Any plan of efficiency must be based on sympathy and human feeling. To avoid unnecessary fatigue is imperative, not only because it increases production, but because it increases happiness. Fatigue may have its origin in little matters,--in a bad bench, in a poor work table, or an inferior tool. Chronic fatigue[1] alters character; the drudge and slave are not really human, and if your workers become drudges, to that degree have you lapsed from your stewardship. Men react to fatigue in different ways: one is merely tired, weak and sleepy --a "dope," to use ordinary characterization--but another becomes a dangerous rebel, ready to take fire at any time.
[1] The Gilbreths have written an excellent little book on this subject. Doctor Charles E. Myers' recent publication, "Mind and Work," is less explicit, but worth reading.
More important than physical fatigue (or at least as important) is the fatigue of monotony. If your shop is organized on a highly mechanical basis, then the worker must be allowed to interrupt his labors now and then, must have time for a chat, or to change his position or even to lie down or walk. Monotony disintegrates mind and body--disintegrates character and personality--brings about a fierce desire for excitement; and the well-known fact that factory towns are very immoral is no accident, but the direct result of monotony and opportunity. It's bad enough that men and women have to become parts of the machine and thus lowered in dignity, worth and achievement; it is adding cruelty to this to whitewash windows, prohibit any conversation and count every movement. Before you may expect loyalty you must deserve it, and the record of the owners of industry warrants no great loyalty on the part of their employees. Annoying restrictions are more than injuries; they are insults to the self-feeling of the worker and are never forgotten or forgiven.
That a nation is built on the work of its people--their steadiness, energy, originality and intelligence, is trite. That anything is really gained by huge imports and exports when people live in slums and have their creative work impulses thwarted is not my idea of value. Factories are necessary to a large production and a large population, but the idea of quantity seems somehow to have exercised a baleful magic on the minds of men.
England became "great" through its mills, and its working people were starved and stunted, body and soul. Of what avail are our Lawrences and Haverhills when we learn that in the draft examinations the mill towns showed far more physical defects, tuberculosis and poor nutrition than the non-factory towns?
Work is the joy of life, because through it we fulfill purposes of achievement and usefulness. Society must have an organization to fit the man to his task and his task to the man; it must organize its rewards on an ethical basis and must find the way to eliminate unnecessary fatigue and monotony. The machine which increases production decreases the joy of work; we cannot help that, therefore society must at least add other rewards to the labor that is robbed of its finest recompense.
A counsel of perfection! The sad part is that books galore are written about the ways of changing, but meanwhile the law of competition and "progress" adds machines to the world, still further enslaving men and women. We cannot do without machines,--nor can we do without free men and women. The fact is that competition is a spur to production and to industrial malpractice, since the generous employer must adopt the tactics of his competitors whether in a Southern mill town or in Japan.
I must confess to a feeling of disgust when I read preachments on the joys of work, on consecrating one's self to one's task. I can do that, because I do about what I please and when I please, and so do you, Mister Preacher, and so do the exceptional and the able and the fortunate here and there and everywhere. But this is mathematically and socially impossible for the great majority, and unless a plan of life fits that majority it is best to call the plan what it is,--an aristocratic creed, meant for the more able and the more fortunate.
