treated as "hands" it cannot claim the service of their wills and their
brains. If it desires them to show the zeal of skilled professionals,
it must secure that they have sufficient power to allow of their
discharging professional responsibilities. In order that workmen may
abolish any restrictions on output which {153} may be imposed by them,
they must be able to insist on the abolition of the restrictions, more
mischievous because more effective, which, as the Committee on Trusts
has recently told us, are imposed by organizations of employers. In
order that the miners' leaders, instead of merely bargaining as to
wages, hours and working conditions, may be able to appeal to their
members to increase the supply of coal, they must be in a position to
secure the removal of the causes of low output which are due to the
deficiencies of the management, and which are to-day a far more serious
obstacle than any reluctance on the part of the miner. If the workmen
in the building trade are to take combined action to accelerate
production, they must as a body be consulted as to the purpose to which
their energy is to be applied, and must not be expected to build
fashionable houses, when what are required are six-roomed cottages to
house families which are at present living with three persons to a room.
It is deplorable, indeed, that any human beings should consent to
degrade themselves by producing the articles which a considerable
number of workmen turn out to-day, boots which are partly brown paper,
and furniture which is not fit to use. The revenge of outraged
humanity is certain, though it is not always obvious; and the penalty
paid by the consumer for tolerating an organization of industry which,
in the name of efficiency, destroyed the responsibility of the workman,
is that the service with which he is provided is not even efficient.
He has always paid it, though he has not seen it, in quality. To-day
he is beginning to {154} realize that he is likely to pay it in
quantity as well. If the public is to get efficient service, it can
get it only from human beings, with the initiative and caprices of
human beings. It will get it, in short, in so far as it treats
industry as a responsible profession.
The collective responsibility of the workers for the maintenance of the
standards of their profession is, then, the alternative to the
discipline which Capitalism exercised in the past, and which is now
breaking down. It involves a fundamental change in the position both
of employers and of trade unions. As long as the direction of industry
is in the hands of property-owners or their agents, who are concerned
to extract from it the maximum profit for themselves, a trade union is
necessarily a defensive organization. Absorbed, on the one hand, in
the struggle to resist the downward thrust of Capitalism upon the
workers' standard of life, and denounced, on the other, if it presumes,
to "interfere with management," even when management is most obviously
inefficient, it is an opposition which never becomes a government and
which has neither the will nor the power to assume responsibility for
the quality of the service offered to the consumer. If the abolition
of functionless property transferred the control of production to
bodies representing those who perform constructive work and those who
consume the goods produced, the relation of the worker to the public
would no longer be indirect but immediate, and associations which are
now purely defensive would be in a position not merely to criticize and
oppose but to advise, to initiate and to enforce upon their own members
the obligations of the craft.
{155}
It is obvious that in such circumstances the service offered the
consumer, however carefully safeguarded by his representation on the
authorities controlling each industry, would depend primarily upon the
success of professional organizations in finding a substitute for the
discipline exercised to-day by the agents of property-owners. It would
be necessary for them to maintain by their own action the zeal,
efficiency and professional pride which, when the barbarous weapons of
the nineteenth century have been discarded, would be the only guarantee
of a high level of production. Nor, once this new function has been
made possible for professional organizations, is there any extravagance
in expecting them to perform it with reasonable competence. How far
economic motives are balked to-day and could be strengthened by a
different type of industrial organization, to what extent, and under
what conditions, it is possible to enlist in the services of industry
motives which are not purely economic, can be ascertained only after a
study of the psychology of work which has not yet been made. Such a
study, to be of value, must start by abandoning the conventional
assumptions, popularized by economic textbooks and accepted as
self-evident by practical men, that the motives to effort are simple
and constant in character, like the pressure of steam in a boiler, that
they are identical throughout all ranges of economic activity, from the
stock exchange to the shunting of wagons or laying of bricks, and that
they can be elicited and strengthened only by directly economic
incentives. In so far as motives in industry have been considered
hitherto, it has usually been done {156} by writers who, like most
exponents of scientific management, have started by assuming that the
categories of business psychology could be offered with equal success
to all classes of workers and to all types of productive work. Those
categories appear to be derived from a simplified analysis of the
mental processes of the company promoter, financier or investor, and
their validity as an interpretation of the motives and habits which
determine the attitude to his work of the bricklayer, the miner, the
dock laborer or the engineer, is precisely the point in question.
