Common sense and labour

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Fundamental Causes of Labour

Unrest . 3

Chapter Two The Relation Between The Employer And The

EMPLOYED

A manufacturer in the Middle West spent some¬ thing more than a hundred thousand dollars fitting up the roof of one of his buildings as a workingmen’s club. He had bowling alleys, billiard and pool tables, plenty of easy chairs, free lemonade on tap, and a special elevator which could carry fifty people at a time and make the trip in something less than half a minute.

He opened the club with a big bang and then settled back, satisfied to think what a splendid speech he could make at the next trade convention. The title bothered him. Would he select “Taking the Workmen into the Big Family,” or “The Place of the Beautiful in the Labour Relation”? The second title made a strong appeal, for it connoted a knowl¬ edge of psychology and he had lately heard some interesting lectures on psychology.

On the opening day the workmen crowded the n COMMON SENSE AND LABOUR club, wandering about joyously on company time, but thereafter the clubbing instinct became sub¬ normal. Day after day, the noon hour found but half a dozen or a dozen men using the facilities which had been provided for a thousand. The employer began to be worried, he resented the disdain of his generosity, and finally he asked a friend who happened to be in the city to look over the place and find out what was the matter. This friend was the owner of a manufacturing plant in Connecticut, which he had built entirely by his own efforts. He had started as a workman and although he had made money, he had never lost his perspective and was always able to get the workers’ point of view. He looked over the place and then he reported:

“ You have one of the finest club houses I have ever seen. You also have an extremely well-fitted-up em¬ ployment office. The employment manager’s office is better than my own. I have never felt that I could afford quite so much good mahogany.

“ Your employment manager looks and acts like an executive and I noticed that he doesn’t waste much time on the applicants for jobs. I was there when a Polak came in. The manager asked him where he had worked and what he could do. Then he said:

“ ‘I have a job for you at $3.00 a day, you can take it or leave it.’

“The Polak took it and went on into the shops. Now let me ask you a question. Suppose a buyer came in to see your sales manager and the sales man¬ ager after telling what you had, said:

“‘These are our prices, you can take them or leave them’ — what would you do with him?”

“I would fire him,” come back the quick retort.

“Then let me suggest that you fire your employ¬ ment manager. Hire a new manager — pay him at least $10,000 a year on condition that he never wears a white collar around the works. Give him a plain table and a couple of benches off somewhere in a corner. Tell him to shake hands with the applicants for jobs, take them around the works, show them the club house, and act generally as though he were trying to sell the plant to the worker.

“The reason that your people do not use the club house and are generally dissatisfied is that you have never sold the company to them. That is, you have never used any salesmanship to prove to them that you are a square man and that this is better than an ordinary place to work.”

The employer took the advice, dropped his speech for the time being, and made it his own job to sell himself and the company to the men he employed — to demonstrate that he had not put in the club house in any spirit of charity or as a preliminary to cutting down wages, but only because he thought it was right that all — president and employees alike — should be able to have a good time while they were on the job.

Take another case. Someone had persuaded this particular employer that it was good policy to “take an interest” in employees — that he was temporarily guardian of the careers of those whom he employed and it was therefore his duty to direct them into the right path and create a “happy family spirit.” He hired a social worker — a man who was fairly drunk with the milk of human kindness and who squared with all the descriptions of those who are said to radiate happiness. This man did radiate — he even ramified all over the place.

Here is a reel out of one of his days.

A young man having passed the employment office and being properly ticketed and numbered was sent out to this social relator — he made it a point to talk with each new employee.

“My boy,” began the ameliator, suavely and be¬ nignly, “this should be a red letter day in your career.

You have to-day become a part, not merely an em¬ ployee, of a great organization and it is for you alone to decide how far you shall progress. With diligence you may become president of this company, displac¬ ing perhaps the great man who now presides over us.

“I am here to help you, to give you advice and counsel. I shall watch your daily doings and I want you to come to me often and I want you to promise me to learn some new thing every day — no matter how small it may be, learn something.”

The boy dutifully promised and went to work. A couple of days later the social secretary met him coming from the direction of the factory hospital, looking a bit rueful and tenderly nursing a bandaged hand.

“Well, my boy,” beamed the secretary, “you see I haven’t forgotten you, what have you learned to¬ day?”

