Working With the Working WomanParker, Cornelia Stratton
History
Working With the Working Woman
Parker, Cornelia Stratton
United States -- Social conditions; Women -- Employment -- United States; Working class -- United States
There can surely be no harm in the employing end shifting a bit of the
burden. A bit cannot wreck either side. Managerial shoulders may feel
more comfortable under the decreased weight and try another shift.
In recruiting Group 2 from Group 3, it is the employer, on the whole,
who must take the initiative. Labor may show no desire to help
shoulder the burden. Yet they must shoulder some of it to amount to
anything themselves, if for no other reason. It may take actual
pushing and shoving at first to get them on their way.
Recruiting from Group 1 is a different matter. There sometimes are
workers who would grab most of the load at the start—or all of it.
Their capacities are untried, the road and its twistings and turnings
is unknown to them. Each side has been throwing stones at the other,
tripping each other up. There is a hostile spirit to begin with, a
spirit of distrust between management and men. Here then is a more
difficult problem. It is more than a matter of shifting the load a
bit; it is a matter of changing the spirit as well. That takes much
patience, much tact. It is not a case of the employer making all the
overtures. Each side is guilty of creating cause for suspicion and
distrust. Each side has to experience a change of heart. It is one
thing to convince a previously unthinking person; it is another to
bring about a change of heart in one frankly antagonistic. Making
industrially enthusiastic workers out of class and labor-conscious
workers will indeed be a task requiring determination, tact, patience
without end, and wisdom of many sorts—on both sides. Some one has to
sell the idea of co-operation to labor as well as to the employer. And
then know the job is only begun. But the biggest start is made when
the atmosphere is cleared so that the partnership idea itself can take
root. Some on both sides never will be converted.
What about the great body of workers unfit physically, mentally,
nervously, to carry any additional load at all? Here is a field for
the expert. Yet here is a field where society as a whole must play a
part. Most of the physical, mental, nervous harm is done before ever
the individual reaches industry. Indeed, at most, industry is but one
influence out of many playing on the lives of the human beings who
labor. Nor can it ever be studied as a sphere entirely apart. Much is
aggravated by conditions over which industry itself has no direct
control. Health centers, civic hygienic measures of all sorts, are of
great importance. A widespread education in the need of healthy and
spiritually constructive influences during the first ten years of
life, if we are to have healthy, wholesome, and capable adults, must
gain headway. Saner preparation for life as a whole must take the
place of the lingering emphasis on the pedagogical orthodoxy still
holding sway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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