Mind, Money and Work

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 48, 19 November 1932, Page 16

Mind, Money and Work

14 he most important general motive is rivalry. Something may I be done by pitting department against department in a factory, | but the bigger the field the more the romance,” says Dr. John f T. MacCurdy in his book, “Mind and Money.” “The British workman will toil like a Trojan to build the best motor car or aeroplane in the world, because he knows he is challenged to beat the world. “The securing of a foreign market for, let us say, boots is less dramatic, but it is not without romance. Why should the humblest workman not know’the destination of the boots he is working on? Why should he not be told that, with this order, it is hoped to capture the Argentine market for boots ? “More effort should be made to get the workers interested in the total process, when they have to deal day after day with one small manipulation,” says Dr. MacCurdy. "Even at the expense of some apparent efficiency it might pay to move a man from one department to another until he can visualise the total process. Transference to another part of the works as reward for attainment of a certain speed of production might well prove a more potent incentive to the British workman than a rise in wages. "Such devices are merely mitigation of what is at best an evil for the English temperament. The Englishman is an intensely human being, and he hates to be a machine. The ultimate economic value of quantity production except in the manufacture of permanently standardised articles

is now being freely questioned, and the collapse of American industry may well lead to a smashing of this idol. “If so, British industry will stand to gain more than that of any other country when craftsmanship comes into its own again. The sophisticated visitor is often shocked to see the casualness of the methods followed in factories where world-famous English products are manufactured. f The answer is that this is just the Englishman’s way of calling his soul his own. He will not have his work regulated by a Prussian drill-master. His bitter enemy is the man who believes quotation marks around the word efficiency constitute a halo, and wants other men to worship it. “The British workman’s defects are the counterparts of his virtues. Having been denied the opportunity to express his peculiar virtues, he has, naturally, retorted by exhibiting his vices. We often hear of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but this is‘a case of trying to make a silk purse into a sow’s ear. It has been coarsened and the purse ruined and then cursed fol? being bad leather. “But give the Englishman something to be proud of and someone to be loyal to, and he will want to give full value for his wages. This country’s life is bound up with an Immortal devotion to its ideals and not on a craving for gain. If its industries are actuated by purely sordid motives they will fail; but if they are reanimated by some kind of idealism they will again outstrip the world.”