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matter of not the slightest concern to us. We respect the unions, sympathize with their good aims
and denounce their bad ones. In turn I think that they give us respect, for there has never been any
authoritative attempt to come between the men and the management in our plants. Of course
radical agitators have tried to stir up trouble now and again, but the men have mostly regarded
them simply as human oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort of interest that
they would have in a four-legged man.
In England we did meet the trades union question squarely in our Manchester plant. The
workmen of Manchester are mostly unionized, and the usual English union restrictions upon
output prevail. We took over a body plant in which were a number of union carpenters. At once
the union officers asked to see our executives and arrange terms. We deal only with our own
employees and never with outside representatives, so our people refused to see the union
officials. Thereupon they called the carpenters out on strike. The carpenters would not strike and
were expelled from the union. Then the expelled men brought suit against the union for their
share of the benefit fund. I do not know how the litigation turned out, but that was the end of
interference by trades union officers with our operations in England.
We make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. It is absolutely a give-and-take
relation. During the period in which we largely increased wages we did have a considerable
supervisory force. The home life of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find out
what they did with their wages. Perhaps at the time it was necessary; it gave us valuable
information. But it would not do at all as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned.
We do not believe in the glad hand, or the professionalized personal touch, or human
element. It is too late in the day for that sort of thing. Men want something more than a worthy
sentiment. Social conditions are not made out of words. They are the net result of the daily
relations between man and man. The best social spirit is evidenced by some act which costs the
management something and which benefits all. That is the only way to prove good intentions and
win respect. Propaganda, bulletins, lectures they are nothing. It is the right act sincerely done
that counts.
A great business is really too big to be human. It grows so large as to supplant the personality of
the man. In a big business the employer, like the employee, is lost in the mass. Together they
have created a great productive organization which sends out articles that the world buys and
pays for in return money that provides a livelihood for everyone in the business. The business
itself becomes the big thing.
There is something sacred about a big business which provides a living for hundreds and
thousands of families. When one looks about at the babies coming into the world, at the boys and
girls going to school, at the young workingmen who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying
and setting up for themselves, at the thousands of homes that are being paid for on installments
out of the earnings of men when one looks at a great productive organization that is enabling all
these things to be done, then the continuance of that business becomes a holy trust. It becomes
greater and more important than the individuals.
The employer is but a man like his employees and is subject to all the limitations of humanity. He
is justified in holding his job only as he can fill it. If he can steer the business straight, if his men
can trust him to run his end of the work properly and without endangering their security, then he
is filling his place. Otherwise he is no more fit for his position than would be an infant. The
employer, like everyone else, is to be judged solely by his ability. He may be but a name to the
men a name on a signboard. But there is the business it is more than a name. It produces the
living and a living is a pretty tangible thing. The business is a reality. It does things. It is a
going concern. The evidence of its fitness is that the pay envelopes keep coming.
You can hardly have too much harmony in business. But you can go too far in picking men
because they harmonize. You can have so much harmony that there will not be enough of the
thrust and counterthrust which is life enough of the competition which means effort and
progress. It is one thing for an organization to be working harmoniously toward one object, but it
is another thing for an organization to work harmoniously with each individual unit of itself.
Some organizations use up so much energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they
have no force left to work for the object for which the organization was created. The organization
is secondary to the object. The only harmonious organization that is worth anything is an
organization in which all the members are bent on the one main purpose to get along toward the
objective. A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely desired that is the great
harmonizing principle.
I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have an atmosphere of good
feeling around him before he can do his work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they
obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on feeling, they
are failures. Not only are they business failures; they are character failures also; it is as if their
bones never attained a sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet.
There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business organizations. People have
too great a fondness for working with the people they like. In the end it spoils a good many
valuable qualities.
Do not misunderstand me; when I use the term good feeling I mean that habit of making one's
personal likes and dislikes the sole standard of judgment. Suppose you do not like a man. Is that
anything against him? It may be something against you. What have your likes or dislikes to do
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