CONCLUSION

Here I sit in all the peace and stillness of the Cape Cod coast, days

filled with only such work as I love, and play aplenty, healthy

youngsters frolicky about me, the warmest of friends close by. The

larder is stocked with good food, good books are on the shelves, each

day starts and ends with a joyous feeling about the heart.

And I, this sunburnt, carefree person, pretend to have been as a

worker among workers. Again some one says, "The artificiality of it!"

Back in that hot New York the girls I labored among are still packing

chocolates, cutting wick holes for brass lamp cones, ironing "family,"

beading in the crowded dress factory. Up at the Falls they are hemming

sheets and ticketing pillow cases. In the basement of the hotel some

pantry girl, sweltering between the toaster and the egg boiler, is

watching the clock to see if rush time isn't almost by.

Granted at the start, if you remember, and granted through each

individual job, it was artificial--my part in it all. But what in the

world was there to do about that? I was determined that not forever

would I take the say-so of others on every phase of the labor problem.

Some things I would experience for myself. Certain it is I cannot know

any less than before I started. Could I help knowing at least a bit

more? I do know more--I know that I know more!

And yet again I feel constrained to call attention to the fact that

six jobs, even if the results of each experience were the very richest

possible, are but an infinitesimal drop in what must be a full bucket

of industrial education before a person should feel qualified to speak

with authority on the subject of labor. Certain lessons were learned,

certain tentative conclusions arrived at. They are given here for what

they may be worth and in a very humble spirit. Indeed, I am much more

humble in the matter of my ideas concerning labor than before I took

my first job.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson learned was that a deep distrust of

generalizations has been acquired, to last, I hope, the rest of life.

It is so easy, so comfortable, to make a statement of fact to cover

thousands of cases. Nowhere does the temptation seem to be greater

than in a discussion of labor. "Labor wants this and that!" "Labor

thinks thus and so!" "Labor does this and the other thing!" Thus

speaks the labor propagandist, feeling the thrill of solid millions

behind him; thus speaks the "capitalist," feeling the antagonism of

solid millions against him.

And all this time, how many hearts really beat as one in the labor

world?

Indeed, the situation would clear up with more rapidity if we went to

the other extreme and thought of labor always as thirty million

separate individuals. We would be nearer the truth than to consider

them as this one great like-minded mass, all yearning for the same

spiritual freedom; all eager for the downfall of capitalism.

What can one individual know of the hopes and desires of thirty

millions? Indeed, it is a rare situation where one person can speak

honestly and intelligently for one hundred others. Most of us know

precious little about ourselves. We understand still less concerning

anyone else. In a very general way, everyone in the nation wants the

same things. That is a good point to remember, for those who would

exaggerate group distinctions. In a particular way, no two people

function exactly alike, have the same ambitions, same capacities.

There is, indeed, no great like-minded mass of laborers. Instead we

have millions of workers split into countless small groups, whose

group interests in the great majority of cases loom larger on the

horizon than any hold the labor movement, as such, might have on them.

Such interests, for instance, as family, nationality, religion,

politics. Besides, there is the division which sex interests and

rivalries make--the conflict, too, between youth and age.

Yet for the sake of a working efficiency we must do a minimum of

classifying. Thirty million is too large a number to handle

separately. There seems to be a justification for a division of labor,

industrially considered, into three groups, realizing the division is

a very loose one:

1. Labor or class-conscious group.

2. Industrially conscious group.

3. Industrially nonconscious group.

The great problem of the immediate future is to get groups 1 and 3

into Group 2. The more idealistic problem of the more distant future

is to turn a great industrially conscious group into a socially

conscious group.

* * * * *

By the first group, the labor or class-conscious group, is meant the

members of the American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the

World, four railroad Brotherhoods, Amalgamated Clothing Workers,

socialist and communist organizations--workers whose affiliations with

certain bodies tend to make them ultraconscious of the fact that they

are wage workers and against the capitalist system. Class antagonism

is fostered. There is much use of the word "exploited." In their press

and on their platforms such expressions are emphasized as "profits for

the lazy who exploit the workers." Everything possible is done to

paint labor white, the employer black, forgetting that no side has the

monopoly in any shade.

To those who from sympathy or antagonism would picture at least

organized labor as like-minded, it must be pointed out that for the

great part the several millions represented by Group 1 are perhaps

more often warring in their aims and desires than acting as one. Never

have they acted as one. Organized labor represents but a fraction of

labor as a whole. Some more or less spectacular action on the part of

capital against labor always tends to solidify the organized workers.

