And it must always be remembered that the worker will owe nothing to the employer in attaining this position; there will be no paternalism or "giving shares for nothing" about it. It will be clean, honest hard work and endeavour, and the employer will not only be giving nothing away, but will actually profit by it.
And while each benefits by the efficiency of the other, the State will benefit by both.
(d) The Future of Labour.
How will this time study and Reward System affect the position of the worker?
This is a very serious problem.
It is evident that a transmutation of labour is taking place and will proceed more rapidly after the war.
Workers on the whole are becoming less skilled as craftsmen, and machine attendants are taking the place of hand-skilled men.
it is quite impossible to stop this change. But what cannot be avoided may possibly be controlled, and the trade-unions should endeavour to direct these economic changes rather than to obstruct what is inevitable.
Handicrafts can never wholly cease to exist, but the skilled fitter, and more especially the skilled turner, finds machinery and methods of using machinery encroaching more and more on his particular domain.
An unskilled man is given three or four weeks' tuition, and then, if he shows sufficient intelligence, he is put on a machine with an instruction card. The setter-up sets up the machine and gives advice and surveillance, and the man is henceforth a tradesman, getting full wages for that class of work.