NEWS AND LABOUR
A big New England factory, not long ago, wanted to get nearer its raw material and moved to Georgia.
All the machine considerations, better water-power, cheaper labour, smaller freight bills, and new markets had argued for moving to Georgia.
Long rows of new mills were built and thousands of negroes were moved in and thousands of shanties were put up, and the men and the women stood between the wheels. And the wheels turned.
There was not a thing that had not been thought of except the men and women that stood between the wheels.
The men and women that stood between the wheels were, for the most part, strong and hearty persons and they never looked anxious or abused and did as they were told.
And when Sat.u.r.day night came, crowds of them with their black faces, of the men and of the women, of the boys and girls, might have been seen filing out of the works with their week"s wages.
Monday morning a few of them dribbled back. There were enough who would come to run three mills. All the others in the long row of mills were silent. Tuesday morning, Number Four started up, Wednesday, Number Five.
By Thursday noon they were all going.
The same thing happened the week after, and the week after, and the week after that.
The management tried everything they could think of with their people, scolding, discharging, making their work harder, making their work easier, paying them less, paying them more, two Baptist ministers and even a little Roman Catholic Church.
As long as the negroes saw enough to eat for three days, they would not work.
It began to look as if the mills would have to move back to Ma.s.sachusetts, where people looked anxious and where people felt poor, got up at 5 A.M. Mondays and worked.
Suddenly one day, the son of one of the owners, a very new-looking young man who had never seen a business college, and who had run through Harvard almost without looking at a book, and who really did not seem to know or to care anything about anything--except folks--appeared on the scene with orders from his father that he be set to work.
The manager could not imagine what to do with him at first, but finally, being a boy who made people like him more than they ought to, he found himself placed in charge of the Company Store. The company owned the village, and the Company Store, which had been treated as a mere necessity in the lonely village, had been located, or rather dumped, at the time, into a building with rows of little house-windows in it, a kind of extra storehouse on the premises.
The first thing the young man did was to stove four holes in the building, all along the front and around the corners on the two sides, and put in four big plate-gla.s.s windows. The store was mysteriously closed up in front for a few days to do this, and no one could see what was happening, and the negroes slunk around into a back room to buy their meal and mola.s.ses. And finally one morning, one Sunday morning, the store opened up bravely and flew open in front.
The windows on the right contained three big purple hats with blue feathers, and some pink parasols.
The windows on the left were full of white waistcoats, silver-headed canes, patent-leather shoes and other things to live up to.
Monday morning more of the mills were running than usual.
Later in the week there appeared in the windows melodions, phonographs, big gilt family Bibles, bread machines, sewing machines, and Morris chairs. Only a few hands took their Mondays off after this.
All the mills began running all the week.
Of course there are better things to live for than purple hats and blue feathers, and silver-headed canes, and patent leather shoes. But if people can be got to live six days ahead, or thirty days, or sixty days ahead, instead of three days ahead, by purple hats and blue feathers and white waistcoats, and if it is necessary to use purple hats and blue feathers to start people thinking in months instead of minutes, or to budge them over to where they can have a touch of idealism or of religion or of living beyond the moment, I say for one, with all my heart, "G.o.d bless purple hats and blue feathers!"
The great problem of modern charity, the one society is largely occupied with to-day, is: "What is there that we can possibly do for our millionaires?"
The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design and set up purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires.
The moment our millionaires have placed before them something to live for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid lasting things they can do, things that everybody else would want to do, and that everybody else would envy them for doing, it will bore them to run a great business merely to make money. They will find it more interesting, harder, and calling for greater genius, to be great and capable employers. When our millionaires once begin to enter into compet.i.tion with one another in being the greatest and most successful employers of labour on earth, our industrial wars will cease.
Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees as they dare, and pay them as little as they can, and who give the public as small values as they dare, and take as much money as they can, only do such stupid, humdrum, conventional things because they are bored, because they cannot really think of anything to live for.
Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing how much less work a day than they ought to do, they can do, and how much more money they can get out of their employers than they earn, only do such things because they are tired or bored and discouraged, and because they cannot think of anything that is truly big and fine and worth working for.
The industrial question is not an economic question. It is a question of supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem which only an American National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle. The very first moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end.
As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing house--marking off rooms--sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of stones on the ground. When I came up they had just taken hold of a big stone they wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone for yards around--every one that was the right size--seemed subtly out of place. The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.
They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead.
I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys"
first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!
I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But I know people and I know that a man with only three day"s worth of things ahead to live for does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and inspiring him. And I know that the man who does his work with a longer lever still, with thirty or forty years worth" of things he wants, all crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a new size and a new kind of man.
The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would work better than paying him twice as much wages.
Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man"s life twenty times as much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well--twice as much work.
If a man has a big man"s thing or object in view, he can do three times as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while he is doing it every minute. It makes it easier to do it because it seems big.
The little man becomes a big man.
From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who is the man of economic sense. The employer who can put out ideals in front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense.
The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century business world.
Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at least, in the great managers of employers?
You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop. As you move down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven.
Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four hundred girls swing off into each other"s arms. They dance between their machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work.
You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats with flushed and glowing cheeks.
Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency?
The more sentiment there is in it, I think, the more efficient it is and the better it works.
"Business is not business."
One need not quarrel about words, but certainly, whatever else business is, it is not business. It would be closer to the facts to call business an art or a religion, a kind of homely, inspired, applied piety, based upon gifts in men which are essentially religious gifts; the power of communion in the human heart, the genius for cultivating companionship, of getting people to understand you and understand one another and do team work. The bed-rock, the hard pan of business success lies in the fundamental, daily conviction--the personal habit in a man of looking upon business as a hard, accurate, closely studied, shrewd human art, a science of mutual expectation.
I am not saying that I would favour all employers of young women having them, to-morrow morning at eleven o"clock, swing off into each other"s arms and dance for five minutes. The value of the dance in this particular case was that the Firm thought of the dancing itself and was always doing things like it, that everybody knew that the Firm, up in its gla.s.s office, felt glad, joined in the dance in spirit, enjoyed seeing the girls caught up for five minutes in the joy and swing of a big happy world full of sunshine and music outside, full of buoyant and gentle things, of ideals around them which belonged to them and of which they and their lives were a part.