Read Ebook: Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators by Marot Helen

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 166 lines and 34682 words, and 4 pages

ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE AMERICAN WAY

As machine power rivalled hand work, promoters of industry until recently relied for its advancement on the perfection of technology, giving little thought to the perfection of labor. It was confidently assumed that labor, out of its own necessities, would adapt itself automatically to the new requirements of the machine, and to the shifts of business interest. When it was discovered that there were limitations to labor's voluntary adaptation under the conditions laid down, intelligent business in America decided that the responsibility for realizing labor's adaptation or "labor's co?peration" as they call it, must be assumed by the management of industry and that that management must be scientifically worked out and applied.

Scientific management is scientific as it subjects the labor operations on each job, each specific job to be performed in a factory, to a testing out of the energy consumed; to discovering how to secure labor's maximum productivity without waste of time or energy. It is scientific as the manager's state of mind towards the physical and psychological reactions of the workers is one of inquiry and a readiness to accept, as facts of mechanical science are accepted, the reaction of the workers. A scientific manager, or engineer as he is often called, bears the same relation to the labor force in a factory that an electrical engineer bears to the electrical equipment. If his attention to the emotional reaction of the workers is less detached than scientific standards require, it must be remembered that he is trying to make adjustments which must first of all meet definite business conditions. Where the reactions of the workers interfere with the whole scheme of business administration, , he has to substitute measures which are not strictly speaking scientific. On these occasions he adopts humanitarian schemes, which are generally spoken of as welfare work. It is the introduction of these schemes which look like a "slop over" from science to charity, that makes it difficult for outsiders to tell just what scientific management is and what it is not.

Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of scientific management, was capable of scientific detachment in studying working men in relation to the specific job. He was able more notably than others had been before him, and more than many who have followed him, to extend the impersonal state of mind, which he enjoyed in the study of inorganic energy, to his study of human energy. Mr. Taylor's interest did not emanate from sympathy with labor in its hardships; his interest was centered in an effort to conserve and apply labor energy with maximum economy for wealth production. Mr. Taylor awakened the consciousness of industrial managers to the fact that the energy of workers like the power of machinery is subject to laws. He demonstrated that it was possible in specific operations to discover how the highest degree of energy could be attained and the largest output result, without loss through fatigue. He showed how efficiency could be enhanced by transferring the responsibility of standards of work from the workers to the managers. He formulated, as a business and industry doctrine, that a definite relation between the expenditure of labor energy and the labor reward could be established; that the wage incentive, if applied to labor in relation to energy expended, would yield, or might be expected to yield increased returns. These incentives, rewards, stimuli, which employers could apply would produce, he stated with unscientific fervor, the workers' initiative. The inability of Mr. Taylor and other scientific managers to distinguish between initiative and short lived reaction to stimulus is simple evidence that their scientific experiments were confined to comparisons which they could make between a yield in wealth where the stimulus to labor is weak, and a yield where it is strong. They will not discover what a worker's productivity is, or might be, when incited by his impulse to work, nor will they secure labor's initiative, until they release the factors, latent in industry, which have inspirational, creative force.

The attitude of Mr. Taylor and his followers, however, differs from that of the ordinary manager who maintains an irritated disregard of the disturbing elements instead of accepting them and, as far as is consistent with business principles, allaying or cajoling them. The significant contributions which scientific management has made are in line with the experiments originally introduced by Mr. Taylor. They call for the study of each new task by the management, for discovering the economy in the expenditure of labor energy before it is submitted to the working force; the standardizing of the task in conformity with the findings; the teaching of the approved methods to the working force; the introduction of incentives which will insure the full response of labor in the accomplishment of the task. Beside the standardizing of tasks and the relating the wage to the fixed standard, scientific management has made intensive experiments in the scheduling of the various operations to be performed, which are divided among the working force, so that no one operation is held up awaiting the completion of another. It has shown in this connection that work can be "routed" so that the time of workers is not lost. The most successfully managed factories also plan their annual product so that employment will be continuous. They have discovered that the periods of unemployment seriously affect the personnel of a labor force and they estimate that the turnover of the labor force which requires the constant breaking in of new men is an item of serious financial loss. The Ford Automobile Works at one time hired 50,000 men in one year while not employing at any one time more than 14,000. They estimated that the cost of breaking in a new man averaged .00. To reduce this cost, they instituted profit sharing, as an incentive for men to remain. Other factories have estimated the cost of replacing men from .00 to 0.00. A rubber concern in Ohio has a labor turnover of 150 per cent. In connection with the effort to reduce the turnover in the labor force the management of well organized factories takes great care to estimate a worker's value before employing him. The policy of transferring a man from one department to another where he is better suited yields evidently valuable results. In factories where there is effort to hold labor, to make employment continuous, the turnover has been reduced in some cases to as low as 18 per cent. Generally, however, it is still high; frequently as high as 50 per cent, and 50 per cent is still considered low, even in factories which have given the subject much consideration.

