Clay Burell's Public Library

What exactly can management do to solve the crisis in labor relation? (The congress of course passed the Taft-Hartley Act). “Brute force” is not enough and it doubtful if it will work. Mayo says that workers need more than “protective clauses” in the contract and good wages. They also need a sense of participation, need to feel that they are necessary members of a social unit. But how to accomplish this in modern production? “It works when they’re all out to do a job for Uncle Sam,” said the President of the Packard Company. “But what’s the unifying factor going to be after the war? Are the workers going to beat hell out of the production line all for the love of the stock-holder?”

Everyone knows they will not. says Chamberlain:

“In factories that are inexorably chained to an extreme specialization and to the rigidly repetitive actions required by the moving belt, the sense of craftsmanship cannot always be allowed full scope. No doubt something could be done in even the most fully mechanized plant toward rotating a worker from hour to hour on different jobs, but even though this might have a salutary effect on the fatigue curves it would probably fail to evoke a fully satisfying sense of creation.”

Chamberlain notes that the group sense created by modern socialized labor can equally well be used by workers for conducting “a truly artistic slow-down.”

Over and over again during the past years the Luce publications come back to this problem of the worker in modern industry. Sometimes, they give it up as beyond them. In an article on Henry Ford, Charles J. V. Murphy, another senior writer, says:

“The philosopher’s case against Ford is that he annihilated individual craftsmanship, bound man to the machine, and cast up economic and social problems on which he could discover no acceptable solution. But why expect him to? ... [The solution] is up to the philosophers.”

The Luce probings into the future of labor in modern industry lead their writers into some strange places. That cannot occupy us now. Enough to say that Henry Ford no more “created” his problem than Luce “created” his publications. When Ford was running about the Michigan countryside in short pants, Marx wrote:

“Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it ax an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital ... Accumulation of capital wealth at one pole, is therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.’” (Capital – Volume 1, p.709).