The Ghost in the White House Part 23

XIII

LISTENING TO JIM

(A Note on Collective Bargaining)

I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works.

I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it.

A book ent.i.tled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,--a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a principle.

The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National a.s.sociations of Employers and national a.s.sociations of workingmen in labor unions.

Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions.

Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time.

The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other people have it.

When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when I am told in a deep ba.s.s national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937 is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied 2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep ba.s.s seven figure national tone, at their word.

Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years.

It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose, at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,--especially in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer.

The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular human beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from a national Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet the situation as well as Jim did and the factory did.

If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or if the President of the Company had had a telegram giving him national instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to?

I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But the causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt with where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, the more personally they have to be attended to.

If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, say next Christmas--and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relations of men and women and husbands and wives--the stipulations and conditions on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from Indianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to determine the well-being of the s.e.xes, as foolish and visionary a way for the female cla.s.s to attempt to reform and regulate the cla.s.s that has been fenced off by The Creator as the male cla.s.s, as the present attempt of the labor cla.s.s to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal relation of individual employers and individual workmen and subst.i.tute for it collective bargaining from Indianapolis.

There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the women of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a thing nationally that they could not even do at home.

For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside.

The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it.

As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,--as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal--that is to say, the more alive it is.

All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or pa.s.sion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or pa.s.sion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the s.e.xual relation and for the same reasons.

If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get together in another, and pa.s.s resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go?

Only anaemic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together.

And in twenty years only anaemic employers and anaemic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right.

XIV

THE NEW COMPANY

I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front of it--half a street away, American Experience Co.

I wanted to get in.

Of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, The American Express Co., but I couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes--boxes people have got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are mixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used to speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.)

The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company--a big national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go through them all over again alone and just for themselves.

Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it all over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there are many million people with sense in this country--people as good at making sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and the Air Line League proposes that to these people who have the sense, when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped.

And when they get orders--they can ship theirs.

If some of the experience the Labor unions in England have had and got over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken over by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the Air Line League or American Experience Company, if it were existing this minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them--at once. Experiences--or date of experiences shipped from England would not only make a short-cut for America in increasing production in this country, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance in the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to turn the fate of a world.

What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act--particularly through the Look-Up Club--as the American Shipping Experience Company.

XV

THE FIFTY-CENT DOLLAR

This book is itself--so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the Look-Up Club.

The thing the book--between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper--a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities--capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other--reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization.

I might ill.u.s.trate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular idea--an idea on which people must really be got together in America before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all.

Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:--

"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going to have our turn now. n.o.body can stop us."

Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar.

The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money--that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together.

I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like.