NEWS AND LABOUR
A big New England factory, not long ago, wanted to get nearer its raw material and moved to Georgia.
All the machine considerations, better water-power, cheaper labour, smaller freight bills, and new markets had argued for moving to Georgia.
Long rows of new mills were built and thousands of negroes were moved in and thousands of shanties were put up, and the men and the women stood between the wheels. And the wheels turned.
There was not a thing that had not been thought of except the men and women that stood between the wheels.
The men and women that stood between the wheels were, for the most part, strong and hearty persons and they never looked anxious or abused and did as they were told.
And when Saturday night came, crowds of them with their black faces, of the men and of the women, of the boys and girls, might have been seen filing out of the works with their week's wages.
Monday morning a few of them dribbled back. There were enough who would come to run three mills. All the others in the long row of mills were silent. Tuesday morning, Number Four started up, Wednesday, Number Five. By Thursday noon they were all going.
The same thing happened the week after, and the week after, and the week after that.
The management tried everything they could think of with their people, scolding, discharging, making their work harder, making their work easier, paying them less, paying them more, two Baptist ministers and even a little Roman Catholic Church.
As long as the negroes saw enough to eat for three days, they would not work.
It began to look as if the mills would have to move back to Massachusetts, where people looked anxious and where people felt poor, got up at 5 A.M. Mondays and worked.
Suddenly one day, the son of one of the owners, a very new-looking young man who had never seen a business college, and who had run through Harvard almost without looking at a book, and who really did not seem to know or to care anything about anything—except folks—appeared on the scene with orders from his father that he be set to work.
The manager could not imagine what to do with him at first, but finally, being a boy who made people like him more than they ought to, he found himself placed in charge of the Company Store. The company owned the village, and the Company Store, which had been treated as a mere necessity in the lonely village, had been located, or rather dumped, at the time, into a building with rows of little house-windows in it, a kind of extra storehouse on the premises.
The first thing the young man did was to stove four holes in the building, all along the front and around the corners on the two sides, and put in four big plate-glass windows. The store was mysteriously closed up in front for a few days to do this, and no one could see what was happening, and the negroes slunk around into a back room to buy their meal and molasses. And finally one morning, one Sunday morning, the store opened up bravely and flew open in front.
The windows on the right contained three big purple hats with blue feathers, and some pink parasols.
The windows on the left were full of white waistcoats, silver-headed canes, patent-leather shoes and other things to live up to.
Monday morning more of the mills were running than usual.
Later in the week there appeared in the windows melodions, phonographs, big gilt family Bibles, bread machines, sewing machines, and Morris chairs. Only a few hands took their Mondays off after this.
All the mills began running all the week.
Of course there are better things to live for than purple hats and blue feathers, and silver-headed canes, and patent leather shoes. But if people can be got to live six days ahead, or thirty days, or sixty days ahead, instead of three days ahead, by purple hats and blue feathers and white waistcoats, and if it is necessary to use purple hats and blue feathers to start people thinking in months instead of minutes, or to budge them over to where they can have a touch of idealism or of religion or of living beyond the moment, I say for one, with all my heart, "God bless purple hats and blue feathers!"
The great problem of modern charity, the one society is largely occupied with to-day, is: "What is there that we can possibly do for our millionaires?"
The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design and set up purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires.
The moment our millionaires have placed before them something to live for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid lasting things they can do, things that everybody else would want to do, and that everybody else would envy them for doing, it will bore them to run a great business merely to make money. They will find it more interesting, harder, and calling for greater genius, to be great and capable employers. When our millionaires once begin to enter into competition with one another in being the greatest and most successful employers of labour on earth, our industrial wars will cease.
Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees as they dare, and pay them as little as they can, and who give the public as small values as they dare, and take as much money as they can, only do such stupid, humdrum, conventional things because they are bored, because they cannot really think of anything to live for.
Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing how much less work a day than they ought to do, they can do, and how much more money they can get out of their employers than they earn, only do such things because they are tired or bored and discouraged, and because they cannot think of anything that is truly big and fine and worth working for.
The industrial question is not an economic question. It is a question of supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem which only an American National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle. The very first moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end.
As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing house—marking off rooms—sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of stones on the ground. When I came up they had just taken hold of a big stone they wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone for yards around—every one that was the right size—seemed subtly out of place. The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.
They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead.
I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys' first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!
I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But I know people and I know that a man with only three day's worth of things ahead to live for does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and inspiring him. And I know that the man who does his work with a longer lever still, with thirty or forty years worth' of things he wants, all crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a new size and a new kind of man.