They are potentially like-minded in specific instances. Otherwise the

interests of the carpenters' union tends to overshadow the interests

of the A. F. of L. as a whole; the interests of the A. F. of L. tend

most decidedly to overshadow the interests of organized labor as a

whole. Socialists bark at communists. Charges of capitalist tendencies

are made against the four Brotherhoods. The women's unions feel

legislated against in the affairs of labor. Indeed, only utter

stupidity on the part of capital ever could weld organized labor into

enough solidarity to get society or anyone else agitated for long.

Much of the "open shop" fight borders on such stupidity.

Group 2 is at present but an infinitesimal fraction of labor. It

comprises those workers whose background has been fortunate enough, as

to both heredity and environment, to allow of their main industrial

interests centering around the doing of their particular job well for

the sake of their industry as a whole, to which a sentiment of loyalty

has been aroused and held. There is no feeling of class antagonism, no

assurance that the interests of labor are forever inimical to those of

the employer, and _vice versa_. Where such an attitude exists on the

part of workers it presupposes an employer of unusual breadth of

understanding or a deep love for his fellow-man. As co-operation in

industry can be shown to pay socially and financially, so may this

type of employer come more and more to supersede the old-fashioned

"boss."

Group 3, the industrially nonconscious workers, includes the great

majority of labor in the United States. Under this heading come all

those who for reasons connected with the type of industry engaged in,

or because of individual or sex characteristics, remain apart from any

so-called labor movement. Practically all women fall under this head,

most of the foreign labor population, most of unskilled labor. Many

members of labor organizations technically belonging in Group 1 really

fall under Group 3. The great majority of American labor undoubtedly

are not class or group conscious in the sense that they feel

themselves as workers pitted against a capitalist class.

Temperamentally, intellectually, the doctrines of Karl Marx are not

for them. They never heard of Karl Marx. They get up and go to work in

the morning. During the day they dub away at something or other,

whatever it may be--the chances are it changes rather often--putting

no more effort into the day's work than is necessary to hold down an

uninteresting job. They want their pay at the end of the week. Many

have not the minimum intellectual capacity necessary to do a piece of

work properly. Many more have not the minimum physical capacity

required for even routine tasks. Very many, indeed, are nervous

misfits.

Yet a goodly number in Group 3 represent a high type of worker to whom

the doctrine of class warfare is repugnant, and yet whose industrial

experience has never resulted in making them industrially conscious.

They feel no particular call to show more than average interest in

their job.

Peace, efficiency, production in industry, can come only as Group 2

increases. To recruit from Group 1 will always be difficult. Once

labor feels itself hostile to the employer and his interests, which is

another way of saying, once the employing group by its tactics

succeeds in making labor conclude that "the working class and the

employing class have nothing in common," the building up of a spirit

of co-operation is difficult indeed. Class consciousness is poor soil

in which to plant any seeds of industrial enthusiasm.

Would you, then, asks a dismayed unionist, build up your so-called

industrially conscious group at the expense of organized labor? The

answer is a purely pragmatic one, based on the condition of things as

they are, not as idealists would have them. Rightly or wrongly, the

American employing group long ago decided that the organized-labor

movement was harmful to American industry. The fact that the labor

movement was born of the necessity of the workers, and in the main

always flourished because of the continued need of the workers, was

never taken into account. Every conceivable argument was and is used

against organized labor. Many of those arguments are based on half

truths; or no truths at all. The fact remains that probably the

majority of the American public believes the organized-labor movement

to be against our social, civic, and industrial welfare. However

right or wrong such a deduction is, it is safe to say that for the

great part those who hold that belief do so in absolute good faith.

The result is that the American labor movement has developed ever in

an atmosphere so hostile that the effect on the growth of the movement

has been that which hostile environment always exerts on any growing

thing. It has warped the movement. It has emphasized everything

hostile within the movement itself. No wonder a fighting spirit has

ever been in evidence. No wonder only the fighting type of labor

leader has emerged. The movement has had little or no opportunity for

construction. Always the struggle for existence itself has been

uppermost. No wonder the conclusion can justly be drawn that the

American labor movement has not always played a highly productive role

in American industry.

It has been everybody's fault, if we are searching for a resting place

for the blame of it all. Which gets us no place.

The point is, looked at without the tinted glasses of either capital

or labor, that the psychology of the American employer for the past,

assuredly the present, and at least the near future, has been, and is,

and will be, so inimical to organized labor that the movement would

not be allowed to function as a constructive industrial force. Too

much of its energies must go to fighting. At the same time, too much

of the energies of the employer go to fighting it. The public pays

the price, and it is enormous. The spiritual cost of bitterness of

spirit far outweighs any monetary loss to industry, tremendous as that

is.

