Here I sit in all the peace and stillness of the Cape Cod coast, days filled with only such work as I love, and play aplenty, healthy youngsters frolicky about me, the warmest of friends close by. The larder is stocked with good food, good books are on the shelves, each day starts and ends with a joyous feeling about the heart.

And I, this sunburnt, carefree person, pretend to have been as a worker among workers. Again some one says, “The artificiality of it!”

Back in that hot New York the girls I labored among are still packing chocolates, cutting wick holes for brass lamp cones, ironing “family,” beading in the crowded dress factory. Up at the Falls they are hemming sheets and ticketing pillow cases. In the basement of the hotel some pantry girl, sweltering between the toaster and the egg boiler, is watching the clock to see if rush time isn't almost by.

Granted at the start, if you remember, and granted through each individual job, it was artificial—my part in it all. But what in the world was there to do about that? I was determined that not forever would I take the say-so of others on every phase of the labor problem. Some things I would experience for myself. Certain it is I cannot know any less than before I started. Could I help knowing at least a bit more? I do know more—I know that I know more!

And yet again I feel constrained to call attention to the fact that six jobs, even if the results of each experience were the very richest possible, are but an infinitesimal drop in what must be a full bucket of industrial education before a person should feel qualified to speak with authority on the subject of labor. Certain lessons were learned, certain tentative conclusions arrived at. They are given here for what they may be worth and in a very humble spirit. Indeed, I am much more humble in the matter of my ideas concerning labor than before I took my first job.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson learned was that a deep distrust of generalizations has been acquired, to last, I hope, the rest of life. It is so easy, so comfortable, to make a statement of fact to cover thousands of cases. Nowhere does the temptation seem to be greater than in a discussion of labor. “Labor wants this and that!” “Labor thinks thus and so!” “Labor does this and the other thing!” Thus speaks the labor propagandist, feeling the thrill of solid millions behind him; thus speaks the “capitalist,” feeling the antagonism of solid millions against him.

And all this time, how many hearts really beat as one in the labor world?

Indeed, the situation would clear up with more rapidity if we went to the other extreme and thought of labor always as thirty million separate individuals. We would be nearer the truth than to consider them as this one great like-minded mass, all yearning for the same spiritual freedom; all eager for the downfall of capitalism.

What can one individual know of the hopes and desires of thirty millions? Indeed, it is a rare situation where one person can speak honestly and intelligently for one hundred others. Most of us know precious little about ourselves. We understand still less concerning anyone else. In a very general way, everyone in the nation wants the same things. That is a good point to remember, for those who would exaggerate group distinctions. In a particular way, no two people function exactly alike, have the same ambitions, same capacities.

There is, indeed, no great like-minded mass of laborers. Instead we have millions of workers split into countless small groups, whose group interests in the great majority of cases loom larger on the horizon than any hold the labor movement, as such, might have on them. Such interests, for instance, as family, nationality, religion, politics. Besides, there is the division which sex interests and rivalries make—the conflict, too, between youth and age.

Yet for the sake of a working efficiency we must do a minimum of classifying. Thirty million is too large a number to handle separately. There seems to be a justification for a division of labor, industrially considered, into three groups, realizing the division is a very loose one:

• 1. Labor or class-conscious group.
• 2. Industrially conscious group.
• 3. Industrially nonconscious group.

The great problem of the immediate future is to get groups 1 and 3 into Group 2. The more idealistic problem of the more distant future is to turn a great industrially conscious group into a socially conscious group.

By the first group, the labor or class-conscious group, is meant the members of the American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, four railroad Brotherhoods, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, socialist and communist organizations—workers whose affiliations with certain bodies tend to make them ultraconscious of the fact that they are wage workers and against the capitalist system. Class antagonism is fostered. There is much use of the word “exploited.” In their press and on their platforms such expressions are emphasized as “profits for the lazy who exploit the workers.” Everything possible is done to paint labor white, the employer black, forgetting that no side has the monopoly in any shade.