There is a tendency in developing the mechanics of efficiency, as they relate to labor, to establish for machine production standards of workmanship. Long and weary experience has proved that wage earners under factory methods and machine conditions are not interested in maintaining standards of work. The standards which are set by the scientific management schemes of efficiency are not, to be sure, the qualitative standards of craftsmanship but they are qualitative as well as quantitative standards of machine work. The tendency to establish standards should have educational significance for workers. It would have, if the responsibility for setting standards as well as maintaining them rested in any measure with the workers; it would have, that is, if the workers had the interest in workmanship, which as things now stand they have not. The point in scientific management is that efficiency depends, wholly depends they believe, on centralizing the responsibility for setting and maintaining workmanship standards, on transferring the responsibility for standards of work from workers who do it, to the management who directs it done. I have learned of only one manager who realizes that although the factory workers are not to be trusted to maintain standards, a management nevertheless will fail to get the workers' full co?peration until it arouses their interest in maintaining them.

The manager is Mr. Robert Wolf, who illustrated this point at a meeting of the Taylor Society in March, 1917. In describing the process of extracting the last possible amount of water from paper pulp, he said:

This was accomplished, Mr. Wolf told them, without resorting to piece work or bonus or any of the special methods of payments, their men being hired by the day throughout the entire plant. Mr. Wolf accomplished the result by giving meaning to a meaningless task, by letting the men see for themselves how they arrived at results, letting them see the different processes of getting results and knowing on their own account which were the most valuable.

There may be other managers who appreciate the value of letting men in on the experimental effort of getting results but it is not the practice to do so and it is opposed to the idea of transferring the responsibility from the workshop to the manager's office or laboratory. Because of this practice the educational value of establishing standards of workmanship is lost so far as the workers are concerned. Mr. Wolf's criticism of orthodox scientific management and his conclusions are illuminating; they are indeed revolutionary in nature as they come from a manager of a successful industrial enterprise:

Scientific management is sacrificing educational opportunity latent in the realization of workmanship standards in the same way that machinery sacrificed it. They both curtail the workers' chance to discover first-hand what the processes of fabrication are, the processes in which they are involved; they must adopt ready-made methods of doing their work, they must accept them out of hand without questioning, or chance to question, their validity. Workers endowed with good health and moral vigor resist these attempts to put something over on them, irrespective of their good or evil results.

The workers have resisted machinery not only because as individuals they were thrown, out of jobs for a time or lost them permanently, but because the machine imposed on them a method of work, of activity over which they had no control. Scientific management has undertaken to gather up whatever bits of initiative the machine had not already taken over and to hand back to the workers at the bench directions for them to follow with a blind ability to accept instruction. It is incredible to factory managers that workers object to being taught "right" ways of doing things. Their objection is not to being taught, but to being told that some one way is right without having had the chance to know why, or whether indeed it is the right way. This resistance to being taught, it seems, is nothing more nor less than a wayward desire of a worker to do his own way because it is his way, and of course from the managers' point of view, that is stupid. It is stupid, but the stupidity is in the situation. What does this waywardness of the worker to do his own way suggest? Not that he has a way worth bothering about but that he wants to exercise the quality which all industrial managers agree he does not possess--his initiative. Now a man who has the desire to exercise initiative and does not know how to put anything through is not only a useless person in society but the most pestiferous fellow in existence. Allowing that he is does not mean that he has not the power of initiative or that he could not have learned to put this initiative to good use, if at any time in his manhood or youth he had been taught to use it, instead of being required to follow the accepted ways of doing things without having had the experience of trial and error. Schools and factory management give workers scant opportunity to discover whether they have initiative or have not.

Mr. Wolf finds that "while it is possible, under certain conditions, to compel obedience, there is no possible way in which a man can be compelled to do his work willingly and when he does it unwillingly he is far from being efficient. He must have the opportunity to enjoy his work and realize himself in its performance." "In our plant," he remarks, "we never made it a practice to determine arbitrarily standard methods for performing an operation, for we believe that the men who are actually doing the work have generally as much to contribute as the foremen and department heads in deciding standard practices; and because we give the workman the chance to have the most to say about the matter, he is willing to conform to the standard, because it really represents a concensus of opinion of the men in his particular group." It is significant in this connection to remember that he does not pay the men by special methods to get the return. "I am not necessarily opposed to piece work or task and bonus methods of payment.... We have been able to obtain splendid results without resorting to a system of immediate money rewards." He thinks it is better to pay the workers liberally so that they "can forget this economic pressure and do good work because of the joy that comes from the consciousness of work well done."

Scientific management like ordinary management as a matter of fact does not want to cultivate initiative in the rank and file of workers; it would like to find more of it; and its eternal expectation is that enough of it will rise out of the oppressive atmosphere of the factory system to supply its limited needs. Scientific management especially wants this, as it must have more foremen and teachers to carry forward its advanced schemes of organization. But every manager will tell you that industry does not produce men with sufficient initiative to fill these positions. Their estimates of the number of men found in industry who have initiative varies from one to five per cent. The rest they believe are born, routine workers. They speak of their limitations as native. Managers do not stop to consider that their judgments are based wholly on the reaction of the mass of wage workers to the special stimuli which they offer. They say also that high school and college boys show up very little if any better in respect to initiative than the lower school product. The truth is that schools and colleges are more concerned with passing on the standards of an older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand inquiries. That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to the pressure of accepting subject matter without independent inquiry or curiosity.

Factory management like college and school management, instead of depending on the subject matter to interest the workers, instead of opening up to them the factors of interest in industrial enterprise, has adopted incentives for getting the required work done. Enlightened school practice, out of long failure to get the children's initiative by the artificial stimulus of rewards for work done, now depends upon the content of the subject matter and the children's experiments with it, to develop their desire to do the work. The practice of depending on school rewards instead of interest in subject matter is largely responsible for superficial knowledge and lack of ability to think as well as to act. As schools fail to incite the interest of the children they train them to put through this and that task and reward them for it without having added to their power of undertaking tasks on their own account. Indeed, as they fail to give them the chance to do that, they actually decrease whatever power they may have had.

The doing of tasks in factories for the sake of rewards, gives the workers experience in winning rewards. As they are interested only in the reward, they carry away no desire or interest in the work experience. As the method of doing the work is prescribed in every detail and their only requirement, under scientific management, is to follow directions with accuracy, they are trained to do their tasks as the children in school are trained. They are trained in routine, and to do each task as it is given. This is not education, it is training to do tricks. The worker does not take over what can be called experience from one task to another. He forms certain motor habits, called skill. But under the efficient methods of scientific management the acquirement of this skill is robbed even of the educational value that it had under the unscientific method of factory work, which within its limited field, left the worker to discover by trial and error what were the best methods of getting results. Moreover, the standards of workmanship which scientific management sets up are not the worker's own standards; he has had no part in the making of them or in deciding on the comparative merits of the results. He accomplishes the results as he follows directions, not for the sake of the result, not for the sake of good workmanship, but for the reward.

As I have said scientific management has given the subject of incentives the same careful thought that it has given to the study of lost energy. The two important incentives for inducing the response of labor to productive enterprises which scientific management has carried forward in their applications, are wages and promotion. The general assumption is that the wage as an incentive has no limitations, except the physical limitation of a human being in response to stimulus. And surely it is true that the chance to "make money" is to-day the most powerful stimulus in use. But thoughtful managers of industrial enterprise tell you, incredible as it may seem, that the worker's objection to applying himself to his task is not invariably overcome by anticipation of the wage return; he will slack or be perverse or throw over a job in the face of opportunities to earn as good a wage or a better one than he can get elsewhere. It is well known that workers joint unions in the face of opposition of employers and at the risk of losing permanent positions.

