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Page 12 text:
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10 THE ACADEMY STUDENT VALEDICTORY ESSAY EFFICIENCY AND THE LABORER “It is a big- assembly plant in a city of the Northwest. They assemble there the Bogel car. In the assembly plant everyone works on ‘the belt’. This is a big steel conveyor, a kind of moving sidewalk, waist-high. It is a great river running down thru the plant. Various tributaries come into the main stream, the main belt. They bring tires, they bring headlights, horns, bumpers for cars. They flow into the main stream. “The belt is boss. It moves always forward. To stand the pace is the real test. Special skill is not recjuired. It is all perfectly timed, perfectly calculated. If you are a body upholsterer, so many tacks driven per second. Not too many. If a man hurries too much too many tacks drop on the floor. If a man gets too hurried he is not efficient. Let an expert take a month, two months, to find out how many tacks the average good man can drive per second. “There must be a certain «t lard maintained in the finished product. Remember that. It must pass . ..on after inspection. Do not crowd too hard. Crowd all you can. Keep crowding. “It is a good thing to go thru the pL.n now and then, select one man from all the others, give him a new and bigger job, just like that, offhand. If he doesn't make good, fire him. “It is a good thing to go thru the plant occasionally, pick out a man, working apparently just as the others are, fire him. If he asks why, just say to him, ‘You know’. He’ll know all right. He’ll imagine why. The pace can be accelerated a little this year. The men have all got tuned into the old pace now. Step it up a little, just a little. “Now and then a man goes off his nut. He goes fantoed. He howls and shouts. He grabs up a hammer. A stream of crazy profanitj comes from his lips. ‘The belt controls me. It moves. It moves. I’ve tried to keep up. I tell you I’ve been keeping up. The belt is God. God has rejected me.’ “Sometimes a man, fired like that, goes crazy. He get dangerous. A strong policeman on hand knocks him down, takes him out. It is calculated that a man rubbing automobile bodies with pumice, makes thirty thousand and twenty-one arm strokes per day. The difference
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Page 13 text:
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THE ACADEMY STUDENT 11 between thirty thousand and twenty-one and twenty-eight thousand and four will tell a vital story of profits or loss at headquarters. “The belt moves. It keeps moving.” 1 have been quoting from SheVwood Anderson’s essay “Lift Up Thine Eyes” which is a graphic picture of the extreme tension in modern industry, evidently intended to show that laborers are helpless victims of their employers. This however is only one aspect of the picture. There are others equally significant. In an industrial community created by the United States Steel Company a worker is returning from the plant. He stops in at the most attractive store in town, the company supply store. Here be buys some goods and goes to his home, a small, neat, modern cottage house. On his way he passes the community playground, where he sees his two small children playing. In the evening, when he has some leisure time, he goes over to the community clubhouse and gymnasium. These conveniences are maintained by industry and made possible, no doubt, thru extreme efficiency. I he Goodyear Industrial University A an institution consisting of two parts. In one division there are classes in high school and junior college subjects. Workers here are completing their elementary education. In the other division science and administration couises are being taught. These workers are trying for executive jobs and engineering credits. This too is made possible by the efficiency and tension in an assembly plant. f'f A third picture is t! at of the company hospital or infirmary. Laborers with both slight and major injuries are being brought in. A man with a cut finger receives the same deliberate attention from the doctors and nurses as does another with a badly gashed head. Workers with chronic ailments are coming in for treatment. This hospital resembles many other hospitals and clinics except in one respect — the fact that all the bills are made out to one address — that of the employer. In recent years, industry has made an honest attempt to obtain the good will of labor. Industrial leaders have found it profitable to have contented laborers. To gain this end they have instituted social, educational, and health projects, such as those described. These have proven expensive but profitable. Employers also have come to realize that they must pay as high wages as possible in order to maintain the purchasing power of labor. It is clear that the prosperity of the laborer depends directly upon the prosperity of industry. The keynote of industrial prosperity, however, is efficiency. —Philip Brown
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