To those who from sympathy or antagonism would picture at least organized labor as like-minded, it must be pointed out that for the great part the several millions represented by Group 1 are perhaps more often warring in their aims and desires than acting as one. Never have they acted as one. Organized labor represents but a fraction of labor as a whole. Some more or less spectacular action on the part of capital against labor always tends to solidify the organized workers. They are potentially like-minded in specific instances. Otherwise the interests of the carpenters' union tends to overshadow the interests of the A.F. of L. as a whole; the interests of the A.F. of L. tend most decidedly to overshadow the interests of organized labor as a whole. Socialists bark at communists. Charges of capitalist tendencies are made against the four Brotherhoods. The women's unions feel legislated against in the affairs of labor. Indeed, only utter stupidity on the part of capital ever could weld organized labor into enough solidarity to get society or anyone else agitated for long. Much of the “open shop” fight borders on such stupidity.

Group 2 is at present but an infinitesimal fraction of labor. It comprises those workers whose background has been fortunate enough, as to both heredity and environment, to allow of their main industrial interests centering around the doing of their particular job well for the sake of their industry as a whole, to which a sentiment of loyalty has been aroused and held. There is no feeling of class antagonism, no assurance that the interests of labor are forever inimical to those of the employer, and vice versa. Where such an attitude exists on the part of workers it presupposes an employer of unusual breadth of understanding or a deep love for his fellow-man. As co-operation in industry can be shown to pay socially and financially, so may this type of employer come more and more to supersede the old-fashioned “boss.”

Group 3, the industrially nonconscious workers, includes the great majority of labor in the United States. Under this heading come all those who for reasons connected with the type of industry engaged in, or because of individual or sex characteristics, remain apart from any so-called labor movement. Practically all women fall under this head, most of the foreign labor population, most of unskilled labor. Many members of labor organizations technically belonging in Group 1 really fall under Group 3. The great majority of American labor undoubtedly are not class or group conscious in the sense that they feel themselves as workers pitted against a capitalist class. Temperamentally, intellectually, the doctrines of Karl Marx are not for them. They never heard of Karl Marx. They get up and go to work in the morning. During the day they dub away at something or other, whatever it may be—the chances are it changes rather often—putting no more effort into the day's work than is necessary to hold down an uninteresting job. They want their pay at the end of the week. Many have not the minimum intellectual capacity necessary to do a piece of work properly. Many more have not the minimum physical capacity required for even routine tasks. Very many, indeed, are nervous misfits.

Yet a goodly number in Group 3 represent a high type of worker to whom the doctrine of class warfare is repugnant, and yet whose industrial experience has never resulted in making them industrially conscious. They feel no particular call to show more than average interest in their job.

Peace, efficiency, production in industry, can come only as Group 2 increases. To recruit from Group 1 will always be difficult. Once labor feels itself hostile to the employer and his interests, which is another way of saying, once the employing group by its tactics succeeds in making labor conclude that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” the building up of a spirit of co-operation is difficult indeed. Class consciousness is poor soil in which to plant any seeds of industrial enthusiasm.

Would you, then, asks a dismayed unionist, build up your so-called industrially conscious group at the expense of organized labor? The answer is a purely pragmatic one, based on the condition of things as they are, not as idealists would have them. Rightly or wrongly, the American employing group long ago decided that the organized-labor movement was harmful to American industry. The fact that the labor movement was born of the necessity of the workers, and in the main always flourished because of the continued need of the workers, was never taken into account. Every conceivable argument was and is used against organized labor. Many of those arguments are based on half truths; or no truths at all. The fact remains that probably the majority of the American public believes the organized-labor movement to be against our social, civic, and industrial welfare. However right or wrong such a deduction is, it is safe to say that for the great part those who hold that belief do so in absolute good faith.

The result is that the American labor movement has developed ever in an atmosphere so hostile that the effect on the growth of the movement has been that which hostile environment always exerts on any growing thing. It has warped the movement. It has emphasized everything hostile within the movement itself. No wonder a fighting spirit has ever been in evidence. No wonder only the fighting type of labor leader has emerged. The movement has had little or no opportunity for construction. Always the struggle for existence itself has been uppermost. No wonder the conclusion can justly be drawn that the American labor movement has not always played a highly productive role in American industry.

It has been everybody's fault, if we are searching for a resting place for the blame of it all. Which gets us no place.

The point is, looked at without the tinted glasses of either capital or labor, that the psychology of the American employer for the past, assuredly the present, and at least the near future, has been, and is, and will be, so inimical to organized labor that the movement would not be allowed to function as a constructive industrial force. Too much of its energies must go to fighting. At the same time, too much of the energies of the employer go to fighting it. The public pays the price, and it is enormous. The spiritual cost of bitterness of spirit far outweighs any monetary loss to industry, tremendous as that is.