A resourceful manager in one of the most intelligently managed plants in the United States told me that women were less susceptible than men to the wage incentive. He found that many of them are content when their wage covers a sum which represents for them their personal requirements; that they cannot interest them in trying for more. On that account the manager takes up the case of the individual girl to see if her ambition to earn more money cannot be stimulated. They find sometimes that a mother requires her daughter to give in her whole wage at the end of the week and that the girl has no pleasure in the spending of it; they visit the mother and persuade her to let the girl keep a proportion of her wage and point out to the mother that she is limiting the girl's ambition. They also find girls who have entire control over the spending of their wages, who are without ambition to earn over and above a certain sum because that sum will meet their own recognized needs. The case of these girls the management tries to cover by encouraging them to save for vacations and other purposes which they offer by way of suggestion. In both of these instances the management undertakes to create new wants or ways of realizing wants which were not recognized by the workers themselves. The satisfaction of these wants may or may not be in the direction of extending experience and expanding contacts. But that is neither here nor there. The point is, the manager of the industry has used an incentive for increasing production which has no relation to production itself. He is forced to do this because he fails to make the process of production a matter of interest to the worker. The processes of production do not of themselves as we know compel the workers' application or stimulate their desire for productive enterprise.

It is in the nature of the case impossible to increase the wage incentive indefinitely. One large and scientifically managed plant has made remarkable provisions for staving off the time when the dead line is reached. They have taken stock account of the labor power they require, the amount of energy which each worker possesses, for the purpose of evaluation and payment. They have undertaken to cover as separate items each condition which affects a worker's relation to his job. They rate as separate items the worker's proficiency, reliability, continuity in service, indirect charges, increased cost of living, and periods of lay-off; they rate him according to the number of technical processes he is proficient in, whether or not he is engaged on more than one; they rate him if he attends the night school connected with the factory and shows in this way a disposition to learn other operations than, those he already knows. Why, they wonder, does only ten per cent of the force take advantage of the school and what, they are eager to find out, can they do further to secure the men's co?peration. For "co?peration," they say, "in a special way deserves credit, since it is unexpected ... certain well defined acts of co?peration will bring extra reward." Their rewards so carefully calculated did not seem to enlist response as spiritual in its nature as co?peration. It seemed that they had reached "the dead line" where wage stimulus fails to draw its hoped for response.

To get from the workers the highest efficiency the scientifically managed plants pay for a task a stated rate based on piece or time; if the task is performed within the time set and the directions for doing the task as laid out by the management, are followed, the worker receives in addition to the regular rate, a bonus. Mr. H.L. Grant, while working with Mr. Taylor, discovered that there was weakness in the system of paying bonuses, and the weakness was not overcome until he devised a method of paying the workman for the time allowed plus a percentage of that time according to what he did. This method he declares constantly induced further effort and overcame what they discovered was the weakness in a flat bonus. As fair or as superior as this bonus may be in relation to the prevailing rate in the market, managers say that the workers are apt in time to fall below the standard as their work becomes routine, unless the incentive after a time is increased or changed in character. In other words the wage incentive is like a virus injection. The dose is not continuously effective, except as the amount is increased or altered.

A usual method of keeping alive the financial incentive is profit sharing and schemes for participation in profits, but they are rewards of general merit and bids for continuity of service; they have no direct relation to the workers' efficiency and compliance with standards which distinguish the wage rewards of scientifically managed plants.

Promotion, the incentive second in importance to the wage incentive, is of assistance in postponing the time when the dead line for the worker is reached. Nothing better illustrates the limitations of promotion in this respect than the fact that in factories where the turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to promote the workers decreases; it falls in proportion to the length of their term of service. That is, chances for promotion are the lowest in factories where conditions otherwise are favorable to the worker. In the factory where the turnover is only 18 per cent the management says that promotion is a negligible factor. Where the turnover is high there is greater opportunity in plants scientifically managed than in others to promote men, as the scheme of organization calls for a larger number of what they call "functionalized foremen" and teachers in proportion to the working force.

It is as I have said, on account of the necessity of these positions in the general scheme that managers of factories are interested in finding more men who have initiative, than industry under their direction has produced.

Before scientific management was discovered, business management and machinery already had robbed industry of productive incentives, of the real incentive to production; a realization on the part of the worker of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content. All that was left for scientific management to gather together for its direction were bits of experience which workers gained by their own experimental efforts at how best to handle tools. Their efforts it is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise progressive industrial advance. The margin for experiment which was still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort inspired by an interest in the work.