“I learned to keep me fingers out of the cogs.”

Both of these employers really thought that they were doing something in the way of establishing a right relation with their employees, yet neither had given the slightest thought to the fundamentals of that relation. The first established an employees’ club, just as he might have endowed a hospital or any other charity — although he would have resented any remark to the effect that he held his people to be objects for charity. The second man really took the view that his factory was a good place for a little settlement work although he imagined, with perfect sincerity, that he was helping his people. Both men had quite involuntarily adopted the paternal ap¬ proach. There is nothing paternal in the relation.

Let us look somewhat coldly at the bare facts. The employer, representing capital, hires a man, rep¬ resenting labour, to do certain work, under direction, so that an amount of capital may be put through a series of transformations and complete the cycle of business with a greater value than when it started.

In swinging through the cycle, various amounts are paid out for wages and other expenses, but unless the intent is to have the capital come back greater than when it started, the operation cannot be classed as business. If the capital unintentionally comes back less than when it started, the business is unsuc¬ cessful. If it comes back greater, then the business is successful.

There is nothing essentially eleemosynary in this relation and there is no particular reason why the person or persons who own and direct the progress of capital through the cycle should be inclined to regard themselves as being made of a metal different from those who, as employees, add to the value of the capital in its progression. It is but natural to sup¬ pose that those who own, and certainly those who direct the course of capital, should have a somewhat larger mental calibre than those who only accelerate its progress; but the services which they severally render to society are entirely honourable.

If the capital returns to the starting point without an increment, it is of very little use to its owner and most emphatically there exists with him no particular reason for again starting it on such a perilous voyage • — because it might come back from the next trip con¬ siderably battered.

Unless the worker finds it personally profitable to add to capital as it passes through his hands, there is no particular reason why he should work and there is every reason why he should turn his attention to the devising of some means of living without work. If work does not bring more than a bare existence it can hardly be said to be worth while.

The most natural thing in the world is for the man whose work permits him only to exist, to turn to something which promises existence without work.

2S COMMON SENSE AND LABOUR

Of course, the second line leads to dishonesty, but the importance of being honest varies with the point of view. The man who has nothing does not fear the thief. Preaching the importance of property rights to those who have no property is about as effective as preaching in Eskimo purist to a Hot¬ tentot. In order to be understood we must have some conceptions in common. Even if one could talk mulese it is very doubtful if a mine mule who had never seen the sky would be deeply interested in aeronautics.

We like to dodge the terms “capital” and “labour” and to say that they are not distinct entities but, because both make money out of the same general set of circumstances, that their interests are mutual.

The only mutuality that exists between capital and labour is of the variety which exists between a buyer and a seller. In any single transaction it is to the interest of the seller to get the highest price and to the interest of the buyer to pay the lowest price. They are in a sense antagonists. But Amer¬ ican buyers and sellers have found through bitter experience that it does not pay to cheat. The buyer has learned that if he does not pay a fair price, the seller skimps the goods, while the seller has learned that if he charges too much the buyer will not get his money’s worth, either in service or on resale, and will not be able to come back to buy again. It is a give and take arrangement without mutuality, but with natural cupidity tempered by forehandedness.

Naturally we are all in a way capitalists and also all labourers. Although the labourer may be a capi¬ talist when he has a dollar in his pocket, he is a la¬ bourer and nothing more when he works for hire, even if he happens to have a million dollars in his pocket. The capitalist is a buyer of labour and the worker is a seller of labour; it only obscures to deco¬ rate the capitalist with epithets or the labourer with encomiums. There is no moral turpitude involved in being either a labourer or a capitalist. The work¬ man in selling his services may profiteer — that is, he may sell a poor and useless thing at a high price. The capitalist as a buyer may seek to beat down the price to such an extent that the seller loses. And also he may be a defaulting buyer. But these are individual and not class characteristics; there is nothing intrinsically invidious in either buying or selling.

But the parties will not deal with each other con¬ tinuously unless each finds some sort of a profit. In the case of capital it is not profitable to buy labour unless that purchase adds sufficiently to the value of capital to make its engagement worth while. In the case of labour it is not profitable to sell, unless by reason of the sale there results a full family life, a horizon as wide as the sight of the seer, which means an entire opportunity to go forward as far and as quickly as ability propels.

