Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, THURS., JUNE 23, 1927. A PHILOSOPHY FOR INDUSTRY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16374, 23 June 1927, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, THURS., JUNE 23, 1927. A PHILOSOPHY FOR INDUSTRY

Great as havo boon the losses caused by industrial disturbances they are far exceeded by industrial losses caused through waste. If it could be calculated, the waste of labor, materials, and energy in industry would be found to be sufficient to create a .sinking fund for our national debt; it would reduce the cost of living, justify high wages and smooth over all those difficulties which at the present time aro so seriously disturbing the primary producers. Waste in industry occurs in endless ways. Failure to adjust labor to its task, unsuitable tools for the work, obsolete plants, wrong selection of labor for particular work, unprofitable labor, want of system by overseers of labor, needless competition, neglect of standardisation, overlapping; carrying goods backwards and forwards, Auckland manufactures to Dunedin and the same class of articles manufactured • in Dunedin back to be sold in Auckland; neglect of brainwork as auxiliary to labor. The list might bo indefinitely extended. It is well known that in many industries it was found that profit was only obtainable by the conquest of waste. Materials for years thrown away as without value have been saved to such a degree as to become the source of profit without which it would have been difficult if not impossible to havo kept the industry alive at all. - All branches of knowledge were at first parts of philosophy. As knowledge increased the special sciences became independent, and the task of philosophy was to co-ordinate the principles of each science, and to harmonise what in each appeared to be contradictory or conflicting. The labor of men is too valuable—to put it on no higher ground—to be put to no better use than is put to a stonecrusher or a road roller, which serve their day, wear out, nnd go on to the scrapkeap. If the use of human energy were watched as a motor,car or a flying machine in action is watched immense, pains would be taken in recording what it could . do and .its efficiency and cost. But except on very largo road or railway works the same tests are not applied to labor when utilised as a direct source of energy. The engineer makes it his business to cut down the quantity of labor his factory requires: where he can he will use water, steam, or electricity in the factory, if by so doing lie can cut down cost and increase output. Philosophy has been applied to any set of phenomena in its determining principles and it is quite time that thero should be a philosophy for industry. The thing to be desired is not so much to got more out of labor as to save waste in labor and so justify its bettor remuneration. In such a philosophy it would very soon bo recognised as elementary that a goslow policy would be suicidal and unthinkable." In England thpre is a Department of Scientific, and Industrial research. This department has been in existence for eight years only, but it is beginning to give a good account of itself. It has recently issued a report which the Times says is much more than an enumerative record of things, done during the last few years. "Underlying it is a philosophy for industry." The great value of this report and its lesson for Now Zealand is that it emphasises the fact that the valuable work of research so far done lias been done by a maximum of effort by the industries concerned themselves and a minimum of effort by the State. The danger in New Zealand is .that in the efforts for research work now being started the industries concerned and the producers generally aro looking to tho State departments and to the State funds to do the whole of tho work for them. A purely State, or purely university, system is of course possible, but it' lacks the greater familiarity with all the detail of the industry which the men who do the work possess and which is so fruitful for eliminating weaknesses and assuring strength and range in discovery. This is the verdict of the Times' on this point. "The case which the report makes out for a system of research conducted and paid for, except for a small subsidy as a kind of fend-off, by the iudtislrics themselves, seems stronger than any that could be put forward by a purely State or purely university system. A particular industry knows exactly what the problem of the moment is, whether it is.a question of scientific principle or of improved technique; and when it has its own laboratory, as some twenty industries have, and its own workers it is much more likely to get an expeditious and relevant answer than by going outside for help." Various industries in Great Britain are not so conservative in this respect as they once were. It is not so long ago that all improvements in an established industry .wero looked upon with suspicion and some measure of dislike, and even fear, as involving unknown cost in plant and methods of working. Then in the past there was the huddling up of supposed seorets making for betterment in case a rival should benefit. Now this has been much changed. The major industries work together in research and even pool results. This permits of specialisation of work and friendly industrial competition for the benefit of all industries concerned. An advantage of what may perhaps be called co-operative research in industries is the increasing interest which, it is found, is taken by the principals engaged in those industries. There is a common meeting ground where principals can sec for themselves what is being done by. science, and the downof hope brightens as'knowledge, increases. It is a kind of laboratory in the open air. There it room for the

keenest inquiry after improvement, and there is escape for the most persistent watchfulness for; results, cap-able-of immediate, practical, application. This cannot dispense with or supersede the ceaseless experiment and investigation which for ever must go on in the epiiet privacy of The sanctorum of the scientist. But even his work can be stimulated and advanced in time toward practical result, when the man of science has as it were, at his elbow, the keen inquiries and awakened expectation of the men who have to apply scientific result to the businesses of all forms of life which maintain the nation. These, too, justify their insistence, as being those who, as to the principal part, are directly footing the bill. Research so carried out has its moral value. The Times speaks of "its humanising value." by bringing out "the social purpose of human endeavor, and by giving enhanced status to a class of worker too often ignored in economic disputes—the brain-worker, without whom capital is useless anil manual skill unemployable..'' Stress has here beep laid upon waste in industry, as being more costly than industrial disputes. But disputes in industry are, taken separately, the greatest of all single causes of waste. A philosopher's stone might bo worth searching for, capable of converting the baser elements of strife into some form of indivisible atomic peaco under the influences of which every form of human energy put forth might reap its full \ alue in result. ■■.'"'.'