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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 ca
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 ca
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 perso
Workers engaged in support and maintenance are support perso
Workers engaged in managing work of other members of the collective and the work of structural divisions each performing a dedicated function are management perso
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 ca
Because the nature of production and technology dictates the way production and collective work are organized, piecework principle in remuneration of production and auxiliary perso
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 perso
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;