Clearly there are certain types of industry to which they are only
partially relevant. It can hardly be assumed, for example, that the
degree of skill and energy brought to his work by a surgeon, a
scientific investigator, a teacher, a medical officer of health, an
Indian civil servant and a peasant proprietor are capable of being
expressed precisely and to the same degree in terms of the economic
advantage which those different occupations offer. Obviously those who
pursue them are influenced to some considerable, though uncertain,
extent by economic incentives. Obviously, again, the precise character
of each process or step in the exercise of their respective avocations,
the performance of an operation, the carrying out of a piece of
investigation, the selection of a particular type of educational
method, the preparation of a report, the decision of a case or the care
of live stock, is not immediately dependent upon an exact calculation
of pecuniary gain or loss. What appears to be the case is that in
certain walks of life, while the occupation is chosen after a
consideration of {157} its economic advantages, and while economic
reasons exact the minimum degree of activity needed to avert dismissal
from it or "failure," the actual level of energy or proficiency
displayed depend largely upon conditions of a different order. Among
them are the character of the training received before and after
entering the occupation, the customary standard of effort demanded by
the public opinion of one's fellows, the desire for the esteem of the
small circle in which the individual moves and to be recognized as
having "made good" and not to have "failed," interest in one's work,
ranging from devotion to a determination to "do justice" to it, the
pride of the craftsman, the "tradition of the service."
It would be foolish to suggest that any considerable body of men are
uninfluenced by economic considerations. But to represent them as
amenable to such incentives only is to give a quite unreal and bookish
picture of the actual conditions under which the work of the world is
carried on. How large a part such considerations play varies from one
occupation to another, according to the character of the work which it
does and the manner in which it is organized. In what is called _par
excellence_ industry, calculations of pecuniary gain and loss are more
powerful than in most of the so-called professions, though even in
industry they are more constantly present to the minds of the business
men who "direct" it, than to those of the managers and technicians,
most of whom are paid fixed salaries, or to the rank and file of
wage-workers. In the professions of teaching and medicine, in many
branches of the {158} public service, the necessary qualities are
secured, without the intervention of the capitalist employer, partly by
pecuniary incentives, partly by training and education, partly by the
acceptance on the part of those entering them of the traditional
obligations of their profession as part of the normal framework of
their working lives. But this difference is not constant and
unalterable. It springs from the manner in which different types of
occupation are organized, on the training which they offer, and the
_morale_ which they cultivate among their members. The psychology of a
vocation can in fact be changed; new motives can be elicited, provided
steps are taken to allow them free expression. It is as feasible to
turn building into an organized profession, with a relatively high code
of public honor, as it was to do the same for medicine or teaching.
The truth is that we ought radically to revise the presuppositions as
to human motives on which current presentations of economic theory are
ordinarily founded and in terms of which the discussion of economic
question is usually carried on. The assumption that the stimulus of
imminent personal want is either the only spur, or a sufficient spur,
to productive effort is a relic of a crude psychology which has little
warrant either in past history or in present experience. It derives
what plausibility it possesses from a confusion between work in the
sense of the lowest _quantum_ of activity needed to escape actual
starvation, and the work which is given, irrespective of the fact that
elementary wants may already have been satisfied, through the natural
disposition of ordinary men to maintain, and of extraordinary {159} men
to improve upon, the level of exertion accepted as reasonable by the
public opinion of the group of which they are members. It is the old
difference, forgotten by society as often as it is learned, between the
labor of the free man and that of the slave. Economic fear may secure
the minimum effort needed to escape economic penalties. What, however,
has made progress possible in the past, and what, it may be suggested,
matters to the world to-day, is not the bare minimum which is required
to avoid actual want, but the capacity of men to bring to bear upon
their tasks a degree of energy, which, while it can be stimulated by
economic incentives, yields results far in excess of any which are
necessary merely to avoid the extremes of hunger or destitution.
That capacity is a matter of training, tradition and habit, at least as
much as of pecuniary stimulus, and the ability of a professional
association representing the public opinion of a group of workers to
raise it is, therefore, considerable. Once industry has been liberated
from its subservience to the interests of the functionless
property-owner, it is in this sphere that trade unions may be expected
increasingly to find their function. Its importance both for the
general interests of the community and for the special interests of
particular groups of workers can hardly be exaggerated. Technical
knowledge and managerial skill are likely to be available as readily
for a committee appointed by the workers in an industry as for a
committee appointed, as now, by the shareholders. But it is more and
more evident to-day that the crux of the economic situation is not
{160} the technical deficiencies of industrial organization, but the
growing inability of those who direct industry to command the active
good will of the _personnel_. Their co-operation is promised by the
conversion of industry into a profession serving the public, and
promised, as far as can be judged, by that alone.