Why is not the present, then, a wise time in which to encourage an

alternative movement, one that has not the effect of a red rag to a

bull? Labor can shout its loudest; the fact remains that in this

country labor is very far from controlling the industrial situation.

Therefore, the employer must still be taken into account in any

program of industrial reform. That being so, it might be saner to try

some scheme the employer will at least listen to than stubbornly

continue to fight the issue out along the old lines of organized labor

alone, at the very mention of which the average employer grows red in

the face.

It is not, indeed, that we would do away with the organized-labor

movement, if we could. The condition is far too precarious for that.

Labor too often needs the support of unionism to keep from being

crushed. The individual too often needs the educational influence

organization exerts. Organized labor, despite the handicaps within and

without, has too much of construction to its credit. The point is,

further growth in the organized-labor movement, considering the

development forced upon the movement by its own past and the ever

antagonistic attitude of business, will not, for the present and

immediate future, necessarily spell peace, efficiency, production.

Rather, continued, if not increased, bitterness.

What is the development, at least for the present and immediate

future, which will improve the situation?

The first move--and by that we mean the thing to start doing

_to-day_--is to begin converting the non-industrially conscious group

into the industrially conscious group. Group 3 is peaceful--they call

no attention to themselves by any unrest or demands or threats. But

they are not efficient or productive, the reason being that they have

not enough interest in their jobs, or in many cases are not physically

or mentally competent. Theirs are sins of omission, not commission.

The process of this conversion means many things. It means first and

foremost an understanding of human nature; a realization that the

great shortcoming of industry has been that it held, as organized, too

little opportunity for a normal outlet to the normal and more or less

pressing interests and desires of human beings.

It worked in a vicious circle. The average job gave the worker little

or no chance to show any initiative, to feel any sense of ownership or

responsibility, to use such intellect and enthusiasm as he possessed.

The attitude of the average employer built up no spirit of loyalty or

co-operation between management and men. Hence these very human

tendencies, compelling expression in a normal personality, became

atrophied, as far as the job was concerned, and sought such

functioning as a discouraging environment left them capable of in

fields outside of industry--in many cases, within the labor movement

itself. The less capacity the job called out, the more incapable the

worker became. Tendencies inherent in human nature, whose expressions

all these years could have been enriching the individual and industry,

and therefore the nation as a whole, have been balked entirely, or

shunted off to find expression often in antisocial outlets. In some

cases the loss to industry was small, since the individual capacities

at best were small. In other cases the loss was great indeed. In every

case, encouragement of the use of capacities increases the

possibilities of those capacities.

The first step in this process of conversion then is to reorganize the

relationship between management and men so that as many outlets as

possible within industry can be found for those human expressions

whose functioning will enrich the individual and industry. Which means

that little by little the workers must share in industrial

responsibilities. The job itself, with every conceivable invention for

calling out the creative impulse, can never, under the machine

process, enlist sufficient enthusiasm for sustained interest and

loyalty on the part of the worker. He must come to have a word in

management, in determining the conditions under which he labors five

and a half to seven days a week.

It is a nice point here. The parlor Bolshevik pictures all labor eager

and anxious and capable of actually controlling industry. The fact of

the matter is that most individuals from any and every walk of life

prefer to sidestep responsibility. Yet everyone does better under

some. Too much may have a more disastrous effect than not enough--to

the individual as well as industry. Here again is where there must be

caution in generalizing. Each employer has a problem of his own. Nor

can the exact amount of responsibility necessary to call out maximum

efficiency and enthusiasm ever be determined in advance.

I have talked to numerous employers whose experience has been the

same. At first their employees showed no desire for any added

responsibility whatever. Had there not been the conviction that they

were on the right track, the whole scheme of sharing management with

the workers would have been abandoned. Little by little, however,

latent abilities were drawn out; as more responsibilities were

intrusted to the workers, their capacities for carrying the

responsibilities increased. In two cases that I know of personally,

the employees actually control the management of their respective

companies. In both these companies the employers announced that their

businesses were making more money than under one-sided management.

