Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

While industry is not responsible for many conditions which make subnormal workers, industry cannot evade the issue or shift the burden if it desires peace, efficiency, production. These goals cannot be obtained on any basis other than the welfare of the workers. No matter how sane is welfare work within the plant, there must develop a growing interest and understanding in “off the plant” work. The job is blamed for much. Yet often the worker's relation to the job is but the reflection of the conditions he left to go to work in the morning, the conditions he returns to after the day's work is done. There again is a vicious circle. The more unfortunate the conditions of a man's home life—we do not refer to the material side alone—the less efficiently he is apt to work during the day. The less efficiently he works during the day, the less competent he will be to better his home conditions.

When men expressed themselves in their particular handicraft they found much of their joy in life in their work. One of the by-products of large-scale industry and the accompanying subdivision of labor has been the worker's inevitable lack of interest in the monotonous job. Since too long hours spent at mechanical, repetitious labor result in a lowered standard of efficiency, and rebellion on the part of the worker, there has followed a continual tendency toward a reduction in the length of the working day. The fewer hours spent on the job, the greater the opportunity conditions outside industry proper have to exert their influence on character formation. With the shorter working day there develop more pressing reasons than ever for the emphasis on off-the-plant activities, and wholesome home and civic conditions. All these together, and not industry alone, make the worker.

The growth of the spirit and fruit of industrial democracy will not bring any millennium. It will merely make a somewhat better world to live in here and now. The dreamers of us forget that in the long run the world can move only so far and so fast as human nature allows for, and few of us evaluate human nature correctly. The six industrial experiences in this book have made me feel that the heart of the world is even warmer than I had thought—folk high and low are indeed readier to love than to hate, to help than to hinder. But on the whole our circles of understanding and interest are bounded by what our own eyes see and our own ears hear. The problems of industry are enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities of human understanding and sympathy. More or less artificial machinery must be set up to bring management and men in contact with each other to the point where the problems confronting each side are within eyesight and earshot of the other. Up to date it has been as impossible for labor to understand the difficulties of management as for management to understand the difficulties of labor. Neither side ever got within shouting distance of the other—except, indeed, to shout abuse! Many a strike would have been averted had the employer been willing to let his workers know just what the conditions were which he had to face; or had the workers in other instances shown any desire to take those conditions into account.

For, when all is said and done, the real solution of our industrial difficulties lies not in expert machinery, however perfect, for the adjustment or avoidance of troubles. “Industrial peace must come not as a result of the balance of power with a supreme court of appeal in the background. It must arise as the inevitable by-product of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will.”[3]

[3] From Constitution of Industrial Council for the Building Industry, England.

Any improved industrial condition in the future must take as its foundation the past one hundred years of American industry. The fact that this foundation was not built of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will is what makes the task of necessary reconstruction so extremely difficult. Countless persons might be capable of devising the mechanical approach to peace and prosperity—courts of arbitration, boards of representation, and the like. But how bring about a change of heart in the breast of millions?

It is a task so colossal that one would indeed prefer to lean heavily on the shoulders of an all-wise Providence and let it go with the consoling assurance that, as to a solution, “the Lord will provide.” But the echoes of recriminations shouted by each side against the other; the cries of foul play; the accusations of willful injustice; the threats of complete annihilation of capital by organized labor, of organized labor by capital—must reach to heaven itself, and Providence might well pause in dismay. Constructive good will? Where make a beginning?

The beginnings, however, are being made right on earth, and here and now. It is a mistake to look for spectacular changes, reforms on a large scale. Rather do the tendencies toward mutual understanding and this all-necessary good will evince themselves only here and there, in quiet experiments going on in individual plants and factories. The seed will bear fruit but slowly. But the seed is planted.

Planted? Nay, the seed has been there forever, nor have the harshest developments in the most bloodless of industries ever been able to crush it out. It is part and parcel of human nature that we can love more easily and comfortably than hate, that we can help more readily than hinder. Flourishing broadcast through all human creation is enough good will to revolutionize the world in a decade. It is not the lack of good will. Rather the channels for its expression are blocked—blocked by the haste and worry of modern life, by the multiplicity of material possessions which so frequently choke our sympathies; by the cruelties of competition, too often run to the extremes of crushing out inborn human kindness. And most of all, blocked by ignorance and misunderstanding of our fellow-beings.

It is a sound business deduction that the greatest stumbling blocks in the difficulties between labor and capital to-day resolve themselves down to just that lack of understanding of our fellow-beings. Yet without that understanding, how build up a spirit of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will? On what other foundation can a saner industrialism be built?