The proponents of the wage system — that is, of production for profit — say that it is perfectly feasible to bargain and sell in a way satisfactory to both the buyer and seller. The opponents, on the other hand, say that this relation is not possible, that both capital and labour must be abolished and a new system of society inaugurated, in which capital shall be owned in common and production be solely for use and not for profit. This is essentially the present Russian experiment. These two systems are up before the world to-day.

Capital believes in the wage system — it believes in itself — but cool-headed men very frankly acknowl¬ edge that they do not know how to apply the wage system.

Labour does not know what it believes. It is more or less in the position of a drunken man, lurchmg down the street with a very indefinite idea of where he is going, and sometimes falling on the capi¬ talist sidewalk, and again on the anti-capitalist sidewalk. Take, for instance, a recent meeting of the American Federation of Labour. The members set themselves resolutely against Bolshevism (which is essentially production for use) and thus declared themselves in favour of the wage system, but they applauded every attack on capital, they declared for various anti-capitalist schemes, and one man in the course of a discussion on the daylight-saving law thought he had made a splendid point against it by saying it enabled employers to save money! They asked for wages and hours without a word as to re¬ sults and seemed to repose a vast confidence in sonor¬ ous phrases.

The average employer or capitalist — call him what you will— is equally at sea. He puts down labour unrest to pure cussedness, just as though there were any particular reason why a man should work if he does not want to and can manage at the same time to exist. The employer is apt to think that in the management of capital he is entitled as of right to the service of such individuals as he may desire and at the wage he would like to pay them.

Between the employer and the employee exists for the moment a vast misunderstanding, not so much of each other, but concerning their respective aims and what they are really trying to decide. In this confusion it is those who have given least attention to the theory who claim the greatest public attention. The most serious quarrels are not when the parties know what they want, but when they, not knowing what they themselves want, are certain they are against whatever it is that the other fellow wants. When words and reason fail, force is natural. A few employers want an autocracy of capital and a few employees want a revolution — but both extremes form insignificant minorities here. The parties are equally inarticulate and hence they tend to fight. It is a reluctance to articulate that is causing employers and employees to make ready to do a number of very silly things, rather than sit down and see if they really know what it is all about.

Reduced to its elements the question is not com¬ plex. It is this: Is production for use better than production for profit?

The worker wants a place and a dignity in society. He wants an opportunity to live and to expand. When he says he detests work and asks for very short hours, he really says that he cannot express himself in his work and therefore needs an outside opportun¬ ity.

Why should there be so much more trouble to-day than yesterday? Was not the old way good enough, and where are we going, anyhow? Has a new ele¬ ment come into the world to change it and is there no way out?

The quick answer is the war. The war was so big and its effects are so entirely incomprehensible that one may safely blame almost anything on it. Has the war really anything to do with the present situation?

The war did not create a general desire to live better; the war did not give birth to Lenin and his marvellous faculty for winning the support of many people. The man who was content in 191u> to woik at a lathe in an automobile factory through ten hours a day and at a wage is not different from the man who in 1920 professes a complete disdain for the successor of that lathe and says that if he works at all, it is going to be for a precious short time each da^ and for a lot of money. The mere fact that this man hap¬ pened during a few years to make something more frankly designed for killing than the automobile did not change his character. Then why all the row?

Before the application of power to industry, labour troubles were very infrequent. The employer did not need much capital to begin business. Whoever owned a set of tools might start up on his own ac¬ count if he had an order or two on hand. The car¬ penter, the plumber, and the automobile repair man, among others, can do that to-day. One man form¬ erly worked for another simply because he lacked the courage to venture out on his own. As the ap¬ plication of power developed, starting a business required more and more capital. The average worker could not look forward to working for himself.

He still remained, however, a craftsman and could exercise an intelligent creative skill in all that he did. When he made a steam engine, it was his steam en¬ gine. He and his fellows had worked on every part — it was their steam engine.

