KILLED IN CRASH

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 247, 14 July 1932, Page 9

KILLED IN CRASH

Millionaire Boot & Shoe Manufacturer INDUSTRIAL NAPOLEON By Telegraph—Press Berlin, July 12. Thomas Bata, the Czecho-Slovakian millionaire shoe manufacturer, was killed as a result of his private aeroplane crashing near Zlin, Moravia. The pilot was killed instantly, and M. Bata died in hospital. A message from Prague states that flags are flying at half-mast throughout Czecho-Slovakla as a tribute to M. Bata, whose name was a household word throughout the country. He was regarded as an industrial Napoleon. The son of a cobbler, M. Bata worked in his father’s shop, and started a small factory with fifty employees. He seized a war-time opportunity, and by 1917 was employing 4000 hands. His Zlin factory is at present producing 130,000 pairs dally. There are also factories in France, Switzerland, and England. M. Bata paid his 17.000 employees the best wages in Czecho-Slovakia, and provided them with houses and entertainments. He is reported to have made £10,000,000 in the last ten years.

SHOEMAKER’S SON Rapid Rise to Fortune Within a few years the name of Thomas Bata acquired in Europe a strong and widespread significance. He was described recently as the leader in the industrial Americanisation of the Continent. He was the greatest manufacturer of boots and shoes in Europe, and his competition was keenly felt in England, and as far away as the Unitev. States of America. The factories of M. Bata are erected' in Zlin, a town lost in the agricultural, regions of Czechoslovakia, far from any Industrial centre; and the workmen have been drawn almost entirely from the peasants of Moravia. The few great Austrian families that ruled the country before the war are broken up, and in their place the processes of modern democratic government have been made to work without a jar. Zlin itself as recently as 1920 had a population of only 4500. Today the population is about five times as large, an increase due entirely to Mr. Bata. In 1923 he employed 1800 workers, and was able to produce 1800 pairs of shoes daily. In 1931 he employed more than 17,600 workers, and his daily output was 90,000 leather shoes, 40,000 rubber shoes, and 4000 bedroom slippers. President Masaryk said on one occasion that in forcing down the prices of storbs in Czecho-Slovakia, M. Bata had also forced down the general cost of living. First his competitors were compelled to lower their prices; then the price of leather fell; then that of cattle; then that of the grain on which the cattle fed; and so on over the whole field of essential products, _ At the same time the money wages, and still more, the real wages in the Bata factories had been steadily going up. The importance of M. Bata’s contribution to the industrial trend of Europe was suggested by the extensive controversial literature that since the beginning of 1928 had grown up around him, not only in his own land and in Germany, but also in England and elsewhere. A book in Germany called “The Unknown Dictator, Thomas Bata,” contained so many startling assertions about the dangers of Bataism, that M. Bata went to law and had it suppressed until certain definitely false allegations were eliminated. -M. Bata was born in 1876 in the town where his factories now are. As nis father was a shoemaker young Thomas spent his early years either working in the family shop or, when he was old enough, going about to secure business for his father. When he was 18 he set up for himself in a small way at Zlin. In 1904 before he had made any important progress, he went to the United States to learn anything he could from American methods by becoming an ordinary workman. Later he did the same in GermanyReturning with the now familiar principles of modern efficiency, and with some original ideas' of his own, _he began to extend his business, employing, when the war broke out, 2000 men. The war made it necessary for him to specialise in army stores in order to keep up his volume, and after the war it became his problem to find peace markets that would continually grow. In 1922 came the_ stabilisation of the crown, which he seized as an opportunity to begin his plunge into low prices. His reorganisation work in 1922 and 1923 was so successful that his fundamental problems were solved. M. Bata’s basic principle was that profit-sharing was sound; that it should be related to the contribution of the individual, and that this contribution could be calculated evenly only through estimating the efficiency of the group to which the individual belonged. M. Bata always admired the old-time single shoemaker who had to rely not only on his mechanical skill, but on his economy in the use of leather, his care and responsibility in filling orders and dealing with his customers, and the hign quality of his work. The problem was to carry over into a factory, modern and huge, .some of the best dualities of the days of hard labour. He put out his solution in 1024 after pondering for many years, and he started the idea in this sentence: “So far your individual effort has not given good results, because you have had your eyes fixed on your own needs, aiid have not troubled to work so as to help those who take over from you. Toward the end of April last it was reported that many of his employees had been dismissed owing to loss of. markets. M. Bata explained that prohibitive tariffs and import restrictions had closed practically all foreign markets. He promised relief to help his unemployed, but forbade them to accept State aid.