it was easier than it is now to make the daily task one of mutual
cooeperation and mutual service within the family circle.
=The Old Household a Work-place.=--We have passed laws now, forbidding
"home industries" because so many "sweated trades" find their last and
often impregnable fortress in the crowded rooms of the tenement
living-places. This may be necessary and may be well to do, but the
fact remains that something inhered in the old domestic training of
children and youth in useful work within the home which was lost when
the factory was built and the young workers had to seek their jobs
outside the family circle. And that something of work-drill and
habit-forming in the interest of self-support and family usefulness we
are now trying to reintroduce into the education of children and youth
by elaborate and costly "manual training," "Pre-vocational and
Vocational courses" and similar departments in the schools.
=Welfare Managers in Modern Times.=--The fact that hours of work and
conditions affecting the workers can be standardized more easily when
those workers are massed in large numbers under one recognized owner
and manager of a great industry has sometimes blinded us to the need
of each young person to have constantly near at hand a personal
representative of society's interest in the development of his
character; some interpreter of social customs and ideals to follow
which will make for his advantage. We are trying now to get "Welfare
Managers," paid chaperons, nurses and teachers, into business concerns
to take the place of older forms of social direction and care for
youthful workers. These functionaries often do much good and are
recognized expressions of the social interest of employers. Since they
are installed avowedly for the purpose of making conditions better for
the younger, weaker, less trained and more needy of the workers,
"Welfare Managers" often find a hostile or at least indifferent
attitude toward their efforts on the part of the higher paid, the
better established, and more competent women workers, especially those
organized in Trade Unions with the slogan of "Not Charity, but
Justice." They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the
darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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