Then came the sub-division of labour wherein a man instead of building all of one thing, built only a part. Gradually that sub-division became more in¬ tricate, until now in thousands of cases the worker at an automatic machine has but a slight idea what the part he makes is intended for, and no idea at all as to whether or not he has made a good part. It is not his part. The opportunity for self-expression has apparently left the job. Work became only an uninteresting ordeal out of which the means of subsis¬ tence might be had. Capital — ownership of the machine — became the whole thing, and the worker, feeling his inferiority, bowed to capital. And capital, acting after the manner of a short-sighted buyer, thought only of buying labour at the cheapest price.

The conditions in the industrial districts of England — the under-sized, under-nourished British Tommy — are striking evidences of how far that domi¬ nation could go. We did not go so far here, but it must be said in all frankness that the continuous supply of ignorant immigrants gave the buyer of labour a distinct advantage which he was not slow to grasp. We like politically to talk about the great American workman, but it is many years since we had any American workmen. The native-born American, as the machine became more prominent than the man, passed on to the direction of industry, or got out altogether. The newer generation took the white collar and went into the offices, so that to¬ day it is rare to find a native-born American in a shop.

The theory that the machine is the whole thing is a fallacy. It has been demonstrated that no matter how perfect the machine may seem to be, it is more effective when its attendant has its mastery than when he is but a human adjunct.

Robert B. Wolf made some interesting experiments in this line. He was manager of a large paper mill, turning out news print. One of the most important processes is that in which the wood and the chemicals are mixed in a “cooker” at a certain temperature. The quality of the finished product depends to a large degree upon the evenness of this process. The cook¬ ing machines are more or less automatic and the labourers attending them are regarded as “unskilled.” The men did not know why they did anything, neither did they know the results of their work.

Mr. Wolf arranged that samples of each heating should be taken and he had the data on each plotted on a chart across which ran a straight line represent¬ ing the standard desired. As each “cooking” was finished the workers had before them in dramatic form the results of their work. They could see whether they had done well or ill and very quickly they wanted to know why. If one lot deviated far from the standard, they investigated to discover why that had happened and they used the results of their investigations on the next lot. This mill had been turning out a very low grade of pulp which, taking the standard as a hundred, seldom ran above eighty; within six months, under the new system, the men were regularly averaging above ninety-five. What is more, they turned out nearty double the former quantity. The workers gained no direct financial benefit from their increased skill, but they found an interest in life and consequently in their work which they previously had not. That is, being given the knowdedge which permitted them to become masters of the machine, they exercised their creative instincts and more than doubled the value of the machine. Where they had before worked shiftlessly, they now worked steadily. Considered as machines these men had been inefficient; considered as men, they became efficient.

Sweeping a factory floor apparently'requires a mini¬ mum of intelligence — any one can sweep. But is not a job which requires no intelligence the better for its addition? Take this instance. A factory had twenty men who wandered about sweeping floors with tender regard for their own energy and stop¬ ping together when not under observation. That factory was always dirty. An engineer broke up this leisurely gang and divided the factory floor space into zones, varying in size according to the amount of debris which daily collected. He put a sweeper in charge of each of these zones and made it the duty of that man to keep that zone always clean. Inspec¬ tion might occur at any time. If the floor were clean the sweeper got a mark which entitled him to a spe¬ cific addition to his wages. Within a month ten men were keeping that factory spotlessly clean and none of them was working as hard as before. In¬ stead of a shiftless gang always dodging work, there were substituted a number of intelligent caretakers each of whom made much more money than a sweep¬ ing job is supposed to pay — yet it cost the company considerably less for sweeping than before. What is more to the point, they had a clean factory instead of a dirty one.

But in general, industry has not to any large de¬ gree recognized the human factor excepting as some¬ thing which might be stimulated to more intense work by hanging up a money bag. This is in appar¬ ent contradiction to welfare work — to the prevail¬ ing desire to provide better living conditions, cleaner shops, and facilities for amusement and recreation.

But these provide for humanizing surroundings— not the work itself.

