Combating this spirit there is a type of American employer who realizes he has a responsibility toward the men he gathers together in his factories. He comes nearer representing the modern spirit in American industry. He usually begins with some patronizing welfare work, but ends up with whole-hearted co-operation. Men of this type see the gulf between capital and labor, and instead of trying to widen it and perpetuate industrial strife like the leaders in the heavy industries they are throwing out flying bridges across the gulf. They are trying to establish a decent human relationship between employer and employee and give the lie to the I. W. W. preamble that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
The men who are making these attempts are fairly sane and do not think they are “solving the labor problem.” They are trying to re-establish in modern industry the touch that was lost between the master mechanic and the journeyman mechanic when they stopped working over the same bench. Some are having a real success. Others cannot make it go. It depends upon the amount of sincerity in the undertaking. But there are some 700 plants in America being run on this voluntary “industrial conference” system. They do not pretend to be throwing more than a flying bridge across the gulf, but they may have some permanency. At any rate, it is the most interesting experiment in American industry. If it succeeds it will establish new standards in industry and we shall be able to say that America has succeeded in working out another way the industrial problem that has led to the social revolution in Europe.
INDUSTRIAL COUNCILS SHOW EMPLOYER AND WORKER WAY TO REAL PEACE AT HOME
By Arno Dosch-Fleurot.
Copyright, 1921, by the Press Publishing Co. (The New York World).
There is a way to peace, at least comparative peace, in industry. The warfare that is forever being carried on through the open shop, the closed shop, the strike and the lockout, is coming to be considered just as uncivilized as any other form of warfare. All that is considered necessary is the give-and-take of “industrial councils.”
The idea is being worked out in one way in England and in another way here. The English have had to come to it, forced by the fact that their factory workers are organized in industrial unions. Here it is voluntary, for the industrial workers are not organized in America. The British factory workers are organized because they are all, or nearly all, British. The American factory workers are largely foreign. In England it is a question of Englishmen dealing with Englishmen. Here it is Americans dealing with foreigners.
The British have tried to get down to a uniform system or “industrial conference,” known as the Whitley system. There it is an even game, with organization and intelligent leadership on both sides. Here the homogeneous leadership is all on one side. The industrial workers are at such a disadvantage, in the fact of their not being all Americans, that they cannot get together and hold together, like the workers of England, France, Belgium or Germany, where industrial unionism is already traditional.
American Employee Has Powers Which Boss Thinks Best for Him
The American situation is peculiar to itself. It can only be approached from one point of view, that of the employer. The employee has only so much power as the employer may consider wise to yield him. This might not seem like a very successful starting point for an idea that is supposed to be leading to industrial peace, but at that it appears to be so doing. At any rate it is a very important move in the history of American industry, and, whatever it may be leading to, it is going to have a far-reaching effect.