When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage: educationally speaking, the repression is direct. The workers are fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them. They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own initiative. They are being managed and they know it and all things being equal they do not like it. The responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a better scheme for carrying industry forward. The methods of scientific management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the opportunity is provided.

Scientific managers have hoped that their plans to conserve energy and increase the wage in relation to expenditure of energy would meet little opposition. They also have hoped that the paternalistic feature of welfare work would allay opposition. But I am not inclined to include the welfare schemes in a consideration of scientific management; they have little light to throw on what educational significance there is in the efficiency methods which scientific management has introduced in industry. The playgrounds attached to factories, the indoor provisions for social activity, the clubs, while not having an acknowledged relation to the scientific management of the factory and while repudiated by some managers, are a common feature of plants which claim to be scientifically managed. There are scientifically managed plants which object to the recreational and other features which have to do with matters outside the province of the factory, on the ground that it is a meddling with the personal side of people's lives. "A baseball game connected with the factory," said the educational manager of a certain plant, "has the effect of limiting the workers' contacts; it is much better for them, as it is for every one, not to narrow their relationships to a small group, but to play ball with the people of the town." It is significant that this concern deals with the union and conforms to its regulations. Whether this more generous concept of the workers' lives yields more in manufactured goods than one that confines the activity of the workers to the factory in which they labor, scientific management, so far as I know, has not discovered.

The very nature of the welfare schemes suggests that they are inspired more out of fear of the workers' freedom of contact than launched on account of comparative findings which relate strictly to the economy of labor power. The policy of leaving the workers free, it was clear in the instance just cited, had been adopted out of a personal preference for freedom in relationships. The introduction of clinics, rest rooms, restaurants, sanitary provisions, and all arrangements relating directly to the workers' health have a bearing on efficiency and productivity which is well recognized and probably universally endorsed by efficiency managers, even if they are not invariably adopted.

Scientific management wants two things; more men in the labor market to fill the positions of functionalized foremen, more men than modern industrial society has produced; and it wants an army of workers who will follow directions, follow them as one of the managers said, as soldiers follow them. It wants this army to be endowed as well with the impulse to produce. It may by its methods realize one of its wants, that is, an army of workers to follow directions; but as it succeeds in this, as it is successful in robbing industry of its content, and as it reduces processes to routine, it will limit its chances to find foremen who have initiative and it will fail to get from workers the impulse to produce goods.

During the last four years, under the stress of a consuming war every stimulus employed by business management for speeding up production has been advanced. Organized efficiency in the handling of materials has increased the output, as increased rewards to capital and labor have stimulated effort. But the quantitative demand of consumption requirements is insatiable. It is not humanly possible under the present industrial arrangements to satisfy the world's demand for goods, either in time of war or peace. It was never more apparent than it is now, that an increase in a wage rate is a temporary expedient and that wage rewards are not efficient media for securing sustained interest in productive enterprise. It is becoming obvious that the wage system has not the qualifications for the co?rdination of industrial life. As the needs of the nations under the pressure of war have brought out the inefficiencies of the economic institution, it has become sufficiently clear to those responsible for the conduct of the war and to large sections of the civil population, that wealth exploitation and wealth creation are not synonymous; that the production of wealth must rest on other motives than the desire of individuals to get as much and give as little as particular situations will stand.

In England and in the United States, where the individualistic conception of the industrial life has been an inherent part of our national philosophy, the governments, with cautious reservations, have assumed responsibilities which had been carried in normal times by business. Because business administration had been dependent for its existence on a scheme of profiteering it is not in the position where it can appeal to labor to contribute its productive power in the spirit of patriotic abandon. But governments as they have taken over certain industrial responsibilities are in a better position to make such appeals to capital as well as to labor.

The calculable effect of the appeal to capital to assume the responsibility is in the long run of passing importance, as under the present business arrangement that is the position capital occupies. In other words, the appeal will mark no change in capitalist psychology as it promises to do in the case of labor.

