If men, instead of saying “the employer ought to do thus-and-so,” would say, “the business ought to be so stimulated and managed that it can do thus-and-so,” <yet this requires workers and businessmen to be Bolsheviks in their morals and ethics>, they would get somewhere. Because only the business can pay wages. Certainly the employer cannot, unless the business warrants. But if that business does warrant higher wages and the employer refuses, what is to be done?[87] As a rule a business means the livelihood of too many men, to be tampered with <i.e. careless in regard to these people>. It is criminal to assassinate a business to which large numbers of men have given their labors and to which they have learned to look as their field of usefulness and their source of livelihood. Killing the business by a strike or a lockout does not help. The employer can gain nothing by looking over the employees and asking himself, “How little can I get them to take?”[88] Nor the employee by glaring back and asking, “How much can I force him to give?” Eventually both will have to turn to the business and ask, “How can this industry be made safe and profitable, so that it will be able to provide a sure and comfortable living for all of us?[89]”

But by no means all employers or all employees will think straight. The habit of acting shortsightedly is a hard one to break. What can be done? Nothing. No rules or laws will effect the changes. But enlightened self-interest will. It takes a little while for enlightenment to spread (put in bold type by the authors). But spread it must, for the concern in which both employer and employees work to the same end of service is bound to forge ahead in business.(…)

It ought to be clear, however, that the high wage begins down in the shop[90]. If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of <productive> work. Nature has seen to that. Idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us. Work is our sanity <above all of moral and psychic health>, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing. Exact social justice flows only out of honest work (put in bold type by the authors: though it would be more precise to say «conscientious labor»). The man who contributes much should take away much[91]. Therefore no element of charity <and actually financing parasitism and sloth> is present in the paying of wages. The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. And he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition of his contribution. The man who comes to the day’s job feeling that no matter how much he may give, it will not yield him enough of a return to keep him beyond want, is not in shape to do his day’s work. He is anxious and worried, and it all reacts to the detriment of his work (put in bold type by the authors: this is exactly what all post-Stalin reformers achieved on the territory of the former USSR).

But if a man feels that his day’s work is not only supplying his basic need, but is also giving him a margin of comfort and enabling him to give his boys and girls their opportunity and his wife some pleasure in life, then his job looks good to him and he is free to give it of his best (put in bold type by the authors)[92]. This is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business. The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day’s work is losing the best part of his pay» (Ch. 8. “Wages”).

We shall stop quoting here because in order to make clear the point of our further discussion (discourse) several issues of managing an enterprise and its employees must be clarified.

* * *

Digression 5 :

Directly Productive and Auxiliary Labor, Managerial Labor, Rem u neration of Labor

Earlier we have quoted the following words of H. Ford in a footnote:

«It is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages».

In the modern world product is in most cases the result of the work of an integral microeconomic system — means of production, the infrastructure of the enterprise and its workers. If one considers only the factors of profit[93] and number of employees the ratio of «profit per employee» is what determines the employees’ wages on the whole. Yet because the collective is heterogeneous in terms of professions, responsibilities and authority the enterprise’s head must face the following triad of questions:

1. Whom to pay?

2. What to pay for?

3. How much should one pay?

In order to answer those three questions and ensure management efficiency one must have a clear understanding of what every worker’s professional skills and responsibilities are (within the framework of organizational structure), as well as how his or her professional skills contribute to the collective’s productive activity on the whole (the latter may or may not be covered in job descriptions).

If one grades professions without going into much detail one would get the following three categories:

Workers directly engaged in the manufacturing process are factory personnel;

Workers engaged in support and maintenance are support personnel (janitors, general-duties men, repair and servicing personnel) that also includes what is generally referred to in Russia as «technical personnel» of various divisions of the enterprise (purchase, accounting, security and others);

Workers engaged in managing work of other members of the collective and the work of structural divisions each performing a dedicated function are management personnel.

Representatives of these three categories do not have equal opportunities of participating in the manufacturing process and of developing it thereby ensuring the «profit per employee» ratio growth that to a certain extent characterizes the enterprise’s efficiency and its facility to pay wages and salaries to employees and dividends to shareholders.

Besides, in the framework of most modern manufacturing processes there are workers in all the three categories who are busy with performing their professional duties throughout the whole working day. But there are workers whose professional skill the enterprise cannot do without but the manufacturing process is of such kind that work can be assigned them only for a part of workday or only on certain days.

Because the nature of production and technology dictates the way production and collective work are organized, piecework principle in remuneration of production and auxiliary personnel labor is an irrelevant remnant of independent amateurism, of individual cottage craft. When the collective provides the systemic integrity of an enterprise, piecework means the following:

squabbles within the collective (open and covert) around who gets access to paying and non-paying work;

constant threat of piecework men violating manufacturing procedures in order to get a higher output which leads to increasing expenditure on technical control service;

encouraging repairmen and maintenance personnel to commit acts of sabotage to the end of artificially raising their importance and, correspondingly, their payments;

concealing new and better methods of work and hampering their application within the collective by piecework men of highest qualification to the end of maintaining their monopoly, which is one of the largest obstacles on the way of technological progress and of production quality growth;