COMMON SENSE AND LABOURBY SAMUEL CROWTHERCONTENTS: CHAPTER PAGE I. THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OF LABOUR UNREST II. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE EMPLOYER AND THE EMPLOYED III. THE WORKER AND His WAGE IV. WAGES AND PROFITSHARING DELUSIONS V. THE FETISH OF INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY VI. WHEN THEY GET TOGETHER VII. THE ECONOMIC TRUTHS OF WORK VIII. THE MAN AND THE MACHINE IX. THE METHODS AND POLICIES OF BRITISH LABOUR CHAPTER ONE THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OF LABOUR UNREST A LARGE employer who has never had any difficulties of moment with his workers and who has given a great deal of his time to the study of how the employ ment relation might in all fairness be adjusted, remarked somewhat hopelessly the other day: There is something I do not understand in my workers. In former years, we have always been able rather easily to arrive at adjustments and I have rather prided myself, I think, upon the sincerity of the union between myself and those I employ. I have scientifically worked out wage payments and they have always been satisfactory. I have so adjusted my affairs that the volume of work passing through the shops seldom decreases. If our selling orders drop off, we produce for stock, and for the past Beprinted from System, the Magazine of Business, by permission of A. W. Shaw Company. five or six years we have never laid off a man be cause there was no work for him. But today there is something different, there seems to be something stirring, something which I cannot comprehend and I am not sure that the men themselves comprehendfor I have talked frankly with many of them. There is something one might almost call a subconscious restlessness that makes them seem different. I cannot put my finger on it and say it is this or it is that The quality eludes me. I have heard the same sort of statement from many other employers variously expressed, and undoubtedly there are new and strange currents circu lating through the minds of workers everywhere. It is not precisely a profound dissatisfaction with labour as a means of livelihood. It is not so much wages and hours, for although wage disputes are frequent enough, they very often seem rather to be pegs on which to hang trouble than real causes of themselves. With the almost universal habit of eventually grant ing most demands for wage increases, doubling the increase and then adding it into the cost of the product, employers generally are not a great deal con cerned about the wages they pay. The matter of hours is on the same basis. The desire for an eighthour or a sixhour day would be perfectly comprehensible if the workers gave any evidence at all of desiring so to limit their working time, but they seem to want the eighthour day as a basis of pay and not as a period of work. We have had several strikes because the request for the eight hour day was granted literally, whereas what the workers wanted was a tenhour day with overtime during two hours of it. The unions have no answer. They have gained the eighthour day, which used to be a shibboleth, they are talking of and also succeeding in extending union control, but beyond that they have only vague formulas and some interesting excursions into internationalism, possibly with the thought that if you cannot set your own house in order, it is diverting to poke about your neighbours premises. The progress of events has caught up with trades unions platforms and the workers are less happy than ever they were. The attitude of the worker is curious his outstand ing characteristic today is a reluctance to work. It is extraordinarily hard to buy good service at any price. Per man production has, to a considerable extent, dropped off in America it has dropped off...