Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

inefficient kind is employed instead of machine labour after the proper machines have been invented-as was the case with buttonhole making, box-making, furpulling, sack-making-not because they were economical or efficient, but because labour could be had at sweating rates and a low grade of production was profitable, or because the capitalist had not enough inducement to undergo the trouble of making the change. Labour has also been enlisted in this conservative policy because having to pay out of its own resources for the injury which a reorganization of industry entails upon it, it has no desire for a change.

It is true that recently Capitalism has become aware of the need of employing scientific skill. This is partly the result of combination, and one of these combinations is known to spend something like £20,000 per annum in experiments-certainly no extravagant sum considering the scientific nature of the work of the firm. The scientific wage-earner, however, is tied hand and foot to his employer. In the nature of things only exceptionally wealthy firms or combinations can employ him and his field of free movement is narrow. Everyone in it is marked. If he leaves one firm, that firm can decide whether another is to employ him or not. Even if he applies for new employment, his present employer knows of it and can regard it as a fault. In any event, he is generally tied by a restrictive agreement. This is not an imaginary description: it is the story told to me by one of those workers. Hence the development of capitalist combination, whilst it provides openings for the scientific worker, at the same time offers a prospect of employment so restricted as to be unattractive if not intolerable. When Capitalism has employed brains to the utmost extent, when its

scientific staffs are complete and it has distributed its bonuses to every workman who can give it a hint for mechanical improvement, it can never rise above its own nature to turn everything into private gain, and to serve the community only in so far as that contributes to private gain, to harness to its chariot all who contribute service and thoughts, to use them, or refuse to use them, in accordance with its interest. This will always be challenged as the intelligence and self-respect of the service givers are quickened. It is not a relationship which can yield the maximum of brain effort or secure industrial peace.

The remuneration that has been offered to the professional classes has also been meanly inadequate. Clerks, teachers, clergymen in great masses have hardly enjoyed a living wage, and the chemists who have done so much to put German industry on the footing it stood upon before the war, were notoriously badly paid. To defend themselves by entering into combination was distasteful to these classes. It was something which they regarded as beneath them. But now the Trade Union methods adopted by the medical profession-especially when they drove hard bargains with the community over the Insurance Act -the National Union of Teachers, Unions amongst clerks, the Science Workers' Guilds and similar bodies, have broken the ice, and we may expect collective bargaining amongst the professional classes to be as marked in the future as it has been in the past amongst the working classes. One need not be surprised if at first the organization of the professional classes, for instance, the attempted boycott of railwaymen by some doctors during the railway strike in 1919, is to be antagonistic to labour, because whilst

copying the methods of the workmen, the members will retain their feelings of social distinction and antagonism. Professional pride having surrendered to circumstance will seek for a time to maintain itself by policy. At any rate, it will be shy of companionship with manual workers, as when the National Union of Teachers, though it has adopted every weapon of Trade Unionism including the strike, hesitates to join the Trade Union Congress and the local Trades Councils. This barrier of class and professional distinction is, however, decaying, and there is no reason why we may not see in time, not only the National Union of Teachers but the British Medical Association represented at the Trade Union Congress and on local Trades Councils and thus accepting the full implications of their existence. A few years ago the professions owed a wholehearted allegiance to Capitalism, now they do not. Their personal social contacts still bind them to that allegiance, and so do their tasks and preferences. But a conflict of interest has begun. The brain worker is beginning to understand that there is a dignity in work, he is making contacts with the better educated workmen and is acquiring a sympathy for their point of view and a liking for their simple unadorned humanity. He has only begun to protect his livelihood against Capitalism, and his efforts will drive him closer to the Unions of workmen. Above all, the scientific worker, finding his brains exploited by Capitalism, seeing his discoveries used for sectional profit, and feeling a narrowing and cramping influence upon him in consequence, will discover affinities with labour which he has not hitherto experienced. The rise of a young generation of workmen better educated than the last, reading good literature, interested in science and history, and able

to discuss with intelligence and vigour the affairs and concerns of the day, will make the rapprochement easy. When labour, science and professionalism find their natural unity, the end of the present system is in sight. The Socialist proposals for the control of production, which I am about to sketch, offer a happy liberty and an energetic joy in labour to the scientific and technological worker as much as to the manual toiler, and enable both sections to work in co-operation for common social ends.

CAPITALISM AND MANAGEMENT

Capitalism also employs another class of labour in connexion with production-the managerialand this has often one foot amongst those who are capitalists and the other amongst those who serve capital. In the earlier stages of Capitalism, the manager was the owner, and profits went into his pocket when all charges, including his own wages, were met. That is no longer so since the dominance of the limited liability company. The manager is now for the most part a servant enjoying commissions maybe, but under all the disabilities of a salaried official. There is no difference between the work and responsibility of a manager of a municipal tramway system and of a private company, but the status of the former is perhaps better than that of the latter. Efficiency in the use of capital, whether in an antiquated or up-to-date form, in exacting from labour its utmost, in producing as advantageously as circumstances will allow, is essential if Capitalism is to last, and to create and maintain that efficiency is the duty of the manager. The assumption of Capitalism is that management must be of a rigid kind, and must

be allied with capitalist and not labour interests. In order to get the most out of labour it must, of course, appeal somehow to labour's good will, but advances must not go so far as to bring in labour's free will. In its most modern form, called "Scientific management," management reduces labour to the most perfect status of a machine in order to effect economies and increase production. In theory nothing can be said against this, provided that labour receives compensating advantages which can only be given by greater leisure and a fuller life away from the drudgery of the workshop. This, however, Capitalism cannot give to any satisfactory extent. It is interesting to watch the various attempts now being made to improve management and to interest labour in it, like the Welfare schemes which are largely an inheritance of the war. These schemes have not a few virtues, but all have this defect. They approach labour as a subordinate factor to be kept efficient and serviceable-they are too much on the model of the games provided by Emperors in the decadent days of Rome to keep the Romans off politics. "It was artfully contrived by Augustus," says Gibbon," that, in the enjoyment of plenty, the Romans should lose the memory of freedom." Some of the employers responsible for these undertakings have the most irreproachable intentions, others regard them solely as a way of lubricating the machine. Labour is thereby to be made efficient and content, is to be removed from the temptations of certain political and social ideas, and is to be taught to lean more heavily than ever upon capitalist patronage. It is safe to prophesy that no virtues can preserve such schemes from failure, because the more men know and the more truly they feel, the more offensive be

« ForrigeFortsett »