The worker has simply been a machine — a mere adjunct without a place in society. Regardless of whether his work was big or little, high-paid or lowpaid, he was hired only because he could do some¬ thing which no machine had yet been designed to do. The impotence of that position is being resented, and if you will investigate the more recent strikes you will discover that wages and hours are not the real causes, but are merely convenient modes of expres¬ sion. Most of the strikes abroad are against capital as such, although they are expressed in money and hours values. For instance, in the great Clyde strike in 1919, the leader told me very frankly that they were asking for forty hours and higher wages, not in the expectation or with any particular desire of getting them, but simply because they wanted to ask for something the employer could not give and if their demands were gratified, then they would again strike for still shorter hours and still greater pay, until finally capital would throw up its hands and quit. They wanted to go on to production for use. The I. W. W. follows the same theory here, while most of the unions that presently sanction strikes in America couple union recognition with the money de¬ mands. Union recognition is only a step toward greater dignity for the worker. It is the loss of posi¬ tion and dignity which hurts the worker and espe¬ cially here in America where we have so little class consciousness.

The unions are in an anomalous position in all this. They say that they want the “ closed shop ” and union recognition, in order to make collective bargaining universal and thereby force the very highest rate of wages. They want high wages and low prices, which two desires are not in the least incompatible, but which the unions render incompatible by opposing the introduction of such methods as are directed toward making high wages also spell high produc¬ tion. The unions have had to oppose these methods because most of them were directed toward forcing the worker to a pace which hurt his health; in order to satisfy their constituents they have had to op¬ pose all methods, good or bad, which lead to better work.

They have had to oppose high production also, because the theory is widely held, especially in Eng¬ land, that there is only a certain amount of work in the world to do. There it resulted in the strict limitation of production on the theory that the less work a man did the more men would find work. Be¬ fore the war if an English manufacturer introduced a machine capable of turning out a thousand parts a day, and the worker with his old machine had been capable of turning out only 500 parts a day, then the union would either set a limit on the new machine of 500 parts, or so raise the rate that the increased efficiency of the machine would be absorbed in the higher wage. The English unions removed the limit on production for the period of the war, and although it is popularly supposed that they have now agreed not to re-establish those limits, I could not find, while in England recently, any actual evidence that the unions had taken on a new economic theory. On the contrary, unemployment has served to strengthen the old theory, and in cases where the restriction of output was removed, the men, with or without the sanction of the union, immediately replied by striking for hours so short that even the former limit of pro¬ duction could not easily be reached.

It should be perfectly apparent to everyone that the progress of industry, if it is to increase, has to be constantly in the direction of the cheapening of output. It takes only a moment’s thought to prove the fallacy of the theory that there is only so much work in the world to be done. The buying power of a people cannot be estimated. Yet em¬ ployer and employee alike think that markets have limited capacities. Because a certain country bought 5,000 automobiles in one year at a price is some in¬ dication that in the next year it will probably buy at least that many at the same price. On that theory unions limit production and owners make desperate efforts to keep competitors out of the market. But if we lower the price of an article, then we tap a new buying power which cannot be estimated and we provide more wTork for the workers. They have more money to spend and further swell this new buying power.

The Ford car is the best illustration of how lower¬ ing a price not only uncovers, but adds, to hidden purchasing resources, and the extraordinary part of it all is that the sale of the inexpensive Fords seems to increase the demand for more expensive motors — which only goes to show that probably one of the reasons wTe have not found a way to correlate the parts of industry is that we really do not know what industry is.

No economist has yet been able to trace, in other than the most superficial manner, the relation be¬ tween price and demand. We can find in a single year that lowering the price of a single article increases the demand for that article by so much, but we do not know how greatly the demand for other articles is increased thereby. About all that we can safely say is that no single factor in industry is static. The productive capacity of a man or machine is not static and neither is the buying power of a market, for both of these depend finally upon the ingenuity of the in¬ dividual, which is something which cannot be mapped and charted.

If any accurate national statistics have ever been compiled anywhere, which I doubt — certainly the most accurate would have been compiled in Germany. (Among the various crimes for which Germany might well be tried, not the least is the responsibility for the present international passion for statistics.) But take their estimates of the food supply. When I was in Germany in March, 1919, the government had divided up all the food of the country on a percapita basis and had rationed it out in miserable little doles at fixed prices. That was all the food which the most accurate statisticians in the world could discover in Germany. But I could not find a single individual who was not consuming, in addition to his ration, at least three times as much food bought on the outside, and the well-to-do people not infrequently did not even bother to draw their rations. In the cold, clear, statistical eye of the government this additional food did not exist, because it was not on their ledgers.