Straight America, a call to national serviceKellor, Frances
History
Straight America, a call to national service
Kellor, Frances
National service -- United States; United States -- Defenses
The Committee is now following this with a schedule to industries
covering the source of the labor supply, labor turn-over, methods of
employment, promotions, transfers, and voluntary lay-offs, insurance,
and other methods in use to conserve the labor of the country.
It includes inquiries into the living conditions, as housing and
sanitation, and into citizenship and knowledge of English.
From the data already at hand, it has begun holding a series of
conferences with industrial leaders throughout the country, looking
toward the conserving of men, keeping immigrants in America, and
stabilizing the labor market. It is essential, however, that the fields
of production, transportation, conservation of resources and of the
labor supply be brought together and a national policy be worked out
as the result of the combined effort. It is important that this whole
field be related to universal service and military preparedness. Let us
illustrate the nature of the interdependence.
In any system of universal service there needs to be some plan of
industrial adjustment, as to time, payments, and releases from work,
so that the burden will not fall too heavily upon special industries
at critical times of output. The efficiency records of plants make
the selection of good officers easier. There needs to be a careful
handling of skilled labor in order that it may not be withdrawn too
heavily at vital points. Even our voluntary civilian training camps
are being filled with coöperation of industry, which is arranging
vacations, paying wages during the training period, and urging its
men, by competition and in other ways, to attend. No military system
can operate successfully without understanding effort on the part of
production and transportation men. The pursuit of Villa showed the
absence of this, and to date it seems to be largely a moral victory.
When we have this information along many lines, industry is not
mobilized. We have but secured the knowledge to begin the real task.
The mobilization of industry for America’s defense cannot stop with the
plant. Is the employer’s responsibility ended with the eight-hour day
and an increase in wages? The best-equipped plant in the world will
not give us strong, able, efficient men unless they live decently,
have the right kind of recreation, and get a home stake in the country
to defend. There are minimum standards in the matters of numbers,
separation of sexes, family privacy, sanitation, and cleanliness
which no American workman can fall below and be a loyal citizen fit
for defense. It is part of the mobilization of industry to see that
conditions do not prevail which give American defense men unable or
unwilling to defend it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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