Nor is the assumption of the new and often disagreeable obligations of
internal discipline and public responsibility one which trade unionism
can afford, once the change is accomplished, to shirk, however alien
they may be to its present traditions. For ultimately, if by slow
degrees, power follows the ability to wield it; authority goes with
function. The workers cannot have it both ways. They must choose
whether to assume the responsibility for industrial discipline and
become free, or to repudiate it and continue to be serfs. If,
organized as professional bodies, they can provide a more effective
service than that which is now, with increasing difficulty, extorted by
the agents of capital, they will have made good their hold upon the
future. If they cannot, they will remain among the less calculable
instruments of production which many of them are to-day. The instinct
of mankind warns it against accepting at their face value spiritual
demands which cannot justify themselves by practical achievements. And
the road along which the organized workers, like any other class, must
climb to power, starts from the provision of a more effective economic
service than their masters, as their grip upon industry becomes
increasingly vacillating and uncertain, are able to supply.
{161}
X
THE POSITION OF THE BRAIN WORKER
The conversion of industry into a profession will involve at least as
great a change in the position of the management as in that of the
manual workers. As each industry is organized for the performance of
function, the employer will cease to be a profit maker and become what,
in so far as he holds his position by a reputable title, he already is,
one workman among others. In some industries, where the manager is a
capitalist as well, the alteration may take place through such a
limitation of his interest as a capitalist as it has been proposed by
employers and workers to introduce into the building industry. In
others, where the whole work of administration rests on the shoulders
of salaried managers, it has already in part been carried out. The
economic conditions of this change have, indeed, been prepared by the
separation of ownership from management, and by the growth of an
intellectual proletariat to whom the scientific and managerial work of
industry is increasingly intrusted. The concentration of businesses,
the elaboration of organization, and the developments springing from
the application of science to industry have resulted in the
multiplication of a body of industrial brain workers who make the old
classifications into "employers and workmen," which is still current in
common speech, an absurdly {162} misleading description of the
industrial system as it exists to-day.
To complete the transformation all that is needed is that this new
class of officials, who fifty years ago were almost unknown, should
recognize that they, like the manual workers, are the victims of the
domination of property, and that both professional pride and economic
interest require that they should throw in their lot with the rest of
those who are engaged in constructive work. Their position to-day is
often, indeed, very far from being a happy one. Many of them, like
some mine managers, are miserably paid. Their tenure of their posts is
sometimes highly insecure. Their opportunities for promotion may be
few, and distributed with a singular capriciousness. They see the
prizes of industry awarded by favoritism, or by the nepotism which
results in the head of a business unloading upon it a family of sons
whom it would be economical to pay to keep out of it, and which,
indignantly denounced on the rare occasions on which it occurs in the
public service, is so much the rule in private industry that no one
even questions its propriety. During the war they have found that,
while the organized workers have secured advances, their own salaries
have often remained almost stationary, because they have been too
genteel to take part in trade unionism, and that to-day they are
sometimes paid less than the men for whose work they are supposed to be
responsible. Regarded by the workmen as the hangers-on of the masters,
and by their employers as one section among the rest of the "hands,"
they have the odium of capitalism without its power or its profits.
{163}
From the conversion of industry into a profession those who at present
do its intellectual work have as much to gain as the manual workers.
For the principle of function, for which we have pleaded as the basis
of industrial organization, supplies the only intelligible standard by
which the powers and duties of the different groups engaged in industry
can be determined. At the present time no such standard exists. The
social order of the pre-industrial era, of which faint traces have
survived in the forms of academic organization, was marked by a careful
grading of the successive stages in the progress from apprentice to
master, each of which was distinguished by clearly defined rights and
duties, varying from grade to grade and together forming a hierarchy of
functions. The industrial system which developed in the course of the
nineteenth century did not admit any principle of organization other
than the convenience of the individual, who by enterprise, skill, good
fortune, unscrupulous energy or mere nepotism, happened at any moment
to be in a position to wield economic authority. His powers were what
he could exercise; his rights were what at any time he could assert.
The Lancashire mill-owner of the fifties was, like the Cyclops, a law
unto himself. Hence, since subordination and discipline are
indispensable in any complex undertaking, the subordination which
emerged in industry was that of servant to master, and the discipline
such as economic strength could impose upon economic weakness.