On the whole, this development of the partnership idea in industry is

a matter of the necessary intellectual conviction that the idea is

sound--whether that conviction be arrived at _via_ ethics or "solid

business judgment"--to be followed by the technical expert who knows

how to put the idea into practice. That he will know only after

careful study of each individual plant as a situation peculiar unto

itself. He is a physician, diagnosing a case of industrial anaemia. As

in medicine, so industry has its quacks--experts who prescribe pink

pills for pale industries, the administration of which may be attended

with a brief show of energy and improvement, only to relapse into the

old pallor. As between a half-baked "expert" and an "ignorant"

employer whose heart is in the right place--take the employer. If he

sincerely feels that long enough has he gone on the principle, "I'll

run my business as I see fit and take suggestions from no one"; if it

has suddenly come over him that, after all, the employee is in most

ways but another like himself, and that all this time that employee

might be laboring under the notion, often more unconscious than

conscious, that he would "like to run his job as he saw fit and take

suggestions from no one"; if, then, that employer calls his men

together and says, "let's run the business as we all together see fit

and take suggestions from one another"--then is that employer and that

business on the road to industrial peace, efficiency, and production,

expert or no expert. The road is uphill, the going often rough and

discouraging, but more often than not the load of management becomes

lighter, easing overburdened muscles; the load of labor in a sense

heavier, yet along with the added weight, as they warm to the task

there develops a sense that they are trusted, are necessary to the

success of the march, that they now are men, doing man-sized work.

Perhaps in only a minimum of cases will the load ever be divided

"fifty-fifty." Too soon would the workers tire of their added burden,

too few could carry the added weight. The fact remains that with

management carrying the whole load, the march is going very badly

indeed on the whole. At times the procession scarcely seems to move.

There can surely be no harm in the employing end shifting a bit of the

burden. A bit cannot wreck either side. Managerial shoulders may feel

more comfortable under the decreased weight and try another shift.

In recruiting Group 2 from Group 3, it is the employer, on the whole,

who must take the initiative. Labor may show no desire to help

shoulder the burden. Yet they must shoulder some of it to amount to

anything themselves, if for no other reason. It may take actual

pushing and shoving at first to get them on their way.

Recruiting from Group 1 is a different matter. There sometimes are

workers who would grab most of the load at the start--or all of it.

Their capacities are untried, the road and its twistings and turnings

is unknown to them. Each side has been throwing stones at the other,

tripping each other up. There is a hostile spirit to begin with, a

spirit of distrust between management and men. Here then is a more

difficult problem. It is more than a matter of shifting the load a

bit; it is a matter of changing the spirit as well. That takes much

patience, much tact. It is not a case of the employer making all the

overtures. Each side is guilty of creating cause for suspicion and

distrust. Each side has to experience a change of heart. It is one

thing to convince a previously unthinking person; it is another to

bring about a change of heart in one frankly antagonistic. Making

industrially enthusiastic workers out of class and labor-conscious

workers will indeed be a task requiring determination, tact, patience

without end, and wisdom of many sorts--on both sides. Some one has to

sell the idea of co-operation to labor as well as to the employer. And

then know the job is only begun. But the biggest start is made when

the atmosphere is cleared so that the partnership idea itself can take

root. Some on both sides never will be converted.

What about the great body of workers unfit physically, mentally,

nervously, to carry any additional load at all? Here is a field for

the expert. Yet here is a field where society as a whole must play a

part. Most of the physical, mental, nervous harm is done before ever

the individual reaches industry. Indeed, at most, industry is but one

influence out of many playing on the lives of the human beings who

labor. Nor can it ever be studied as a sphere entirely apart. Much is

aggravated by conditions over which industry itself has no direct

control. Health centers, civic hygienic measures of all sorts, are of

great importance. A widespread education in the need of healthy and

spiritually constructive influences during the first ten years of

life, if we are to have healthy, wholesome, and capable adults, must

gain headway. Saner preparation for life as a whole must take the

place of the lingering emphasis on the pedagogical orthodoxy still

holding sway.

While industry is not responsible for many conditions which make

subnormal workers, industry cannot evade the issue or shift the burden

if it desires peace, efficiency, production. These goals cannot be

obtained on any basis other than the welfare of the workers. No matter

how sane is welfare work within the plant, there must develop a

growing interest and understanding in "off the plant" work. The job is

blamed for much. Yet often the worker's relation to the job is but the

reflection of the conditions he left to go to work in the morning, the

conditions he returns to after the day's work is done. There again is

a vicious circle. The more unfortunate the conditions of a man's home

life--we do not refer to the material side alone--the less efficiently

he is apt to work during the day. The less efficiently he works during

the day, the less competent he will be to better his home conditions.

When men expressed themselves in their particular handicraft they

found much of their joy in life in their work. One of the by-products

of large-scale industry and the accompanying subdivision of labor has

been the worker's inevitable lack of interest in the monotonous job.

Since too long hours spent at mechanical, repetitious labor result in

a lowered standard of efficiency, and rebellion on the part of the

worker, there has followed a continual tendency toward a reduction in

the length of the working day. The fewer hours spent on the job, the

greater the opportunity conditions outside industry proper have to

exert their influence on character formation. With the shorter working

day there develop more pressing reasons than ever for the emphasis on

off-the-plant activities, and wholesome home and civic conditions. All

these together, and not industry alone, make the worker.

