Men and Things

by Henry A. Atkinson

Another thing that will be required is a changed attitude toward the men at work. Just as long as we assume that the workers employed at these tasks are worthless, just so long will they try to live down to their reputation. A Methodist minister in Seattle believed that the average “blanket stiff” had enough good in him to respond to right treatment. He formed a cooperative company and bought up a number of mills in the state. He hired a lot of the commonest workers and sent them out to the woods to work in these mills. Instead of attempting to make a big profit on the labor of the men, he allowed the men to share in the management and profits of the concern. The result was that when all the other mills were having labor troubles he was able to work right straight along, and where others failed he made a big success. The reason was that he faced the issues squarely and fairly, and treated the men as he would himself like to be treated.

Sin and Inefficiency. If every individual was normal you could lay the full responsibility upon him and feel that when he failed it was perfectly just that he should suffer, and we would not need to worry about the conditions under which people labor. But sin enters in and with depravity comes inefficiency. Business cannot be conducted as a benevolent enterprise. A man or woman’s wage must be earned by the worker or else it cannot be continued. When a man by drink or other excesses destroys his efficiency it is impossible for him to maintain himself in a position that pays a large wage and which offers steady employment; so he drifts into the ranks of the casual workers. He is unfit for regular work by temperament and habit; but he is willing to work for a short time, even though he works extremely hard. In dealing with the problem of the casual worker then, we have two things to take into account: First, we must regularize industry as far as possible, doing away with the extraordinary demands for certain periods that are always followed by long periods of idleness. In the second place, we must in some way lay hold of the individual man, and by surrounding him with the best influences, make it possible for him to live a life of righteousness and sobriety. In other words, we must reduce the amount of seasonal work to the minimum and increase the efficiency of the worker to the maximum.

We should never lose sight of the fact that personal qualities enter in to complicate this question and make its solution more difficult. The drunkenness and vice of the individual man keep him in a position where it is almost impossible for him to be helped or for him to help himself. The man out of work degenerates. His moral fiber is weakened; he becomes susceptible to every evil. The process by which many a criminal has been made was begun in the hour that the man found himself thrown out of employment. Perhaps it was not his own fault in the first place, but having once been faced with the grim alternative of seeing his family suffer or of yielding to some criminal act, he accepted the latter as the easiest solution of the problem and a way out of his difficulties.

As long as a person is able to provide the necessities of life and to keep himself and his family in a fair degree of efficiency through the use of an adequate amount of food, shelter, and clothing, the chances are that he will develop a new and stronger interest in the things that have to do with the moral and social side of his life. On the other hand, when the means of livelihood are taken away, and a man finds himself denied the opportunity of work—which means that the things that are necessary to satisfy the most fundamental needs of himself and his family cannot be secured—the moral effect on this man, his family, and society can hardly be exaggerated. The whole structure of our life is dependent upon and presupposes regularity of employment. Not only does the fact of being out of a job cut off a man’s means of livelihood, but the psychological effect of being forced to live without working, taken together with the breaking of habits acquired by years of industry, puts a severe strain on the standards of morality which have been built up by long and painful processes. The unemployed man may react in one of two ways: he will become an anarchist and spend himself in fighting the system under whose injustice he suffers, or he will give up the struggle and become a drifter upon the tides of life, a social outcast.

The Jungle. The best thing in Upton Sinclair’s story of the conditions in the stock-yards in Chicago is the little picture he gives of the man who finally in despair gave up the struggle for a living, got on a train, and went out as far west as the train would carry him. When he left the railroad track he wandered into a field and lay down beside a stream. Feeling hungry after a while he arose and went to a near-by house and asked for something to eat. This was the first time he had ever begged but the woman at the door was considerate of him and he got his food. Then he returned and lay down again in the rich grass and went to sleep. When he awoke he took off his clothes and had a bath in the creek, then getting out of the water he dressed himself and again lay down; put his hands behind his head and looked up into the blue sky. All of a sudden it occurred to him that he was now getting more out of life than he ever had before. He had worked and worried and all he ever got was just barely enough to eat. Now he had all he wanted to eat, a good place to lie and dream, the pure air of heaven fanning his face, the blue sky over his head, and no work to do. “Why should a man work, anyway? What’s the use?” he said. This philosophy made him a tramp.

Unemployment must be recognized as an evil in and of itself. For the man out of work meals and lodging should be secured. The church has done much in this regard. The soup-kitchens have been so much an adjunct of so many churches that some of our evangelists have come to refer to the soup-kitchen type of Christianity as being a recognized type. The church knows the methods for charity and relief. We must go further than this. The church’s program for the casual laborer should include the education of the community regarding the necessity of regularized industry, bringing it about so that, for instance, hats will be made not only when hats are needed but ahead of time. And, too, there should be public exchanges for employment covering the country and a systematized distribution of public work.

The forming of a comprehensive plan for unemployment insurance is another step forward. Other countries have found this kind of insurance a wise provision. Insurance against every form of disaster is common. We insure a perfect day for a parade. We insure the ships and their cargoes. We insure our lives. Why not insure men against the greatest of all disasters that can befall them, the loss of their jobs? We need not worry about the probability that unemployment insurance is likely to take away the initiative of the men. The danger of moral deterioration in such a case is much less than that which actually grows out of the periods of unemployment.

The church is involved in the whole situation. The men dependent on their wages for a living find their means of livelihood cut off and they naturally turn to the church. A year before the war broke out the unemployed in several cities marched into the churches and demanded help. Some of the churches felt that they were being encroached upon. A committee in one church forced the janitor to sweep the entire building with a solution of formaldehyde, for, as the chairman of the committee said, “You never know what diseases these dreadful people have.” It is undoubtedly true that the churches are always expected to do more than it is possible for them to do. At the same time the unemployed man has the right to feel that if the church is a fundamental institution for the salvation of individuals, for the remaking of society, and the reconstruction of industrial life, it cannot evade the issue nor fail to shoulder its responsibility. To open the church as a sleeping place and to feed the hungry is not enough.

The War and the Future. The world war has brought us face to face with a new task. The United States and Canada are at present the producing nations of the world. The Anti-Loafer laws now being carried through are cleaning out the cabarets, the poolrooms, the theaters, and other places where idle men congregate. It will be years before we are faced with the same serious situation that has faced us in the past. However, when our huge armies are demobilized and “Johnny comes marching home,” there will be a new problem which will have to be considered. How can these men be fitted back into industrial life without increasing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers to such a degree that we will again be faced with a huge army of unemployed?

In periods of unemployment it is the common laborer who suffers most. We have failed to realize this. And yet he makes a big contribution to all progress. You cannot build a bridge without him and, in fact, he is used in every enterprise. Because of his lack of skill, and also because of his too common habits of living, we call these men tramps and hobos, and refer to them in the mass as common laborers. As a matter of fact no man who does any work is a common man. They are ignorant for the most part; vicious in many cases; some are lazy, drunken, shiftless—all of these things; but at the same time they are the men who are cutting down the trees, sawing up the logs, forming them into rafts, floating them down the river, and putting them through the mills. They are the men who are loading the ships at our docks, the men who pick hops and work in the harvest fields; pick the fruit and do the thousand other things that have to be done when the season is right. Besides these, there are the thousands of women who are driven at top speed at certain periods of the year through the unusual demands of industry, and then are thrown out of employment for long periods. Ignorant, unknown, friendless, and made the victims of industrial conditions over which they have no control, they seem of so little importance in the vast system—as merely the lesser cogs in the lesser wheels—that very few know of their existence except when something goes wrong with the cogs, and the whole machine is shut down because of the break. But without them the machine could not run at all.