Scientific management wants two things; more men in the labor market to fill the positions of functionalized foremen, more men than modern industrial society has produced; and it wants an army of workers who will follow directions, follow them as one of the managers said, as soldiers follow them. It wants this army to be endowed as well with the impulse to produce. It may by its methods realize one of its wants, that is, an army of workers to follow directions; but as it succeeds in this, as it is successful in robbing industry of its content, and as it reduces processes to routine, it will limit its chances to find foremen who have initiative and it will fail to get from workers the impulse to produce goods.
During the last four years, under the stress of a consuming war every stimulus employed by business management for speeding up production has been advanced. Organized efficiency in the handling of materials has increased the output, as increased rewards to capital and labor have stimulated effort. But the quantitative demand of consumption requirements is insatiable. It is not humanly possible under the present industrial arrangements to satisfy the world's demand for goods, either in time of war or peace. It was never more apparent than it is now, that an increase in a wage rate is a temporary expedient and that wage rewards are not efficient media for securing sustained interest in productive enterprise. It is becoming obvious that the wage system has not the qualifications for the coördination of industrial life. As the needs of the nations under the pressure of war have brought out the inefficiencies of the economic institution, it has become sufficiently clear to those responsible for the conduct of the war and to large sections of the civil population, that wealth exploitation and wealth creation are not synonymous; that the production of wealth must rest on other motives than the desire of individuals to get as much and give as little as particular situations will stand.
In England and in the United States, where the individualistic conception of the industrial life has been an inherent part of our national philosophy, the governments, with cautious reservations, have assumed responsibilities which had been carried in normal times by business. Because business administration had been dependent for its existence on a scheme of profiteering it is not in the position where it can appeal to labor to contribute its productive power in the spirit of patriotic abandon. But governments as they have taken over certain industrial responsibilities are in a better position to make such appeals to capital as well as to labor.
The calculable effect of the appeal to capital to assume the responsibility is in the long run of passing importance, as under the present business arrangement that is the position capital occupies. In other words, the appeal will mark no change in capitalist psychology as it promises to do in the case of labor.
The calculable effect on labor psychology may have revolutionary significance. It is quite another sort of appeal in its effect from the stereotyped and familiar one of employers to labor to feel their responsibility. That appeal never reached the consciousness of working men for the reason that it is impossible to feel responsible or to be responsible where there is no chance of bearing the responsibility. Experiencing responsibility in industry means nothing more nor less than sharing in the decisions, the determination of procedure, as well as suffering from the failure of those decisions and participating in their successful eventuation. As the governments in the present case have made their appeals to labor they have carried the suggestion of partnership in responsibility because the government is presumably the people's voice and its needs also presumably are the common needs and not the special interests of individuals. It is hardly necessary to point out that it was not the intention of government officials who made the appeal to excite a literal interpretation; they did not expect to be taken so seriously and up to date they have not been taken more seriously than they intended by American labor. All they mean and what they expect to gain, is what employers have meant and wanted; that is labor's surrender of its assumed right to strike on the job, its surrender of its organized time standards and its principle of collective bargaining. But when officials speak in the name of a government what they mean is unimportant; what it means to the people to have them speak, and the people's interpretation of what they say, is the important matter.
These appeals of the governments in this time of war to the working people have the tendency to clear the environment of the suggestion that common labor, that is the wage earning class (as distinguished from salaried people, employers and the profiteers pure and simple) are incompetent to play a responsible part in the work of wealth production. A responsible part does not mean merely doing well a detached and technical job; it means facing the risks and sharing in the experimental experience of productive enterprise as it serves the promotion of creative life and the needs of an expanding civilization. As the appeals of the governments at this time bear the stamp of a nation's will, its valuation and respect for common labor, there is the chance, it seems, that they may carry to the workers the energizing thought that all the members of the industrial group must assume, actually assume, responsibility for production, if production is to advance. Equally important in the interest of creative work is the power of these appeals to shift the motive for production from the acquisitive to the creative impulse. In the midst of the world's emergency, driven by the fear of destruction the nations have turned instinctively to the unused creative force in human and common labor, that is to the ability of the wage earner to think and plan. If the response of labor is genuine, if with generous abandon it releases its full productive energy, it is quite certain as matters now stand that neither the governments nor the financiers are prepared to accept the consequence.
If labor in answer to these appeals gains the confidence that it is competent to carry industrial responsibility, or rather that common labor, together with the trained technicians in mechanics and industrial organization are competent as a producing group to carry the responsibility, one need we may be sure will be eliminated which, has been an irritating and an unproductive element in industrial life; I mean the need the workers have had for the cultivation of class isolation. As the workers become in the estimation of a community and in their own estimation, responsible members of a society, their more rather than less abortive effort to develop class feeling in America, will disappear. Under those conditions concerted class action will be confined to the employers of labor and the profiteers, who will be placed in the position of proving their value and their place in the business of wealth creation. On this I believe we may count, that labor will drop its defensive program for a constructive one, as it comes to appreciate its own creative potentiality.
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Judging from recent events in England, where the government appeals to labor have had longer time to take effect, it seems that new brain tracks in labor psychology have actually been created. English labor apparently is beginning to take the impassioned appeals of its government seriously and is making ready to assume the responsibility for production. The resolutions adopted by the Labor Party at its Nottingham Conference in November in 1917 covered organized labor's usual defense program relating to wage conditions. The Manifesto which was issued was first of all a political document, written and compiled for campaign purposes. But the significance of the party's action is the new interpretation which it is beginning to give industrial democracy. It is evident where state ownership is contemplated that the old idea that industry would pass under the administrative direction of government officials, is replaced by the growing intention and desire of labor to assume responsibility for administration whether industry is publicly or privately owned. The Party stands for the "widest possible participation both economic and political … in industry as well as in government." In explanation of the Manifesto, the leader of the Party is quoted in the Manchester Guardian as saying, that when labor now speaks of industrial democracy it no longer means what it did before the war; it does not mean political administration of economic affairs; it means primarily industrial self-government.
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