The new industrial day, a book for men who employ men

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Wealth and Waste 3

II The Days of the Rule of Thumb .... 18

Foreword

It is in the hope that we may come to see more clearly the right values among us, and that seeing them, we may come to use them better, and that using them better, we may conserve them, that this book is written. If it shall help to add to the appreciation of man for man, if it shall aid to take away the unnecessary burdens placed by man on man, if it shall in any degree lead to the happier and more productive working of man with man, its purpose will have been fully served.

IX

Chapter I Wealth And Waste

A MEEICA must have seemed a land of almost *"* incredible plenty to the early Colonial settlers. Coming as they did from well populated countries of limited area which had often felt the blasting breath of war and which had long been fully cultivated so far as the agricultural knowledge of that day permitted, they were for the first time face to face with large abundance. The land stretched out on every side challenging their capacity to occupy it and with the forest promised materials for every common need. Behind them, they saw in the old world restrictions on every side ; before them, they looked into the mysteries of a new world in which the prospect was limitless. By reaching out their hands they won from the scanty population of their adopted country whatever they wished in area and in these broad acres they found resources lavish beyond their dreams.

And necessity was upon them to use this opportunity to the full. Insistent demands for food, for clothing, for shelter allowed them no rest until they had taken freely of the goodly heritage that had fallen to them. This they did amid a plenty that was strange and with a largeness of opportunity that was inspiring. Where there was so much to be had there was small need, indeed small opportunity for saving, for the strife with the land and the forest and the Indian foe was long, fierce and unrelenting. The problems of winning their way were more than sufficient to fill their thought. Why should they think of waste or saving when there was at hand more than could possibly be used?

Under such conditions began the growth of civilization on this continent and under like conditions it long continued to expand. As the demands of the people grew they were met with supplies apparently as free as the air. The thought that there might ever come a time when the resources of nature would need careful husbanding probably never occurred to them at all. As with the conquest of the land the waves of population surged westward and the country became more fully known this outlook of abundance grew; as the prairies of the central west were brought under the plow; as the stores of coal and iron were developed; as later the riches in petroleum and in gold and silver became known, these all in their turn added to the inherited feeling that this was a country of plenty whose wealth was to be used with a freedom as generous as the enormous extent of the country itself. Indeed, the very variety of the riches provided by nature stimulated their lavish development. The abounding life of the expanding young nation eagerly sought and spent the bounty which nature gave, and out of thisi vast abundance and its free use by a growing people has come that rapid advance in the material side of our national life which has made our progress the wonder of the past century.

It is a magnificent epic, this story of the material conquest of America, as full of heroic figures, of fierce combats, of movements of mighty forces as any Iliad, as pregnant with promise for the future as was the Roman poet's legend in the ^Eneid. After almost three centuries of ceaseless struggle, ending in a material victory beyond the dreams of the avarice of old, now comes the need to take sober thought of what is and is to be.

For the three centuries of material conquest and of rapid rise in power have had two unexpected results. They have seriously modified the character of our people and they have made plain to us that the resources of our land have their limits.

At the very time when we have developed a national habit of wastefulness, we have come also to realize with something of a shock that our natural wealth no longer permits continued wasteful use. It is but a few years since men thought of America almost as the fabled El Dorado, and now we talk of conservation of our resources and face the problems of child labor and the sweat shops and the evils arising from congested population. Cry for a living and sufficient wage is heard among us and the protest against working hours that exhaust.

There are not lacking examples of the wastefulness with which we have dissipated our inheritance. The bison which roamed in countless thousands over our western plains were a great national asset which, used with care, would have provided food and other valuable products which we now greatly need. The buffalo was wasted-^ killed with a reckless hand till he almost ceased to be, and now, "with painful steps and slow," we are trying to bring back the herds which once roamed innumerable over the plains. Forests covered the land, promising a permanence of their products had wise care conserved them. But under the pressure of immediate need and the sense that there would always be enough, the forests have gone — wasted largely by fire and by other preventable causes till now the States and the nation have stepped in to protect a water supply which has in many places already been threatened through the wasteful treatment of the forests that guarded it,

The waste from fire is becoming familiar to us all. We seem until recently to have acted on the theory that it is better to build and burn and rebuild than to build once for all, and are just beginning to learn how costly this process is. We have paid in pensions over four and a half billions of dollars since the Civil War ended, and there are those who think this vast sum a serious burden upon us ; but we have burned up since the Civil War several times that amount, and if our full fire loss per capita can be brought down to the level of that in England or Germany, we shall save in the next twenty years more than enough to make good all that has been paid for pensions in these past fifty years, and can pay every dollar of our national and state debts besides out of the saving thus made.

