The bondholders will have an ever vigilant and directly interested
army of workers who must of necessity safeguard their mutual welfare.
The worker cannot avoid this service to the bondholder, hence he is
the best protected bondholder in all the world. I do not here refer to
values; that is covered elsewhere.
_A New Type of Factory._
I believe there will develop in Roadtown a form of factory that is
intermediate between the large privately owned factory as it exists
to-day and the individual work room of Roadtown. I refer to the small
coöperative factory, organized by a band of workers whose separate
operations are needed to complete a single article. For illustration,
suppose a group of employés of a shoe factory are dissatisfied. Instead
of going on a strike they would organize a coöperative Roadtown
Association and move into Roadtown. They could arrange for houses
adjoining and throw their individual work room into a continuous work
room large enough to accommodate them. They could elect their own
foreman and decide the proportion of profits to go to different grades
of work and embody these conditions in their charter. These inner
coöperators would buy and sell through the central organization of
the Roadtown, as will the individual workers. Here we will have the
mechanical saving of the combination of the several operations--the
commercial saving of centralized buying and selling, and the profits
going to the workers, not the least of which would be the satisfaction
of independence.
Once Roadtown becomes an established fact, single workers, little
groups of workers, and whole armies of workers will be seen leaving
the old system for the new. It will be a strike for all time, a strike
from which the hiring of strike breakers will be an empty retaliation,
for the Roadtown worker will not only work better but his products will
be less destroyed in the mill of competitive selling--he can undersell
the strike breaker, being employer, and because the food and house and
things he buys of the other workers will cost him less and serve him
better; the workman who joins this final general strike can work and
live better, yet cheaper, than his successor in the old factories.
It is the beginning of the end of the barbarous so-called “factory
system”--and the end is that each work will be performed in a way that
is most economical to society as a whole.
_A Special Message to Women._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account