Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my
employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself.
And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my
trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try
to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my
employer's hiring engineers to make me efficient. I would try to get my
trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like
Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much
work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his
employer and three times as fit and strong for himself.
This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good. I would be
so good that he could not afford not being good too.
If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood human nature,
and knew enough about psychology to found a great business house and
wanted to make my employee good, or make him work three times as hard
for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a
normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the
House of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that I would
be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with
more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could. And
I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural
counties, how I could improve my factory and get them to let me improve
it. I could do it quietly by myself.
In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for
every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one
else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he
is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the
sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the n-th power, in what might
be called a kind of larger syndicalism.
The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will
take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves,"
is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories
ourselves."
What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national
confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work
to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation,
begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the
factories?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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