We are wasteful of life itself. What we have done with the bison, with our forests and through our fires, we have done also with the lives of our people. Look back through the last forty years and note the deaths from railway and industrial accidents. Include with these the lives lost through needless fires. Beckon among them the Iroquis Theater and the Triangle fire, the Brooklyn Theater and the Collinwood School House, and consider that most, if not all, of these deaths were preventable. But we need not stop here. No one who is well informed will question that about forty per cent, of the deaths in our country to-day are needless — are from the public standpoint a waste of life. They occur through preventable causes, and means are known and are available to prevent the causes from operating. We can save the lives of some five hundred thousand people a year if we choose, and we are beginning to choose.

Much of the waste and the loss both of natural resources and of life are the price we have had to pay for progress, and our power, our comforts, our efficiency, all that make up the material side of our national life, are the results that we have bought at this price. The paying of this price was undoubtedly largely inevitable as a part of the cost of the nation's growth. But now that we have, so to speak, found ourselves, need this price be longer paid? May we not have a still more prosperous and happy America based upon an energy which shall be no longer reckless in its expenditure of resources or life? For there is room all about us for the use of effort of hand and brain in saving of waste and in producing at a less fearful cost than we have hitherto paid. We must stop the losses from the waste of human labor, waste from fatigue and waste through preventable illness and deaths.

For whether we look with the eyes of the altruist or of the economist, we shall see, if our vision is clear, that the greatest value in America lies in our men and our women. We have had as a nation to strive so hard, first for existence, then for growth and then for power; we have had to put so much force and thought into the struggle for political and industrial life ; so much energy has necessarily gone to developing our material resources, and so much now goes to the use and spending of our wealth that we have too much overlooked the fact that all these together are of little worth compared with the value of human life and welfare.

If American men and women are our most valuable possessions — more valuable, for example, than material wealth — then the getting of material wealth at the cost of injury to men and women becomes an economic mistake, a national injury as well as an ethical wrong. The price is too high to be paid. The nation cannot afford to waste its best for anything less valuable. If a great state loses its sense of right values so far as to permit its children to be exploited to their injury in mills or mines in the effort for wealth, or to refuse to protect its men and women from excessive hours of labor, then that state has become disloyal to its best self ; is wasting its finest values, and its action or its inaction means the loss of that which it should be its chief function and pride to preserve and which it needs more than ail else. Wherever the labor of children prevails so as to stunt or injure childhood or to prevent these children from developing into a healthy and rounded manhood or womanhood, then he who attacks that system as one which destroys our best values, is a conserver of the state; and he who for his personal profit would maintain that system, is a destroyer of our best and becomes a menace to the state.

Examples do not fail in history to show us what befalls a nation which loses its sense of human values. Rome in the fourth century seemed still to sit secure and strong upon her Seven Hills, ruling the world with every outward semblance of power. She had wealth and organization and military force and at times great leaders, but the greatest asset of a nation was lacking — she lacked men. Many slaves, much luxury, much money was hers, but the high and fine values in men and women were missing and she fell before the strong manhood that was in the Goth.

We look with horror upon the days of human sacrifices to the false gods of old. We shrink from the bloody ceremonies of the Aztecs and the Druids and their like, and we have evolved so far that in all our latter-day religions we shed no blood to appease the Deity. But can it be said that human beings are no longer sacrificed on the altar of ignorance or neglect? Are the industries unknown in which at least a chance of such a sacrifice is taken? Are there no men in places of power who weigh rather too carefully what it will cost to make things safe? Risks must be taken, to be sure, but how far is the risk taken as a matter of course, and how keen the effort to reduce the risks? When it means lives against profits, do the lives always win?