Why is not the present, then, a wise time in which to encourage an alternative movement, one that has not the effect of a red rag to a bull? Labor can shout its loudest; the fact remains that in this country labor is very far from controlling the industrial situation. Therefore, the employer must still be taken into account in any program of industrial reform. That being so, it might be saner to try some scheme the employer will at least listen to than stubbornly continue to fight the issue out along the old lines of organized labor alone, at the very mention of which the average employer grows red in the face.

It is not, indeed, that we would do away with the organized-labor movement, if we could. The condition is far too precarious for that. Labor too often needs the support of unionism to keep from being crushed. The individual too often needs the educational influence organization exerts. Organized labor, despite the handicaps within and without, has too much of construction to its credit. The point is, further growth in the organized-labor movement, considering the development forced upon the movement by its own past and the ever antagonistic attitude of business, will not, for the present and immediate future, necessarily spell peace, efficiency, production. Rather, continued, if not increased, bitterness.

What is the development, at least for the present and immediate future, which will improve the situation?

The first move—and by that we mean the thing to start doing to-day—is to begin converting the non-industrially conscious group into the industrially conscious group. Group 3 is peaceful—they call no attention to themselves by any unrest or demands or threats. But they are not efficient or productive, the reason being that they have not enough interest in their jobs, or in many cases are not physically or mentally competent. Theirs are sins of omission, not commission.

The process of this conversion means many things. It means first and foremost an understanding of human nature; a realization that the great shortcoming of industry has been that it held, as organized, too little opportunity for a normal outlet to the normal and more or less pressing interests and desires of human beings.

It worked in a vicious circle. The average job gave the worker little or no chance to show any initiative, to feel any sense of ownership or responsibility, to use such intellect and enthusiasm as he possessed. The attitude of the average employer built up no spirit of loyalty or co-operation between management and men. Hence these very human tendencies, compelling expression in a normal personality, became atrophied, as far as the job was concerned, and sought such functioning as a discouraging environment left them capable of in fields outside of industry—in many cases, within the labor movement itself. The less capacity the job called out, the more incapable the worker became. Tendencies inherent in human nature, whose expressions all these years could have been enriching the individual and industry, and therefore the nation as a whole, have been balked entirely, or shunted off to find expression often in antisocial outlets. In some cases the loss to industry was small, since the individual capacities at best were small. In other cases the loss was great indeed. In every case, encouragement of the use of capacities increases the possibilities of those capacities.

The first step in this process of conversion then is to reorganize the relationship between management and men so that as many outlets as possible within industry can be found for those human expressions whose functioning will enrich the individual and industry. Which means that little by little the workers must share in industrial responsibilities. The job itself, with every conceivable invention for calling out the creative impulse, can never, under the machine process, enlist sufficient enthusiasm for sustained interest and loyalty on the part of the worker. He must come to have a word in management, in determining the conditions under which he labors five and a half to seven days a week.

It is a nice point here. The parlor Bolshevik pictures all labor eager and anxious and capable of actually controlling industry. The fact of the matter is that most individuals from any and every walk of life prefer to sidestep responsibility. Yet everyone does better under some. Too much may have a more disastrous effect than not enough—to the individual as well as industry. Here again is where there must be caution in generalizing. Each employer has a problem of his own. Nor can the exact amount of responsibility necessary to call out maximum efficiency and enthusiasm ever be determined in advance.

I have talked to numerous employers whose experience has been the same. At first their employees showed no desire for any added responsibility whatever. Had there not been the conviction that they were on the right track, the whole scheme of sharing management with the workers would have been abandoned. Little by little, however, latent abilities were drawn out; as more responsibilities were intrusted to the workers, their capacities for carrying the responsibilities increased. In two cases that I know of personally, the employees actually control the management of their respective companies. In both these companies the employers announced that their businesses were making more money than under one-sided management.

