A EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATION
The most significant conquests have been won during the latter half
of that period, and more particularly within the past hundred and
fifty years. Great though these achievements have been, their human
cost has been high in the dominance they have given the machine,
coupled with aggregations of wealth privately owned and controlled,
over human desires and aspirations. Impersonal, mechanized forces
and an impersonal, pecuniary calculus have reduced “success” for
millions of men and women to obedience to mandates issued by per-
sons whose purposes they neither share nor know. Subjugation of
many to the will of few is the result—not in the ancient manner of
slaves subserviently doing their lord’s bidding—but as apparently
free persons willingly entering into contracts to perform for persons
they never see, the innumerable stockholders of great corporations,
acts whose social function—the production of goods—is of primary
interest neither to them nor to their employers.
One certainly would not ask for a return to the meager life of the
serf in manorial times, nor even to the more satisfying life of the
medieval craftsman. The factory system with all it connotes is of
the very warp of modern civilization, and its beneficial contributions
to human advancement are manifold. Yet almost from its earliest
appearance it has levied a toll upon those intimately concerned in
its operation. The reasons are not hard to find.
The domestic, sweatshop organization of production—which
even in the twentieth century is not entirely supplanted—served as
a transition from the craft gilds to the modern factory. In this
2¢ itis deplorably true that a very large proportion of industrial work
is in itself distasteful to those who do it,and that this distaste is not to any appre-
ciable degree mitigated by any sense that the toil of performing it conduces to
the happiness of mankind. The bulk of the hard routine manual and mental
labour probably falls in this category; it carries with it no interest or goodwill,
nor does any glimmer of its social value brighten the vision of the toilers who per-
form it. Such toil, destitute of noble purpose, demoralises and derationalises the
workers, and, through its reactions upon individual and social character, consti-
tutes the heaviest drag upon the car of human progress. If we seek to interpret
the industrial system as a system of human wills in codperation for the social
good, this forced consent of so many of the human units to perform their part is
its worst defect.”—Hobson, John A., The Industrial System, pp. 320-21.
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