Those in charge of the welfare and safety work, whether at the mills or at the Corporation’s headquarters, do not claim, nor for that matter do any of the Corporation’s officials claim, that the work is entirely altruistic. They are perhaps rather too inclined to emphasize its importance purely from the efficiency standpoint. It is impossible to judge motives, and generally those behind any course of action are more or less mixed. The outside observer, however, studying the operation of the Safety and Welfare movement, and noticing the enthusiasm of those engaged in it, cannot but be convinced that the deeper motive behind it is an unselfish one. The consideration that the employer benefits financially from the health and happiness of his employees is there, but it occupies a decidedly secondary place.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to demonstrate statistically that welfare work, as distinct from safety work, is financially beneficial to the employer; that the Corporation has received any tangible return for the large sums it spends yearly to give its workers the opportunity to lead cleaner, healthier, happier, and broader lives. But no work thus done can fail to give the doer a return, full measure and overflowing.
The stock subscription plan, discussed in the early part of this work, is in reality a part of the welfare programme. It has a two-fold object: that of creating a direct personal interest on the part of the worker in the Corporation’s affairs, and that of encouraging thrift among the men and women employees, setting their feet on the first rung of the ladder of success.
All welfare work, in the end, whether it be the salvation of the worker from accidents, the teaching of individual or community hygiene, the care of the sick, financial compensation for the injured, the teaching of languages, trades, sciences, or the inculcation of thrift, has for its object the making of better men and women, the giving to the worker born under unfavorable social conditions the opportunity to lift himself above these conditions. And from this both the employer and employed must benefit together.
But every other consideration aside, welfare work had paid in the satisfaction that the management and the stockholders of the great industrial enterprise feel in the knowledge that they have given the man who works with his hands, not in the Corporation alone, but industry generally—for where U. S. Steel leads, others follow—better working conditions, cleaner homes and communities, and better educational facilities for their children. In the satisfaction of knowing that, by this work, better citizens are being made, and finally, in the realization that it has helped to bridge the chasm that separates capital from labor.
Sooner or later the time must come when it will be recognized that what is known as “welfare work” is a simple duty that industry owes to labor. If it is not freely accorded, the working man will eventually demand that his work and his home be surrounded with those conditions, tangible and intangible, that make for decent citizenship, for self-respecting manhood.
If industry as a whole, as the Steel Corporation has already done, will recognize without compulsion these rights it will go a far way toward smoothing out the differences that exist between capital and labor, toward eliminating radical agitation and Bolshevism. It must offer this practical recognition of the workers’ rights as evidence of its claim that the real interests of the man who works with his hands and of him who pays him his wage are identical.
Welfare work is the humanizing of industry. It may prove the salvation of industry.