On the whole, this development of the partnership idea in industry is a matter of the necessary intellectual conviction that the idea is sound—whether that conviction be arrived at via ethics or “solid business judgment”—to be followed by the technical expert who knows how to put the idea into practice. That he will know only after careful study of each individual plant as a situation peculiar unto itself. He is a physician, diagnosing a case of industrial anÆmia. As in medicine, so industry has its quacks—experts who prescribe pink pills for pale industries, the administration of which may be attended with a brief show of energy and improvement, only to relapse into the old pallor. As between a half-baked “expert” and an “ignorant” employer whose heart is in the right place—take the employer. If he sincerely feels that long enough has he gone on the principle, “I'll run my business as I see fit and take suggestions from no one”; if it has suddenly come over him that, after all, the employee is in most ways but another like himself, and that all this time that employee might be laboring under the notion, often more unconscious than conscious, that he would “like to run his job as he saw fit and take suggestions from no one”; if, then, that employer calls his men together and says, “let's run the business as we all together see fit and take suggestions from one another”—then is that employer and that business on the road to industrial peace, efficiency, and production, expert or no expert. The road is uphill, the going often rough and discouraging, but more often than not the load of management becomes lighter, easing overburdened muscles; the load of labor in a sense heavier, yet along with the added weight, as they warm to the task there develops a sense that they are trusted, are necessary to the success of the march, that they now are men, doing man-sized work. Perhaps in only a minimum of cases will the load ever be divided “fifty-fifty.” Too soon would the workers tire of their added burden, too few could carry the added weight. The fact remains that with management carrying the whole load, the march is going very badly indeed on the whole. At times the procession scarcely seems to move. There can surely be no harm in the employing end shifting a bit of the burden. A bit cannot wreck either side. Managerial shoulders may feel more comfortable under the decreased weight and try another shift.

In recruiting Group 2 from Group 3, it is the employer, on the whole, who must take the initiative. Labor may show no desire to help shoulder the burden. Yet they must shoulder some of it to amount to anything themselves, if for no other reason. It may take actual pushing and shoving at first to get them on their way.

Recruiting from Group 1 is a different matter. There sometimes are workers who would grab most of the load at the start—or all of it. Their capacities are untried, the road and its twistings and turnings is unknown to them. Each side has been throwing stones at the other, tripping each other up. There is a hostile spirit to begin with, a spirit of distrust between management and men. Here then is a more difficult problem. It is more than a matter of shifting the load a bit; it is a matter of changing the spirit as well. That takes much patience, much tact. It is not a case of the employer making all the overtures. Each side is guilty of creating cause for suspicion and distrust. Each side has to experience a change of heart. It is one thing to convince a previously unthinking person; it is another to bring about a change of heart in one frankly antagonistic. Making industrially enthusiastic workers out of class and labor-conscious workers will indeed be a task requiring determination, tact, patience without end, and wisdom of many sorts—on both sides. Some one has to sell the idea of co-operation to labor as well as to the employer. And then know the job is only begun. But the biggest start is made when the atmosphere is cleared so that the partnership idea itself can take root. Some on both sides never will be converted.

What about the great body of workers unfit physically, mentally, nervously, to carry any additional load at all? Here is a field for the expert. Yet here is a field where society as a whole must play a part. Most of the physical, mental, nervous harm is done before ever the individual reaches industry. Indeed, at most, industry is but one influence out of many playing on the lives of the human beings who labor. Nor can it ever be studied as a sphere entirely apart. Much is aggravated by conditions over which industry itself has no direct control. Health centers, civic hygienic measures of all sorts, are of great importance. A widespread education in the need of healthy and spiritually constructive influences during the first ten years of life, if we are to have healthy, wholesome, and capable adults, must gain headway. Saner preparation for life as a whole must take the place of the lingering emphasis on the pedagogical orthodoxy still holding sway.

While industry is not responsible for many conditions which make subnormal workers, industry cannot evade the issue or shift the burden if it desires peace, efficiency, production. These goals cannot be obtained on any basis other than the welfare of the workers. No matter how sane is welfare work within the plant, there must develop a growing interest and understanding in “off the plant” work. The job is blamed for much. Yet often the worker's relation to the job is but the reflection of the conditions he left to go to work in the morning, the conditions he returns to after the day's work is done. There again is a vicious circle. The more unfortunate the conditions of a man's home life—we do not refer to the material side alone—the less efficiently he is apt to work during the day. The less efficiently he works during the day, the less competent he will be to better his home conditions.

When men expressed themselves in their particular handicraft they found much of their joy in life in their work. One of the by-products of large-scale industry and the accompanying subdivision of labor has been the worker's inevitable lack of interest in the monotonous job. Since too long hours spent at mechanical, repetitious labor result in a lowered standard of efficiency, and rebellion on the part of the worker, there has followed a continual tendency toward a reduction in the length of the working day. The fewer hours spent on the job, the greater the opportunity conditions outside industry proper have to exert their influence on character formation. With the shorter working day there develop more pressing reasons than ever for the emphasis on off-the-plant activities, and wholesome home and civic conditions. All these together, and not industry alone, make the worker.

