PLEASURE IN DAY'S WORK

Evening Star, Issue 18517, 27 December 1923, Page 4

PLEASURE IN DAY'S WORK

FORD’S VIEW ATTACKED. Members and friends of tbo Labor Copartnership -Association entertained at lunch in London a few weeks ago MiHenry S. Dennison, president of the Dennison Manufacturing Company, at Framingham, United States, a well-known authority in the United States on the subject of profit-sharing. The company included Mr B. Sedbohm Rowntree, who presided, and Jlr Ernest Walls, director of Messrs Lever Bros.

Mr Dennison after the lunch gave an address on ‘ Profit-sharing and Democratic Organisation.’ The first half of his subject covered a detailed description of the scheme adopted at Die Framingham Works, and in one of the most interesting passages ho referred to the appeals of the operative section, at first excluded from the profit-sharing, for some participation in the scheme. They said: “We can deliver values you are not getting now; we can do work of better quality; we can save waste; we can require less supervision; and wo can co-operate more than wo do now. The thing that_ will make us do it is tbo sense of proprietorship.’’ A distinction still remained be tween the operative and what was known as the managerial group, but now onethird of the reinvested surplus went to operatives with three years’ service. Mr Dennison afterwards eloquently developed the contention that the industry should bo regarded as a great national service rather than as a means merely of creating wealth for a few. He said that in the commercial and industrial problem wore involved thousands of social and psychological problems upon which study and experiment were needed. Business management might become a great and learned profession. It had opportunities for service greater than any profession to-day. What remained was to demand that its practitioners should have a proper intellectual training. Wo had no more moral right to allow a man in industry to affect the working lives of thousands of people without proper training than to allow a medical man to affect the lives of two or three hundred without adequate training. A code of professional ethics should°bo formulated and impressed on business men In expressing the view that we should get better productive results by attempting to make the day’s work tho most attractive part of life, Mr Dennison said Mr Ford took it fop granted that the dav’s work in production was necessarily drudgery, and that the only way out was to make it as short and ns productive as possible, so that the hours of leisure could be filled with a compensating joy. Ho regarded that as nonsense. He believed those who took most pleasure m their daily task spent their pleasure on the highest plane, and that their aim should be to make the working hours the most delightful part of the day._ Mr Dennison thousrht the desire for security was first among the workers’ aims to-dav, and in this connection ho .paid a tribute to the stimulating ideas expressed in America by Mr Seebohm Rowntree.