The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would work better than paying him twice as much wages.
Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man's life twenty times as much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well—twice as much work.
If a man has a big man's thing or object in view, he can do three times as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while he is doing it every minute. It makes it easier to do it because it seems big.
The little man becomes a big man.
From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who is the man of economic sense. The employer who can put out ideals in front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense.
The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century business world.
Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at least, in the great managers of employers?
You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop. As you move down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven. Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four hundred girls swing off into each other's arms. They dance between their machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work. You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats with flushed and glowing cheeks.
Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency?
The more sentiment there is in it, I think, the more efficient it is and the better it works.
"Business is not business."
One need not quarrel about words, but certainly, whatever else business is, it is not business. It would be closer to the facts to call business an art or a religion, a kind of homely, inspired, applied piety, based upon gifts in men which are essentially religious gifts; the power of communion in the human heart, the genius for cultivating companionship, of getting people to understand you and understand one another and do team work. The bed-rock, the hard pan of business success lies in the fundamental, daily conviction—the personal habit in a man of looking upon business as a hard, accurate, closely studied, shrewd human art, a science of mutual expectation.
I am not saying that I would favour all employers of young women having them, to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock, swing off into each other's arms and dance for five minutes. The value of the dance in this particular case was that the Firm thought of the dancing itself and was always doing things like it, that everybody knew that the Firm, up in its glass office, felt glad, joined in the dance in spirit, enjoyed seeing the girls caught up for five minutes in the joy and swing of a big happy world full of sunshine and music outside, full of buoyant and gentle things, of ideals around them which belonged to them and of which they and their lives were a part.
When we admit that business success to-day turns or is beginning to turn on a man's power of getting work out of people, we admit that a man's power of getting work out of people, his business efficiency, turns on his power of supplying his people with ideals.
Ideals are news.
You come on a man who thinks he is out of breath and that he cannot possibly run. You happen to be able to tell him that some dynamite in the quarry across the road is going to blow the side of the hill out in forty-five seconds and he will run like a gazelle.
You tell a man the news, the true news that his employees are literally and honestly finding increased pay or promotion, either in their own establishment or elsewhere for every man they employ, as fast as he makes himself fit, and you have created a man three times his own size before your own eyes, all in a minute. And he begins working for you like a man three times his own size, and not because he is getting more for it, but because he suddenly believes in you, suddenly believes in the world and in the human race he belongs to.
To make a man work, say something to him or do something to him which will make him swing his hat for humanity, and give three cheers (like a meeting of workmen the other day): "Three cheers for God!"
There is a well-known firm in England which has the best labour of its kind in the world, because the moment the Firm finds that a man's skill has reached the uttermost point in his work, where it would be to the Firm's immediate interests to keep him and where the Firm could keep on making money out of him and where the man could not keep on growing, they have a way of stepping up to such a man (and such things happen every few days), and telling him that he ought to go elsewhere, finding him a better place and sending him to it. This is a regular system and highly organized. The factory is known or looked upon as a big family or school. There are hundreds of young men and young women who, in order to get in and get started, and merely be on the premises of such a factory, would offer to work for the firm for nothing. The Factory, to them, is like a great Gate on the World.
It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World.
And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself. News to a man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel.
And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves, all day, every day, all the week, like a church—let such a factory, I say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be counted with the other churches!
People have a fashion of speaking of a man's ideals in a kind of weak, pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour by schoolgirls, as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead of being fierce, splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable in human history, trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing wonder, deaths, births upon the world, carrying everything before them, everywhere they go. These are ideals! This may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a year, but it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they make a man feel when he is working on them. It is what they are for, to make him feel like this, when he is working on them. With the men who are most alive and who live the longest, the men who live farther ahead and think in longer periods of time, the energies in ideals function as an everyday matter of course.
I wish people would speak oftener of a man's motives, what he lives for, as his motive powers. They generally speak of motives in a man as if they were a mere kind of dead chart or spiritual geography in him, or clock-hand on him or map of his soul. The motives and desires in a man are the motors or engines in him, the central power house in a man, the thing in him that makes him go.
All a man has to do to live suddenly and unexpectedly a big life is to have suddenly a big motive.
Anybody who has ever tried, for five minutes, a big motive, ever tried working a little happiness for other people into what he is doing for himself, for instance, if he stopped to think about it and how it worked and how happy it made him himself, would never do anything in any other way all his life. It is the big motives that are efficient.