The note of urban industrial organisation, as of all other, must be
that each person shall be employed to do what he can do best, not
what he does worst. It may be desirable for a man to have two trades;
but watch-making and stone-breaking are not convenient alternative
occupations. Where the skilled unemployed belong to trades carried on
everywhere, such as baking, shoemaking, tailoring, etc., they should be
employed at their own trades in municipal workshops, and their products
garnered in municipal stores. These workshops will be under the
direction of foremen, thoroughly skilled workmen, able to superintend
and direct as though in private employment. The working-day must be of
eight hours, and the wages, for the present, the Trades Union minimum.
Then, instead of tailors and shoemakers tramping the streets ragged
and barefoot, the tailors will be making clothes and the shoemakers
boots and shoes; and the shoemaker with the wages he earns will buy
the tailor’s products, and the tailor the shoemaker’s. Then, instead
of supporting the unemployed by rates levied on the employed they will
be set to work to supply their own necessities, and be producers of
the wealth they consume instead of consuming, in enforced idleness
or barren penal exercises in the stoneyard, the wealth produced by
others. Masons, bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, etc., might be set
to work in building decent and pleasant dwellings--in the style of
the blocks of flats, not of the barracks called model dwellings--for
the housing of the municipal industrial army. I lay stress on the
pleasantness of the dwellings. These places are to be dwellings for
citizens, not prisons for paupers; and there is no possible reason why
they should not be made attractive. Under Socialism the workers are to
be the nation, and all that is best is for their service; for, be it
remembered, our faces are set towards Socialism, and our organisation
of labor is to be on Socialist lines.
It is very likely that among the unemployed some will be found whose
trade can only be carried on by large numbers, and is not one of the
industries of the town into which their unlucky fate has drifted them.
These should be sent into municipal service in the towns where their
trade is the staple industry, there to be employed in the municipal
factory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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