The alternative to the allocation of power by the struggle of
individuals for self-aggrandizement is its {164} allocation according
to function, that each group in the complex process of production
should wield so much authority as, and no more authority than, is
needed to enable it to perform the special duties for which it is
responsible. An organization of industry based on this principle does
not imply the merging of specialized economic functions in an
undifferentiated industrial democracy, or the obliteration of the brain
workers beneath the sheer mass of artisans and laborers. But it is
incompatible with the unlimited exercise of economic power by any class
or individual. It would have as its fundamental rule that the only
powers which a man can exercise are those conferred upon him in virtue
of his office. There would be subordination. But it would be
profoundly different from that which exists to-day. For it would not
be the subordination of one man to another, but of all men to the
purpose for which industry is carried on. There would be authority.
But it would not be the authority of the individual who imposes rules
in virtue of his economic power for the attainment of his economic
advantage. It would be the authority springing from the necessity of
combining different duties to attain a common end. There would be
discipline. But it would be the discipline involved in pursuing that
end, not the discipline enforced upon one man for the convenience or
profit of another. Under such an organization of industry the brain
worker might expect, as never before, to come to his own. He would be
estimated and promoted by his capacity, not by his means. He would be
less likely than at present to find doors closed to him because of
poverty. His {165} judges would be his colleagues, not an owner of
property intent on dividends. He would not suffer from the perversion
of values which rates the talent and energy by which wealth is created
lower than the possession of property, which is at best their pensioner
and at worst the spend-thrift of what intelligence has produced. In a
society organized for the encouragement of creative activity those who
are esteemed most highly will be those who create, as in a world
organized for enjoyment they are those who own.
Such considerations are too general and abstract to carry conviction.
Greater concreteness may be given them by comparing the present
position of mine-managers with that which they would occupy were effect
given to Mr. Justice Sankey's scheme for the nationalization of the
Coal Industry. A body of technicians who are weighing the probable
effects of such a reorganization will naturally consider them in
relation both to their own professional prospects and to the efficiency
of the service of which they are the working heads. They will properly
take into account questions of salaries, pensions, security of status
and promotion. At the same time they will wish to be satisfied as to
points which, though not less important, are less easily defined.
Under which system, private or public ownership, will they have most
personal discretion or authority over the conduct of matters within
their professional competence? Under which will they have the best
guarantees that their special knowledge will carry due weight, and
that, when handling matters of art, they will not be overridden or
obstructed by amateurs?
{166}
As far as the specific case of the Coal Industry is concerned the
question of security and salaries need hardly be discussed. The
greatest admirer of the present system would not argue that security of
status is among the advantages which it offers to its employees. It is
notorious that in some districts, at least, managers are liable to be
dismissed, however professionally competent they may be, if they
express in public views which are not approved by the directors of
their company. Indeed, the criticism which is normally made on the
public services, and made not wholly without reason, is that the
security which they offer is excessive. On the question of salaries
rather more than one-half of the colliery companies of Great Britain
themselves supplied figures to the Coal Industry Commission.[1] If
their returns may be trusted, it would appear that mine-managers are
paid, as a class, salaries the parsimony of which is the more
surprising in view of the emphasis laid, and quite properly laid, by
the mine-owners on the managers' responsibilities. The service of the
State does not normally offer, and ought not to offer, financial prizes
comparable with those of private industry. But it is improbable, had
the mines been its property during {167} the last ten years, that more
than one-half the managers would have been in receipt of salaries of
under L301 per year, and of less than L500 in 1919, by which time
prices had more than doubled, and the aggregate profits of the
mine-owners (of which the greater part was, however, taken by the State
in taxation) had amounted in five years to L160,000,000. It would be
misleading to suggest that the salaries paid to mine-managers are
typical of private industry, nor need it be denied that the probable
effect of turning an industry into a public service would be to reduce
the size of the largest prizes at present offered. What is to be
expected is that the lower and medium salaries would be raised, and the
largest somewhat diminished. It is hardly to be denied, at any rate,
that the majority of brain workers in industry have nothing to fear on
financial grounds from such a change as is proposed by Mr. Justice
Sankey. Under the normal organization of industry, profits, it cannot
be too often insisted, do not go to them but to shareholders. There
does not appear to be any reason to suppose that the salaries of
managers in the mines making more than 5/- profit a ton were any larger
than those making under 3/-.