One Thousand Ways to Make a Living; or, An Encyclopædia of Plans to Make Money

by Harold Morse Dunphy

The Employment Manager and the Foreman

From the shoulders of the overloaded superintendent there have slipped down upon the foreman of the shops a mass of heterogenous functions. In establishments where the modern plan of functionalizing the foreman is unknown, each foreman is for his own shop a Jack-of-all-trades, endeavoring to deal directly with the details of a great variety of duties. The inefficiency of such methods has been amply revealed by the analyses of the exponents of scientific management.

The remedy is specialization. This means that groups of related duties are put in the charge of special foremen or service departments, such as the stock clerk, the engineer in charge of repairs, the planning room, and the tool room. From the foreman’s point of view the employment manager is such another functionalized foreman.

In this way the general shop foreman is relieved of hiring friends of employees in his own department who importune him for selected jobs merely on the basis of friendship and not fitness. He is no longer a “bouncer.” He no longer can sell jobs, or hold his pets in soft assignments. He has not the easy device of covering his own incompetence by firing a man. He can ask for the transfer of unsatisfactory employees, but if enough of these transfers show that discarded persons are able to make good in another shop where the foremanizing is different, he prepares a prima facie case against himself. The foreman gets a more even and dependable run of workmen from the employment department than he can provide for himself. And he is freed from many distractions to become an expert in shop manufacturing processes. The employment manager must find a way to secure the enthusiastic co-operation of the foremen with whom he works, and to enlist their sympathy with the policies of the management, and of his own department, as if those policies were their own.

Will Employment Managers Be Needed After the War?

The movement which is developing human engineering is not a temporary nor sporadic demand, but is in response to an underlying trend of our economic life. It has not been dominantly, nor even largely, a product of war conditions, except as the war has made men everywhere appreciate more keenly the social virtues, and has made them long more earnestly for a new justice and comradeship. After the war, the underlying economic forces, which are all based upon the urgency of human wants, will steadily drive forward those economic reforms for which human knowledge has prepared the way.

The distinction between the economics of the war period and of the post-war period lies in this: during the war the competitive struggle was chiefly to save time, after the war it will be to reduce costs. During the war speed outweighed economy. The employment manager was demanded because time was lost by absenteeism and turnover and the training of new men. Time was lost when workers were put at jobs for which they were unfitted; and time was lost by sickness, accidents, and strikes. After the war efficiency will appear to be more a matter of cost. If the losses of this war are not recouped by the efficiency of superior organization, and the only means of making them good is a curtailment of consumption, we may look for the struggle to lessen costs and lower prices to be more intense than has ever been known in modern times. In such an event the employment manager will be demanded by intelligent employers, because sickness and voluntary absenteeism mean idle equipment; because labor turnover means the cost of breaking in new workers; because an antagonistic attitude means waste of materials and tools, spoiled work and soldiering; while strikes mean the entire loss of overhead charges.

Relations to the United States Employment Service

The United States Employment Service is a national system of recruiting bureaus operated by the Department of Labor of the United States Government, for the purpose of organizing the general relations of supply and demand on the labor market, and of distributing the available supply of wage earners as efficiently as possible to those localities and to those employers where they are in greatest demand.

The employment manager is the representative of private business, which has the task of selecting such labor as it needs and of utilizing it to the best possible advantage in the actual work of production. If, therefore, the Government assists in finding men for industry, it is the function of the employment manager to use those men with intelligence, to take such steps as are appropriate for private industry to maintain their productive efficiency unimpaired, and to see that no condition which can be remedied throws them upon the labor market to be placed again.