Judging from recent events in England, where the government appeals to labor have had longer time to take effect, it seems that new brain tracks in labor psychology have actually been created. English labor apparently is beginning to take the impassioned appeals of its government seriously and is making ready to assume the responsibility for production. The resolutions adopted by the Labor Party at its Nottingham Conference in November in 1917 covered organized labor's usual defense program relating to wage conditions. The Manifesto which was issued was first of all a political document, written and compiled for campaign purposes. But the significance of the party's action is the new interpretation which it is beginning to give industrial democracy. It is evident where state ownership is contemplated that the old idea that industry would pass under the administrative direction of government officials, is replaced by the growing intention and desire of labor to assume responsibility for administration whether industry is publicly or privately owned. The Party stands for the "widest possible participation both economic and political ... in industry as well as in government." In explanation of the Manifesto, the leader of the Party is quoted in the Manchester Guardian as saying, that when labor now speaks of industrial democracy it no longer means what it did before the war; it does not mean political administration of economic affairs; it means primarily industrial self-government.

Perhaps an even better evidence of the intention of English labor in this direction is the movement towards decentralization in the trade union organization. This movement, known as the "shop-stewards" movement is essentially an effort of the men in the workshops to assume responsibility in industrial reconstruction after the war, a responsibility which they have heretofore under all circumstances delegated to representatives not connected directly with the work in the shops. As these representatives were isolated from actual problems of workshop production and alien therefore to the problems in their technical and specific application, they were incapable of functioning efficiently as agents of productive enterprise. This "shop stewards" movement recognizes and provides for the interdependence of industrial interests, but at the same time it concerns itself with the competent handling of specific matters.

An interesting illustration of what would happen in the ranks of the syndicalists if the business idea of labor's intellectual and emotional incapacity for functioning, gave way before a community's confidence in the capacity of labor--we have in the case of the migratory workers in the harvesting of our western crops. The harvesters who follow the crops with the seasons from the southern to the northern borders of the United States and into Canada are members of the most uncompromisingly militant organization of syndicalists, The Industrial Workers of the World. On an average it takes ten years for these harvesters to become skilled workers and these men, members of this condemned organization, are the most highly skilled harvesters in the country. On account of their revolutionary doctrines and their combined determination to reap rewards as well as crops, they are considered and treated like outlaws, and outlaws of the established order they are in spirit. When the owners of the farms of North Dakota realized that their own returns on the harvests were diverted in the marketing of their grain, they combined for protection against the grain exchanges and the elevator trusts. While developing their movement they discovered that the natural alliance for their organization to make was with the men who were involved with them in the production of grain. And as the farmers have accepted the harvesters as partners they have formed in effect a co?rdinated producing combination. Without finally settling the problem of agriculture, they have strengthened the production group and eliminated strife at the most vital point.

In the period of reconstruction the industrial issues of significance to democracy will be whether or not management of industry as it has been assumed by the state for the purpose of war shall revert after the war to the condition of incompetency which the war emergency disclosed or whether state management shall be extended and developed as it was in Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. Fortunately, these evidences of a new interest of labor in industry as a social institution, give us some reason to hope that we shall not be confined to a choice between business incompetency and state socialism. The evidence of the desire on the part of the labor force to participate in the development of production is the factor we should keep in mind in any plans for democratic industrial reconstruction. It is inevitable that an effort to open up and cultivate this desire of labor will be regarded by the present governing forces with apprehension. The movement of labor in this direction is now looked upon with suspicion even by people who are not in a position of control. The general run of people in fact outside of those who recognize labor as a fundamental force in industrial reconstruction, conceive of the labor people as an irresponsible mass of men and view their movements as expressions of an irresponsible desire to seize responsibility. They are the men who are not experienced in business affairs and therefore cannot, it is believed, be trusted. The arguments against trusting them are the same old arguments advanced for many centuries against inroads on the established order of over-lordship. But over-lordship has flourished at all times, and in the present scheme of industry it flourishes as it always has, in proportion to the reluctance of the people to participate as responsible factors in matters of common concern. Corruption and exploitation of governments and of industry are dependent upon the broadest possible participation of a whole people in the experience and responsibilities of their common life. It is for this reason that we need to foster and develop the opportunity as well as the desire for responsibility among the common people.

ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE GERMAN WAY

Statemanship in Germany covered "industrial strategy" as well as political. Its labor protection and regulations were in line with its imperial policy of domination. Within recent years labor protection from the point of view of statesmanship has been urged in England and America. The waste of life is a matter of unconcern in the United States so long as private business can replenish its labor without seriously depleting the oversupply. It becomes a matter of concern only when there are no workers waiting for employment. The German state has regulated the conditions of labor and conserved human energy because its purpose has been not the short-lived one of private business, but the long-lived one of imperial competition. It was the policy of the Prussian state to conserve human energy for the strength and the enrichment of the Empire. Whatever was good for the Empire was good, it was assumed, for the people. The humanitarians in the United States who tried to introduce labor legislation in their own country accepted this na?ve philosophy of the German people, which had been so skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, without appreciating that its result was enervating. Our prevailing political philosophy, however, that workers and capitalists understand their own interests and are more capable than the state of looking after them, stood in the way of adopting on grounds of statesmanship the German methods.

The American working man has never been convinced that he can get odds of material advantage from the state. His method is to get all he can through "pull," good luck or his superior wits. He could find no satisfaction like his German brothers in surrendering concrete interests for some abstract idea of a state. He could find no greater pleasure in being exploited by the state than he now finds in exploitation by private business. The average American values life for what he can get out of it, or for what he can put into it. He has no sentimental value of service, nor is service anywhere with us an institutionalized ideal. We judge it on its merits, detached perhaps, but still for what it actually renders in values.

In conformity with American ideals, wage earners look to their own movements and not to the state for protection. Their movements require infinite sacrifice, but they supply them with an interest and an opportunity for initiative which their job lacks. The most important antidote for the workers to factory and business methods is not shorter hours or well calculated rest periods or even change-off from one kind of routine work to another. As important as these may be, reform in labor hours does not compensate the worker for his exclusion from the directing end of the enterprise of which he is a part and from a position where he can understand the purpose of his work The trade union interference with the business of wealth production is in part an attempt to establish a co?rdination of the worker which is destroyed in the prosecution of business and factory organization. The interference of the union is an attempt to bridge the gulf between the routine of service and the administration, and direction of the service which the worker gives.

I do not intend to imply that the labor movement is a conscious attempt at such co?rdination. It is not. The conscious purpose is the direct and simple desire to resist specific acts of domination and to increase labor's economic returns. But any one who follows the sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest, not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker's participation in the administration of affairs connected with life in the shop. The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as men unequipped with the administrative power--as men without will.

There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in the United States. The German workers depended on their political representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards. Their organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck set up. They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.

If Germany loses the war the chances are that the people may recognize what it means for the people of a nation to let the title to their lives rest with the state; they will know perhaps whether for the protection they have been given and for the regulation of their affairs and destiny they have paid more than the workers of other countries, who, less protected by law, suffered the exigencies of their assumed independence.

How much the German people depended upon the state and how much their destiny is affected by it is illustrated better by their educational system and its relation to industry than by any labor legislative protective practices or policy.

The telling off of children at the age of ten and assigning them to a place in the social scheme for life is not American in spirit, nor does it conform to our habits and institutions. But, it is complained, the American habit of taking chances is not efficient. The habit of letting children escape into life with their place unsettled creates confusion and makes calculations in serious things like industry difficult. Therefore, unfaithful to the development of our own concepts of life we are expected to emulate Germany and to determine the destiny of the child. Germany undertakes to eliminate the chances of the individual and the taking of chances by the state, while the American ideal is to leave its people free to make the most of each new exigency that life turns up.

At the age of fourteen it is decided in Germany what industry or trade the children shall enter, that is, the children who at ten are told off to industry. After they enter their trade, their special education for their job is looked after in the continuation schools as well as in the shop. Their attendance at the continuation schools is compulsory. This compulsory attendance does not only insure supplementary training for a particular job, but holds the children to the industry which was chosen for them. That is, a boy is compelled, if he works in the dining-room of a hotel, to attend the continuation school for waiters, until he is eighteen. He may not go to a continuation school for butchers if he decided at the end of a year or so in his first job that he would rather be a butcher, or that he would rather do anything than wait.

The continuation schools protect German manufacture and the national industrial efficiency against indulgence in such vagaries. A butcher would prefer to engage lads who have had experience in butcher shops and butcher continuation classes. Avenues of escape from jobs just because they are uncongenial are thus quite effectively closed together with, the chance to experiment with life--the chance which Americans take for granted. But it is just this element of waywardness and the opportunity America leaves open for its indulgence among working people that makes labor from the standpoint of American manufacture so inefficient. For want of opportunity to put individuality to some account we frequently fall back on waywardness in an awkward and futile protest against domination.