The growth of the spirit and fruit of industrial democracy will not

bring any millennium. It will merely make a somewhat better world to

live in here and now. The dreamers of us forget that in the long run

the world can move only so far and so fast as human nature allows for,

and few of us evaluate human nature correctly. The six industrial

experiences in this book have made me feel that the heart of the world

is even warmer than I had thought--folk high and low are indeed

readier to love than to hate, to help than to hinder. But on the whole

our circles of understanding and interest are bounded by what our own

eyes see and our own ears hear. The problems of industry are

enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals

concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch

the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities

of human understanding and sympathy. More or less artificial machinery

must be set up to bring management and men in contact with each other

to the point where the problems confronting each side are within

eyesight and earshot of the other. Up to date it has been as

impossible for labor to understand the difficulties of management as

for management to understand the difficulties of labor. Neither side

ever got within shouting distance of the other--except, indeed, to

shout abuse! Many a strike would have been averted had the employer

been willing to let his workers know just what the conditions were

which he had to face; or had the workers in other instances shown any

desire to take those conditions into account.

For, when all is said and done, the real solution of our industrial

difficulties lies not in expert machinery, however perfect, for the

adjustment or avoidance of troubles. "Industrial peace must come not

as a result of the balance of power with a supreme court of appeal in

the background. It must arise as the inevitable by-product of mutual

confidence, real justice, constructive good will."[3]

[Footnote 3: From Constitution of Industrial Council for the

Building Industry, England.]

Any improved industrial condition in the future must take as its

foundation the past one hundred years of American industry. The fact

that this foundation was not built of mutual confidence, real justice,

constructive good will is what makes the task of necessary

reconstruction so extremely difficult. Countless persons might be

capable of devising the mechanical approach to peace and

prosperity--courts of arbitration, boards of representation, and the

like. But how bring about a change of heart in the breast of millions?

It is a task so colossal that one would indeed prefer to lean heavily

on the shoulders of an all-wise Providence and let it go with the

consoling assurance that, as to a solution, "the Lord will provide."

But the echoes of recriminations shouted by each side against the

other; the cries of foul play; the accusations of willful injustice;

the threats of complete annihilation of capital by organized labor, of

organized labor by capital--must reach to heaven itself, and

Providence might well pause in dismay. Constructive good will? Where

make a beginning?

The beginnings, however, are being made right on earth, and here and

now. It is a mistake to look for spectacular changes, reforms on a

large scale. Rather do the tendencies toward mutual understanding and

this all-necessary good will evince themselves only here and there, in

quiet experiments going on in individual plants and factories. The

seed will bear fruit but slowly. But the seed is planted.

Planted? Nay, the seed has been there forever, nor have the harshest

developments in the most bloodless of industries ever been able to

crush it out. It is part and parcel of human nature that we can love

more easily and comfortably than hate, that we can help more readily

than hinder. Flourishing broadcast through all human creation is

enough good will to revolutionize the world in a decade. It is not the

lack of good will. Rather the channels for its expression are

blocked--blocked by the haste and worry of modern life, by the

multiplicity of material possessions which so frequently choke our

sympathies; by the cruelties of competition, too often run to the

extremes of crushing out inborn human kindness. And most of all,

blocked by ignorance and misunderstanding of our fellow-beings.

It is a sound business deduction that the greatest stumbling blocks in

the difficulties between labor and capital to-day resolve themselves

down to just that lack of understanding of our fellow-beings. Yet

without that understanding, how build up a spirit of mutual

confidence, real justice, constructive good will? On what other

foundation can a saner industrialism be built?

The place to make the beginning is in each individual shop and

business and industry. The spark to start the blaze in each human

heart, be it beating on the side of capital or on that of labor, is

the sudden revelation that every worker is far more the exact

counterpart of his employer in the desires of his body and soul than

otherwise; that the employer is no other than the worker in body and

soul, except that his scope and range of problems to be met are on a

different level. True it is that we are all far more "sisters and

brothers under the skin" than strangers.

No sane person is looking for a perfect industrialism, is watching for

the day when brotherly love will be the motive of all human conduct.

But it is within the bounds of sanity to work toward an increase in

understanding between the human factors in industry; it is justifiable

to expect improved industrial conditions, once increased understanding

is brought about. Industry needs experts in scientific management, in

mental hygiene, in cost accounting--in fields innumerable. But what

industry needs more than anything else--more, indeed, than all the

reformers--are translators--translators of human beings to one

another. "Reforms" will follow of themselves.