It needs no peculiar vision to see that there is unrest among us. Great moral forces rise in tides of protest against conditions that cramp or cripple many of our people. The cry against special privilege nurtured by law is one form of this protest. The cry against a distorted industrialism, seeking by the law of grasp to reach wealth, regardless of those whom it may crush or injure in its path to riches, is another form of this protest. The cry for shorter hours of labor and for the protection of the women and children who toil is a normal protest against the fatigue that destroys. The call of labor for a larger share in the products of industry is the normal response to the efforts of many masters in industry to get too great a share for themselves. The demand for the restraint by law of the powers that prey, is a righteous call out of the sad experience of those that have been preyed upon.

After three centuries of development and a century of industrialism, in which land and resources and people have been exploited chiefly with the desire and, indeed, the need of getting riches, we have begun to take a more accurate account of our national values, and in this inventory comes clearly out the priceless worth of the great asset we have mentioned — our people themselves. They are the first thing and beside them all else is secondary. For all of them, and not a few of them alone, do our nation and our laws and our civilization and our industries exist. There is no righteousness and there will be no peace growing out of partiality or special privilege. The way to crime and chaos lies plainly in the exploitation of our men and our women as if they were coal or oil. In our free America there is to be industrial and social freedom. Out of the ferment of unrest there has already begun to come a truer sense of human values ; a better adjustment of law to those values ; a keener conscience as to the treatment of those values, and a conservation which shall not stop with saving water or wood, but will make its

THE NEW INDTTSTKIAL DAY

greatest and most fruitful task the conserving of our people themselves.

In the doing of this mighty, multiform and complex task, those who would conserve the best value in America take both an advanced and a progressive position, They do not hesitate to teach the doctrine that the people who work in our mills are of more value to the state than the product of those mills. They believe and fearlessly say that it is much more to the interest of the public that the wages paid in those mills shall be righteous than that the owners of those mills shall profit largely. They insist that profit at the top, arising from penury at the bottom, is a wrong to us all that shall not be endured. They do not hesitate to say that hours that overstrain the nerves and muscles of our people injure us all, and that a sufficient rest is as much a reasonable right as is a living wage. They condemn without reserve the importation of ignorant labor, only to exploit it at pitiful pay in industries that are not efficient. By instinct they look first and foremost for the welfare and the uplift of those who need the most and possess the least, and their outreach is toward those who strive hardest in life's battle rather than toward those who have won that fight. Their thought is not first for the classes that are secure, entrenched by position and wealth and power against those ills to which all flesh is heir, but rather for those who are bearing the "burden and heat of the day," struggling upward on the common levels of life, hoping here in our land to find that which shall make life broader and sweeter for their children than it has been for themselves. The true lover of America finds fellowship with those who, while they have been fortunate in the strife of life, have not lost the "common touch" that distinguishes the patriots of to-day; those who prefer to stand, if need be, on the lower levels, lending a hand to lift their fellow beings upward, striving toward the larger and the better day, rather than, themselves secure, to call upon others to rise unaided to the heights on which they stand. On the one hand there is the spirit of companionship and mutual effort; on the other hand too much the spirit of condescension and of pride.

But while we take this progressive ground, we do so with a true conservative instinct, for salvation lies only along the lines of progress.

Things cannot stay as they are. There is work to be done. There are conditions to be changed. There are readjustments to be made. We must go forward or we shall fall backward, and the progressive spirit sees clearly that the things it would attack and the evils it would destroy are menaces to the prosperity of our industries, as well as injuries to the body of our people. It looks, as is elsewhere said, for industries which freed from illusive protection at the hands of law, shall become self-reliant and strong, and in so looking, it uses the eye of a friend and not the mask of a foe. It looks to see our people freed from the excessive waste of fatigue and from the grasping power of those who would exploit them for profit, and in so doing knows that it builds up our industries and our commerce on the only permanent and enduring basis. It recognizes that every form of privilege for the benefit of the few involves the risk of dangerous reactions, but that growth on right and normal lines is the only progress in which there are no reactions.

