My Life and Work
unwanted sympathy to the labouring man who day in and day out performs
almost exactly the same operation.
When you come right down to it, most jobs are repetitive. A business man
has a routine that he follows with great exactness; the work of a bank
president is nearly all routine; the work of under officers and clerks
in a bank is purely routine. Indeed, for most purposes and most people,
it is necessary to establish something in the way of a routine and to
make most motions purely repetitive--otherwise the individual will not
get enough done to be able to live off his own exertions. There is no
reason why any one with a creative mind should be at a monotonous job,
for everywhere the need for creative men is pressing. There will never
be a dearth of places for skilled people, but we have to recognize that
the will to be skilled is not general. And even if the will be present,
then the courage to go through with the training is absent. One cannot
become skilled by mere wishing.
There are far too many assumptions about what human nature ought to be
and not enough research into what it is. Take the assumption that
creative work can be undertaken only in the realm of vision. We speak of
creative "artists" in music, painting, and the other arts. We seemingly
limit the creative functions to productions that may be hung on gallery
walls, or played in concert halls, or otherwise displayed where idle and
fastidious people gather to admire each other's culture. But if a man
wants a field for vital creative work, let him come where he is dealing
with higher laws than those of sound, or line, or colour; let him come
where he may deal with the laws of personality. We want artists in
industrial relationship. We want masters in industrial method--both from
the standpoint of the producer and the product. We want those who can
mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and
shapely whole. We have limited the creative faculty too much and have
used it for too trivial ends. We want men who can create the working
design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life. Good
intentions plus well-thought-out working designs can be put into
practice and can be made to succeed. It is possible to increase the
well-being of the workingman--not by having him do less work, but by
aiding him to do more. If the world will give its attention and interest
and energy to the making of plans that will profit the other fellow as
he is, then such plans can be established on a practical working basis.
Such plans will endure--and they will be far the most profitable both in
human and financial values. What this generation needs is a deep faith,
a profound conviction in the practicability of righteousness, justice,
and humanity in industry. If we cannot have these qualities, then we
were better off without industry. Indeed, if we cannot get those
qualities, the days of industry are numbered. But we can get them. We
are getting them.
If a man cannot earn his keep without the aid of machinery, is it
benefiting him to withhold that machinery because attendance upon it may
be monotonous? And let him starve? Or is it better to put him in the way
of a good living? Is a man the happier for starving? If he is the
happier for using a machine to less than its capacity, is he happier for
producing less than he might and consequently getting less than his
share of the world's goods in exchange?
I have not been able to discover that repetitive labour injures a man in
any way. I have been told by parlour experts that repetitive labour is
soul--as well as body--destroying, but that has not been the result of
our investigations. There was one case of a man who all day long did
little but step on a treadle release. He thought that the motion was
making him one-sided; the medical examination did not show that he had
been affected but, of course, he was changed to another job that used a
different set of muscles. In a few weeks he asked for his old job again.
It would seem reasonable to imagine that going through the same set of
motions daily for eight hours would produce an abnormal body, but we
have never had a case of it. We shift men whenever they ask to be
shifted and we should like regularly to change them--that would be
entirely feasible if only the men would have it that way. They do not
like changes which they do not themselves suggest. Some of the
operations are undoubtedly monotonous--so monotonous that it seems
scarcely possible that any man would care to continue long at the same
job. Probably the most monotonous task in the whole factory is one in
which a man picks up a gear with a steel hook, shakes it in a vat of
oil, then turns it into a basket. The motion never varies. The gears
come to him always in exactly the same place, he gives each one the same
number of shakes, and he drops it into a basket which is always in the
same place. No muscular energy is required, no intelligence is required.
He does little more than wave his hands gently to and fro--the steel rod
is so light. Yet the man on that job has been doing it for eight solid
years. He has saved and invested his money until now he has about forty
thousand dollars--and he stubbornly resists every attempt to force him
into a better job!
The most thorough research has not brought out a single case of a man's
mind being twisted or deadened by the work. The kind of mind that does
not like repetitive work does not have to stay in it. The work in each
department is classified according to its desirability and skill into
Classes "A," "B," and "C," each class having anywhere from ten to thirty
different operations. A man comes directly from the employment office to
"Class C." As he gets better he goes into "Class B," and so on into
"Class A," and out of "Class A" into tool making or some supervisory
capacity. It is up to him to place himself. If he stays in production it
is because he likes it.
