ARCHBISHOP’S DEFENCE

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 May 1935, Page 3

ARCHBISHOP’S DEFENCE

CO-OPERATION IN INDUSTRY

In an address arranged by the CoPartnership Association, Dr. Temple, Archbishop of York, said: —

“The most manifest fact about all industry, as far as I can see, is that it is in its own eternal nature a cooperative process. “If nobody wished for its produce it could not continue; it is only because the people have need for what it offers that it exists at all. Capital and management and labour and the persons supplying these must, in fact, co-operate or else the process stops. If any one of them withdrew his contribution, progress immediately would come to an end.

“The whole cannot continue without all of its parts. All the while it is co-operation for public service, and ; f people treat it as if it were in its own fundamental nature a competition for private gain, something will go wrong. They are treating it as if it were what it is not. Do not let us be academic about the matter and suppose that because the terms cooperation and competition are logically epposites that they are practically incompatible. Both terms are hound to come together in the very simplest activities of life.

“The best illustration to my mind is a football match. Supposing it is the right kind of football, there will be thirty players who co-operate for their common enjoyment of the game. The way in which they co-operate is that one team competes against the other team. Within each team all the members are co-operating in order to be effective, and yet behind that each may be competing with all the others to be the best co-operator, in co-oper-ating against the other team of cooperating players. “If you can bind up co-operation and competition in one another in That kind of industry over an amateur game, ft is ridiculous to suppose that because there is some value in competition you have, therefore to exclude co-operation as a governing principle in industry. On the contrary, what you have got to do is to find the proper relation between these two things.

“A world of co-operation in which all competition were eliminated, if that could be conceived as a practical proposition, would become a slowmoving, flabby thing. When competition gets out of hand it drives everybody concerned so hard that there is no opportunity of enjoying the results of the profits. “In the game when the cooperative spirit is uppermost you have people who play keenly and hard and would rather be beaten in a good game; but if the competitive spirit is uppermost you have people who play to win, and will do any dirty trick the referee will let them.

“What is of vital importance. ; t seems to me, is that in this combination of the two principles it should always in the last resort be the cooperative spirit or corporate spirit which checks the competitive spirit, and not vice vtrsa. There do conic times when a choice lias to be made whether the general benefit should bo served at the cost of private profit, and unless people are deliberately watching they may be blind to the more general interest in the pursuit of their own gains. THAT EXTUA HALF-CROWN "When fostering th< co-operative principle as dominant over the competitive, one of our aims has been so to arrange matters that these instincts

or impulses in human nature which tend to a selfish line of action are made subordinate to co-operative and public-spirited aims. Thus, for example, in industry there has often been an attempt to stimulate maximum output on the part of workpeople to pay to each individual workman a. bonus when his own output rises above some agreed level.

, “The system of piece-rates rests on the principle. ’ The objection there is that though the individual gains something more tor himself, in the very process of doing it he becomes rather disagreeable to his neighbours who cannot do as well, and it is, in fact, much more important to a decentminded person that he should have the regard of his neighbours rather than he should get another half a crown a week. “The good opinion of the neighbours of working folk who live near one another is much more important to the individual than it is to folk who can get away to their semi-detached villas and have some sort of privacy in their lives. Where people live amongst their fellows the herd instinct must be more than ever an influence of their conduct.

“If you can so arrange matters that it is to the advantage of all of them that they should do their best and then receive some slight encouragement for their efforts, you can harness these two things together and, broadly speaking, co-partnership systems have best. That is one of the grounds for regarding it as containing,, at any rate, in principle, a very large part of the solution of our problems.

“When I was in Manchester I had the opportunity of fairly frequent conference with many people engaged in different types of industry, and one of the things which I wanted to ascertain was the extent to which the workpeople were brought into consultation with regard to the policy of the firm, and I think it is a fair generalisation to say that where this was freely done there were no industrial troubles.

“There was one firm in particular which had the feeling of a family house party, and it had a works committee. representing the management of all grades of labour in the works, which met every month whether there was anything to be discussed or not. and the heads of the firm laid special stress on that feature. REFERRED TO THE BISHOP “One of them said to me: ‘lf we meet only when there is a subject for dispute, wo meet anxious to defend our own position, but if we always meet we are friends and talk about whatever becomes handy; but you cannot become friends bj - settling disputes—you can only settle a dispute by friendship if you are friends before.' They discussed many other things, and on one occasion the head of the firm told me that as soon as they sat down at the meeting before, one’of the working-class members' of the committee, said: ‘See here. Mi. So-and-So, what about this ’ere pre- 1 destination?"

"The head replitd: ‘I must have notice ol that question, and I will consult the Bishop.’ So 1 posted him up with an appropriate reply. "It is no use to set up a kind of organisation which would only work effectively if everybody concerned in it. were entirely self-abnegating because we arc not like that, but we can watch for the opportunities of taking steps for work along lines of trying always to harness and make our selfishness serve the end of the common good. It is not impossible in principle: to an enormous extent it is carried out in practice. "What is surely of vital importance

is that there should be in any concern where people's welfare does, in fact, depend upon the contribution of others, a common feeling which is expressed in common gains and common losses. I believe indeed that by a

method which would secure a much more fice and natural adaption between profits and wages, we should nu.ve towards a solution of the whole of our economic problem. “I am finite confident as a matter of ethics that the sound line to be perpetually followed is neither a pre tome that, selfish instincts do not exist. nor a surrender to them as the <mly tilings that count, but (he deliberate policy of subordinating them to the services of the common good in such a way that they themselves promote that service."