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

by Harold Morse Dunphy

By the new system the employer is brought into contact with public officers, who seek a justification of his demands. It is necessary for employers to state accurately what types of skill they require—a thing which requires job analysis. It is necessary to give advance notice of wants; for this a labor schedule is needed. It is certainly no recommendation for an employer, in the eyes of his community labor board, if he must admit that he still continues the antiquated hiring-and-firing process, or that he has a high labor turnover, or that he has no department charged with responsibility for maintaining proper working conditions.

A Permanent Demand

We have spoken of the underlying forces which are creating a demand for specialists to deal with the human factor in industry. It would be difficult to point to an industrial reform which is more clearly the converging point of a number of progressive movements. Employment management is a result of the evolution of cost accounting, of the idea of supplementing line executives by competent staff departments, and of the movement to specialize the work of foremen. It is an opportunity to apply vocational guidance and industrial training. It provides the expert required for setting wages by investigation rather than by dispute. It gives the needed supervisory agency for safety first, industrial hygiene, and medical aid. And it provides an officer able to deal intelligently with shop committees and collective bargaining.

The personnel officer, as an accountant, applies the methods of cost analysis to the factors which influence labor efficiency. As a hiring officer he has an opportunity to make vocational guidance more definite than it has yet been, because he can supplement the analysis of the individual with a parallel analysis of jobs. He has a powerful motive for competence in industrial training work, for he graduates his pupils in rather than out. His students benefit from the psychology of doing real work for pay in a real shop.

The employment manager is related to recent movements in psychology. He has an opportunity to apply appropriate performance tests and general intelligence tests, for the purpose of sorting out those persons who, although adult in physical development, have still the minds of children. These classes he identifies, not to reject from employment but to place at appropriate work; not to browbeat and terrorize, but to protect and guide by patient and educative foremanizing to insure their becoming happy and permanent members of the productive community.

The evolution of wage systems demands a specialist. The ideal form of reward is that of the man who is in business for himself, whose remuneration rises or falls according to his talent and effort. In the complexity of the modern corporation it is difficult to devise such a wage. In general, it may be said that to take a step toward greater fairness in wage setting, it is necessary to achieve greatness in measuring the basic factors involved in wages. Such are the worker’s talent, the nature of the task, the character of the working conditions; the chances of permanency and promotion, and the local cost of living. There is need of some agency to supervise the prolonged process by which each craft or skill in an establishment is placed at its proper point in the wage scale, with reference to the others.

“Safety first” has exerted a great influence toward personal supervision. Workmen’s compensation laws have enforced responsibility upon employers. Students of accidents maintain that a greater number of disabilities result from the carelessness or ignorance of the working force than from faults of equipment and processes. This puts the matter as much in the domain of the personnel officer as of the engineer.

A great advance has been made in medical science in recent decades. This advance has laid bare the intimate relation between good water, ventilation, digestible food, a reasonable work schedule, and home conditions, on the one side, and accident rates, fatigue, absenteeism, antagonism of mind, and strikes, on the other. The interlacing of these factors accounts for the profitableness of the health work which has been undertaken by progressive employers.

Employment supervision represents a movement in the direction of the democratic shop, in which a voice is given to labor in determining working conditions. It may be said to be a method of applying to the relations of employer and employed those conceptions of “Truth” and “Service” which have revolutionized salesmanship and advertising. As the customer is “sold” a finished product—that is to say, is convinced and satisfied by square and generous dealing—so the workman is to be “sold” his job. The latter must be satisfied as to the task, the working conditions, the wages, the foremanizing, and the general policies, before he becomes a genuine employee.

All of these movements, which have so rapidly shaped the new art of employment management, are functions of a rising level of intelligence, of an increasing power to produce wealth, and of growing interest in ideals of social welfare, as contrasted with ideals of personal luxury or arbitrary power. We may look upon them, therefore, as enduring forces and destined to work a progressive change in business management. Upon them the future of employment management rests. That future is secure.