In a previous chapter I noted that no one applying for work is refused
on account of physical condition. This policy went into effect on
January 12, 1914, at the time of setting the minimum wage at five
dollars a day and the working day at eight hours. It carried with it the
further condition that no one should be discharged on account of
physical condition, except, of course, in the case of contagious
disease. I think that if an industrial institution is to fill its whole
role, it ought to be possible for a cross-section of its employees to
show about the same proportions as a cross-section of a society in
general. We have always with us the maimed and the halt. There is a most
generous disposition to regard all of these people who are physically
incapacitated for labour as a charge on society and to support them by
charity. There are cases where I imagine that the support must be by
charity--as, for instance, an idiot. But those cases are extraordinarily
rare, and we have found it possible, among the great number of different
tasks that must be performed somewhere in the company, to find an
opening for almost any one and on the basis of production. The blind man
or cripple can, in the particular place to which he is assigned, perform
just as much work and receive exactly the same pay as a wholly
able-bodied man would. We do not prefer cripples--but we have
demonstrated that they can earn full wages.
It would be quite outside the spirit of what we are trying to do, to
take on men because they were crippled, pay them a lower wage, and be
content with a lower output. That might be directly helping the men but
it would not be helping them in the best way. The best way is always the
way by which they can be put on a productive par with able-bodied men. I
believe that there is very little occasion for charity in this
world--that is, charity in the sense of making gifts. Most certainly
business and charity cannot be combined; the purpose of a factory is to
produce, and it ill serves the community in general unless it does
produce to the utmost of its capacity. We are too ready to assume
without investigation that the full possession of faculties is a
condition requisite to the best performance of all jobs. To discover
just what was the real situation, I had all of the different jobs in the
factory classified to the kind of machine and work--whether the physical
labour involved was light, medium, or heavy; whether it were a wet or a
dry job, and if not, with what kind of fluid; whether it were clean or
dirty; near an oven or a furnace; the condition of the air; whether one
or both hands had to be used; whether the employee stood or sat down at
his work; whether it was noisy or quiet; whether it required accuracy;
whether the light was natural or artificial; the number of pieces that
had to be handled per hour; the weight of the material handled; and the
description of the strain upon the worker. It turned out at the time of
the inquiry that there were then 7,882 different jobs in the factory. Of
these, 949 were classified as heavy work requiring strong, able-bodied,
and practically physically perfect men; 3,338 required men of ordinary
physical development and strength. The remaining 3,595 jobs were
disclosed as requiring no physical exertion and could be performed by
the slightest, weakest sort of men. In fact, most of them could be
satisfactorily filled by women or older children. The lightest jobs were
again classified to discover how many of them required the use of full
faculties, and we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637
by one-legged men, 2 by armless men, 715 by one-armed men, and 10 by
blind men. Therefore, out of 7,882 kinds of jobs, 4,034--although some
of them required strength--did not require full physical capacity. That
is, developed industry can provide wage work for a higher average of
standard men than are ordinarily included in any normal community. If
the jobs in any one industry or, say, any one factory, were analyzed as
ours have been analyzed, the proportion might be very different, yet I
am quite sure that if work is sufficiently subdivided--subdivided to
the point of highest economy--there will be no dearth of places in which
the physically incapacitated can do a man's job and get a man's wage. It
is economically most wasteful to accept crippled men as charges and then
to teach them trivial tasks like the weaving of baskets or some other
form of unremunerative hand labour, in the hope, not of aiding them to
make a living, but of preventing despondency.
When a man is taken on by the Employment Department, the theory is to
put him into a job suited to his condition. If he is already at work and
he does not seem able to perform the work, or if he does not like his
work, he is given a transfer card, which he takes up to the transfer
department, and after an examination he is tried out in some other work
more suited to his condition or disposition. Those who are below the
ordinary physical standards are just as good workers, rightly placed, as
those who are above. For instance, a blind man was assigned to the stock
department to count bolts and nuts for shipment to branch
establishments. Two other able-bodied men were already employed on this
work. In two days the foreman sent a note to the transfer department
releasing the able-bodied men because the blind man was able to do not
only his own work but also the work that had formerly been done by the
sound men.
This salvage can be carried further. It is usually taken for granted
that when a man is injured he is simply out of the running and should be
paid an allowance. But there is always a period of convalescence,
especially in fracture cases, where the man is strong enough to work,
and, indeed, by that time usually anxious to work, for the largest