The hourly costs of a man are: His hourly wage, the hourly machine charge, the hourly overhead charge. These three items will easily average $0.70 an hour in a machine shop. If the man works at full efficiency he gives us in a year 2,700 hours of standard work in 2,700 hours of actual time at a total cost of $1,890. At 30 p. c. efficiency, it will take 9,000 actual hours, costing $6,300 to deliver 2,700 hours of standard work. The added expense due to inefficiency is $4,410 for a single worker.
Efficiency does not mean strenuousness. The fluttering rooster is strenuous, but he makes little progress; the eagle flies efficiently, covering miles of country, yet never moving a wing. The Chinese coolie on his river treadmill is so strenuous that he wears himself out in a few years. As a producer of power he costs $1,300 a year for the horse-power hour you can buy from Niagara for twenty dollars. The chauffeur of an American automobile gliding along at forty miles an hour, carrying six passengers, is efficient, not strenuous.
It is evident that under this modern employment plan the rate of wages per hour ceases to be a critical question. The efficient man, like steel wire and high-speed steel, is always worth more than he would think of asking for his services.
The requisition calls for a man with certain qualities—it never calls for a man at $0.20 or at $0.30 or at any other rate per hour. Fixed rates per hour are obsolescent when one man turns out the work for $6,300 and the other man turns it out for $1,890. For $1,890? No, he does not. We do not ask him to; we can not secure and hold any 100 p. c. man for the wage rate in the $1,890. We pay the man more, we gladly pay him more, we pay him as much as we must to secure him, but he is cheap at almost any price.
The man who receives a salary of $60,000 a year is expected to profit his company to the extent of $6,000,000 a year; the man who works for a dollar a day is always a loss, a severe loss, and, therefore, we try to eliminate him by the substitution of a machine. The fight against a machine is to carry on a losing fight against the whole current of the age. To put the worker in a position for which his aptitudes qualify him is to double, treble his value, and everybody is best fitted for something. A group of children were playing automobile; one was the engine, another the chauffeur, others the passengers. A little tot far behind was hurrying along. What are you doing? I am playing automobile. What part are you? I am the smell. In a watch there is not a useless piece. In a perfected organization there is not a useless man; there cannot be an unqualified man without endangering the whole. As I write, 20,000 mill hands are rioting at Lawrence, Massachusetts, because somebody has blundered, because some position had been badly filled.
The wage question is ethical. The workman is worthy of his hire, but also man does not live by bread alone. The man scientifically selected is 100 per cent. efficient because he likes his work, is fitted for it and it likes him; it is no longer a drudgery, it is a pleasure. We are rescuing the fit for the work which by nature’s right belongs to them and under this plan there are few unfit.
In years gone by when a beef was slaughtered much of the carcass was wasted—the horns, the bones, the hair, the hoofs, the blood, the offal went to waste. Now nothing is wasted; everything has its use, and the offal we return as fertilizer to the soil is of greater perennial use than the tenderloins and sirloins which find their way to the tables of the rich.
We have in the past treated men as if they were coal, a raw product only fit to burn, or as the German soldiers pathetically called themselves, in 1870, mere cannon fodder. But mere coal contains ammonia, beautiful dyes, strange and powerful medicines, as well as heat units.
Everybody is normally good for something, and if fitted to the right place is worth more than he now is.
At Seattle a boy of 17 was excluded from the high school because he could not learn their lists of English kings or American Presidents, but that boy went out and when I met him he had grabbed the evaporative power of the sun and was propelling a boat with it on the waters of Puget Sound. He was fit, more fit in a mechanical way than any other boy I ever knew.