The modern spirit in America, progressive and therefore truly conservative, having a keen sense of true values among us, believing deeply in the infinite worth of all the people, has set its face to the task of correcting the things that here and now are wrong. It does not assume that it will be easy to do this, or that it can be done in a day or a year, but to the doing of the task it will address itself with all of courage and of patience that the task requires, and having put its hand to the plow it will not turn back. It will still strive for wealth but with a larger knowledge of that in which real wealth consists. It will strive to prevent waste, and especially that waste of human effort and health and life which injures and, if unchecked, will destroy the best values we

Chapter II The Days Of The Rule Of Thumb

TP we have correctly understood the causes *■■ which have led to the wastefulness which has been so marked a characteristic of our material development in America, we shall expect to find that a study of our industrial life will show that a like tendency to waste has existed also there. Any observer of our industrial growth must be astonished at the results of what seems less like a normal expansion than some almost explosive force by which in a few decades our industries have sprung from the little to the large — from the infant stage to that of giants. Men, who are not yet old, recall when this was predominantly an agricultural country, and the tradition yet remains in force among us, but to-day the products of our industries are greater than those of any other two nations in the world, and as this is written new records are being made in output, so that neither the past nor the present form a safe measure of what the future shall be.

THE DAYS OF THE EULE OF THUMB

The industries of the nation have not sprung within a man's lifetime from childhood to heroic size without showing signs of that disregard for details which makes waste, and that strong striving after results which often pushes to one side as a minor detail the relative cost at which those results are bad. So, side by side with the great achievements of our manufacturers, we should normally look to find that the profits arising from these achievements had been won at a higher price of waste of all kinds than it will be longer possible to pay, and that the day has dawned in which a sober second thought must be taken and our methods readjusted. For our industrial past has truly passed not to return. We can grind no longer with the water that has run under the mill. Conditions are not and ought not to be what they have been. The day of rough and ready contest as with the bludgeon and the fist has gone in our industrial fight, and we must use keener and more accurate weapons and carry on the contest at longer range and with more trained antagonists than those with whom until recently we have had to deal.

As yet only the men of vision — the few far sighted captains of industry — have grasped and

THE NEW IKDUSTEIAL DAY

acted upon this new outlook. So splendid have been the results of our industrial growth, so brilliant the victories of our manufacturers at home and abroad, so astonishing the inventive skill with which by special tools and new appliances we have reduced the cost of our production, so matchless has been the courage with which some of us have forsaken the old and taken up the new, that we are apt to lose sight of the fact that these achievements and this brilliancy and fine courage have been the characteristics of the few rather than of the many, and that most of our industries are still laggards in the race.

The day of the " rule of thumb " in our factories is not yet ended, though its sun is setting. Many superintendents manage to-day as they managed of yore — true offspring of the industrial conditions under which they grew up. There is fearful waste of energy, of human strength and thought and even of life, and waste also of time and of material and of attention given to relatively trivial things while more serious matters pass unnoticed. We have depended much heretofore on mere drive, or as we call it " hustling " — crowding into the compressed hours of busy days more and more, and winning out by in-

THE DAYS OF THE EXILE OF THUMB

tensity of effort and by dint of strenuous application rather than by the scientific efficiency which saves all waste and applies the principle of the least effort to produce the greatest result.

There are still men representing the old type who say with pride that they have never taken a vacation, as if such waste of human vitality, such failure to restore the normal drain on strength, could ever be wise or credible. Some of us have inherited from the needs of our fathers a doctrine which almost says that work merely as work, exertion purely as exertion, effort merely as effort, is itself a desirable thing. There are many among us, too, who from habit or necessity, and, in part at least, as a result of training keep on doing well and planning well and managing well according to " rule of thumb " standards, without thinking whether there may not be some better, easier, more productive and less costly method.

Any radical change in factory management must be a gradual evolution out of that which has preceded it. The present systems, or lack of systems, with their good and their bad points are themselves the result of long evolution. No drastic or radical change in them can be suddenly or even rapidly made without causing disturbance. Men have become accustomed alike to the strong and the weak elements in the systems under which they work, and they cling naturally to that which they have been accustomed to do. A factory manager is a busy man. From dawn to dark problems large and small press on his thought. Questions of policy, of principle, of practice, of purchase in every form crowd his hours. Amid these cares, often while doing his best, he is conscious that there are better ways, but having only one man's strength he cannot take them up, especially if he has owners above him who are content with anything so long as it pays.

During a short talk the factory manager of a large Eastern plant making machine tools was asked : " Suppose all care for operating details were taken off your mind and your entire time and thought were concentrated on searching criticism of your own equipment and methods, would not your whole time, if thus spent, he profitably employed?'' He replied: "It would drive me mad; there would be so much to do." This was a prosperous and long established business in a modern shop and under what is thought

THE DAYS OF THE KITLE OF THUMB

good management. Yet the superintendent knew so much improvement was possible, if his time and thought were wholly given to self-study, that he dreaded to undertake so exacting a task, necessary and profitable though he knew it to be.

The truth was that like many another able manager he was dealing with a mass of current details arising from the necessary operation of his works, and his time was too full to permit him to give to the serious task of improvements the continued and severe study it required. So as others do, he did his best, keeping his shop moving, making a change here and there, bettering conditions as time and circumstances permitted, but knowing always that there were better methods which he had not time to study as he desired; and the customers of his concern and the public and his employers paid the bill; and not they alone but the workmen in his shop bore a share of the burden for by so much as the equipment and the management were poorer than the best, the workmen were held back in their production and their earning powers were reduced. In like manner since the product of these works was not made in the easiest and cheapest way, the customers had to pay for it. For a similar reason, too, the concern was at a disadvantage as compared with others using more efficient plant or methods, because it had to charge a price enhanced because of its higher costs in order to make a living profit. They did complain of trouble in meeting foreign competition while admitting they could but did not improve their own methods.

A gentleman in Cleveland, Ohio, was recently called to examine six plants in one industry 1 — all prosperous and contented with themselves. The result of his study was that the best of the six was running at 78% of a normal and possible efficiency, and the poorest was operating at but 30% of a fair and reasonable standard which was common to all six. But they did not know this ; profits were good and they were happy. The " rule of thumb " was in full operation and so long as it paid, why change? They were doing well, along lines that seemed justified by experience. They did not at all realize that a five cent piece — so to speak — was being held so closely to their eyes that a dollar at a distance was invisible. None the less they and their workmen and the public using their goods were all sufferers from the waste of time and energy

THE DAYS OF THE KTJLE OF THUMB

and manhood under this complacent management.

I was employed years ago by two manufacturing firms neither of whom had any cost accounting system. By one it was considered quite needless. The experience of the owner and the foremen told them without records what they thought were the proper costs. In the other place an attempt to show the proprietor the actual facts as to what his goods cost brought down his wrath on my defenseless head. In both places the "rule of thumb" was supreme and stayed supreme till in accord with normal economic laws both concerns wound up.

An agent of the Tariff Board recently visited sixteen concerns in the knit goods industry to determine the cost of their output. None of them knew what it cost them to produce their goods. The Tariff Board man had to find it all out for himself because no accurate records existed in any of the establishments. There was no such! thing as a good accounting system in any of the sixteen factories and the ideas of the owners were vague and hazy on the cost of production and still more so on how to find it. One of them said the government ought to employ men to go about and teach them how to keep their costs.

In the fall of 1911 a friend told me that the head of a large woolen manufacturing company telephoned him to come to his office ; that he had something unique to show him. My friend went, and told me the thing he was shown certainly was unique. The woolen manufacturer had put together in one column all his outlay for the year — wages, expenses, interest, taxes, fuel, everything ; and in another column opposite he had put the total yards of cloth made that year. Then he divided the total outlay by the total yardage, and said to my friend : " Look at that. There is what my goods cost me per yard last year. Did you ever see anything like it? " And my friend, with a straight face, told him he never had. This mill was producing about forty different kinds of goods, varying in width, weight, weave and material. The company did not know the cost of each. Still less did it know the cost of each separate operation on all or any, nor could it tell from accurate records whether each department was running at a profit or at a loss. It was the " rule of thumb " again.