The growth of the spirit and fruit of industrial democracy will not bring any millennium. It will merely make a somewhat better world to live in here and now. The dreamers of us forget that in the long run the world can move only so far and so fast as human nature allows for, and few of us evaluate human nature correctly. The six industrial experiences in this book have made me feel that the heart of the world is even warmer than I had thought—folk high and low are indeed readier to love than to hate, to help than to hinder. But on the whole our circles of understanding and interest are bounded by what our own eyes see and our own ears hear. The problems of industry are enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities of human understanding and sympathy. More or less artificial machinery must be set up to bring management and men in contact with each other to the point where the problems confronting each side are within eyesight and earshot of the other. Up to date it has been as impossible for labor to understand the difficulties of management as for management to understand the difficulties of labor. Neither side ever got within shouting distance of the other—except, indeed, to shout abuse! Many a strike would have been averted had the employer been willing to let his workers know just what the conditions were which he had to face; or had the workers in other instances shown any desire to take those conditions into account.

For, when all is said and done, the real solution of our industrial difficulties lies not in expert machinery, however perfect, for the adjustment or avoidance of troubles. “Industrial peace must come not as a result of the balance of power with a supreme court of appeal in the background. It must arise as the inevitable by-product of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will.”[3]

Any improved industrial condition in the future must take as its foundation the past one hundred years of American industry. The fact that this foundation was not built of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will is what makes the task of necessary reconstruction so extremely difficult. Countless persons might be capable of devising the mechanical approach to peace and prosperity—courts of arbitration, boards of representation, and the like. But how bring about a change of heart in the breast of millions?

It is a task so colossal that one would indeed prefer to lean heavily on the shoulders of an all-wise Providence and let it go with the consoling assurance that, as to a solution, “the Lord will provide.” But the echoes of recriminations shouted by each side against the other; the cries of foul play; the accusations of willful injustice; the threats of complete annihilation of capital by organized labor, of organized labor by capital—must reach to heaven itself, and Providence might well pause in dismay. Constructive good will? Where make a beginning?

The beginnings, however, are being made right on earth, and here and now. It is a mistake to look for spectacular changes, reforms on a large scale. Rather do the tendencies toward mutual understanding and this all-necessary good will evince themselves only here and there, in quiet experiments going on in individual plants and factories. The seed will bear fruit but slowly. But the seed is planted.

Planted? Nay, the seed has been there forever, nor have the harshest developments in the most bloodless of industries ever been able to crush it out. It is part and parcel of human nature that we can love more easily and comfortably than hate, that we can help more readily than hinder. Flourishing broadcast through all human creation is enough good will to revolutionize the world in a decade. It is not the lack of good will. Rather the channels for its expression are blocked—blocked by the haste and worry of modern life, by the multiplicity of material possessions which so frequently choke our sympathies; by the cruelties of competition, too often run to the extremes of crushing out inborn human kindness. And most of all, blocked by ignorance and misunderstanding of our fellow-beings.

It is a sound business deduction that the greatest stumbling blocks in the difficulties between labor and capital to-day resolve themselves down to just that lack of understanding of our fellow-beings. Yet without that understanding, how build up a spirit of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will? On what other foundation can a saner industrialism be built?

The place to make the beginning is in each individual shop and business and industry. The spark to start the blaze in each human heart, be it beating on the side of capital or on that of labor, is the sudden revelation that every worker is far more the exact counterpart of his employer in the desires of his body and soul than otherwise; that the employer is no other than the worker in body and soul, except that his scope and range of problems to be met are on a different level. True it is that we are all far more “sisters and brothers under the skin” than strangers.

No sane person is looking for a perfect industrialism, is watching for the day when brotherly love will be the motive of all human conduct. But it is within the bounds of sanity to work toward an increase in understanding between the human factors in industry; it is justifiable to expect improved industrial conditions, once increased understanding is brought about. Industry needs experts in scientific management, in mental hygiene, in cost accounting—in fields innumerable. But what industry needs more than anything else—more, indeed, than all the reformers—are translators—translators of human beings to one another. “Reforms” will follow of themselves.

THE END