While the German scheme of placing its workers is efficient in its own way, so also is the training for each particular trade. A child is trained first to be skillful and second, to quote Mr. Kerchensteiner, "to be willing to carry out some function in the state ... so that he may directly or indirectly further the aim of the state." "Having accomplished this," he says "the next duty of the schools is to accustom the individual to look at his vocation as a duty which he must carry out not merely in the interest of his own material and moral welfare but also in the interest of the state." From this, he says, follows the next and "greatest educational duty of the public school. The school must develop in its pupils the desire and strength ... through their vocation, to contribute their share so that the development of the state to which they belong, may progress in the direction of the ideal of the community."

His assumption in defining the "greatest duty" is that the members of the state are free to evolve and will evolve a progressive ethical community. But after a child has passed through the hands of a competent teaching force which fits him successfully into a ready-made place, after he has accepted this ready-made place on the authority of modern technology and business, on the authority of the state and religion, that the place given him is his to fill; to fill in accordance with the standards determined by the schools and by industry--after all this, it is difficult to imagine what else a child could do but conform. He could do no more, thus trained, than go forward in the direction he is pushed and in the direction determined before he was born. This is not our idea of a progressive life.

It has been understood generally in America that Germany's preparation and classification of her future workers and their placement in industry, was more responsible than any other policy for Germany's place in the world market. British and American manufacturers before the war urged the emulation of German methods of education and a reorganization of school systems more in conformity with the German. The demand of the manufacturers for reorganization came at a time when intelligent educators in America were recognizing that some reorganization was necessary to bring the school experience of children into relation with their environment and with the actualities of life. The industrial education movement in this country was based on the German, and the German idea was the dominating one. The movement here has shown little-imagination as it adopted a system foreign to America, instead of initiating schemes which represented the aspirations of a free people.

Herman Schneider, of the University of Cincinnati, has made one of the most intelligent contributions in the adaptation of the German scheme of education. He divides trades into two classes, which he calls energizing and enervating. In those which are energizing there is an element of individual expression and opportunity for self-direction. The enervating trades are wholly automatic, and induce a lethargic state of mind and body. His comment on the situation is: "We are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers. The physical workers are becoming more and more lethargic. The work itself is not character building; on the contrary, it is repressive and when self-expression comes, it is hardly energizing mentally. The real menace lies in the fact that in a self-governing industrial community the minds of the majority are in danger of becoming less capable of sound and serious thought because of lack of continuous constructive exercise in earning a livelihood."

Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich this barren soil by alternating the time of pupils between the shop or store and the school, thus co?rdinating the worker's experience, with the assistance of schoolmasters who go into the shops and follow the processes the pupils are engaged in and who see that the experience of the week in the shop is amplified and supplemented in the school. The arrangement also provides that the pupils shall be taken through the various shop processes in the course of apprenticeship. The experience while it lasts may have educational value for the pupil. But in spite of what it may or may not hold, for the general run of pupils it leads up a blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise which apprenticeship supposedly holds out. That is, the pupil, when he becomes a worker, will be thrown back into some factory groove where his experience as an apprentice cannot be used, where he is closed off from the chance to develop and use the knowledge or training he received. If, as Dean Schneider asserts, "we are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers," and if "we cannot reverse our present economic order of things," then any apprenticeship, even this brave effort of his, is a pseudo-apprenticeship and even in the most energizing of the trades leads the pupil nowhere in particular. Even the skilled trade of locomotive engineering, which Dean Schneider classes as the most highly energized of trades, does not escape. As a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers observes: "The big electrical engines which are being introduced in the railroad system are rapidly eliminating the factors of judgment on the part of the engineer and transforming that highly skilled trade into an automatic exercise."

The one-time value of a trade apprenticeship to a youth was that it furnished the background for mastery of machine processes; but apprenticeship under modern factory methods can do no more than make a youth a good servant to machines. The Schneider system fills, as well as can be filled, a scheme of apprenticeship in conformity with the prevailing shop organization and requirements, but it is not a fulfillment for youth; it is not educational. There is no progression from apprenticeship to industrial control; no chance to use the knowledge gained where opportunity for participation in administration and reorganization of industry is cut off. The best of trades is a blind alley, educationally speaking.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet