The directors in turn are charged with the general responsibility of developing the policies of the corporation, some of which are matured by the officers, of selecting its officers and of seeing to it that the corporation is properly managed.
The officers as the executives of the company carry out the company’s policies and are charged with the actual operation of the company and the employment of labor.
As we contrast this gigantic organization with the simple form of industrial organization first described, it is at once apparent that in the very nature of the case the man who supplies the money seldom if ever comes in contact with the man who supplies the labor.
Here we note a marked and serious change. While deplorable, this situation is practically inevitable. Frequently the industry in which a stockholder has invested his capital is located in a far distant city. Not only this, but often investments are made in corporations which conduct business in other countries almost at the ends of the earth.
As a result of this lack of contact between Labor and Capital, the personal relationship has disappeared, and gradually a great gulf has grown up between the two, which is ever widening, so these two great forces have come too often to think that their interests are antagonistic, and have worked against each other, each alone seeking to promote its own selfish ends. This has resulted in the strike, the lockout and the various incidents of industrial warfare so regrettably common in this day and apparently on the increase.
Reports of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics show that for the first eleven months of 1916 there were 3,134 strikes and lockouts in the industries of this country, as against only 1,147 for the corresponding period of 1915.
These industrial conflicts have in some instances come to be little short of civil war; vast sums of money have been lost by both sides, untold hardship and misery have followed in their wake.
The New York City street railroad strike of last summer (1916) is estimated to have cost the companies some four millions of dollars, not to mention the loss in wages borne by the employees or the losses sustained by the public.
Last summer[3] four hundred thousand railroad men, constituting the four brotherhoods, voted in favor of a strike on 225 American railroads. If the average pay of these men had been only $2.50 a day, which is considerably lower than the fact, such a strike would have meant a daily loss in wages of a million dollars, not taking into account the far greater loss to business and the inevitable inconvenience and distress which would have been brought, directly or indirectly, to the doors of the entire population.
I have not had access to data showing the cost to this country of strikes and lockouts. However, the following quotation from a recent address made by Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York, throws light on the subject. Mr. Vanderlip said: