all because a "sinking fund" for the replacement of
the body and vital strength of a worker has never been
invented.
239
FORD IDEALS
It is possible, however, to consider these latter
problems in a lump and provide for them under a form
of old-age pensions ; but even so, we have not thus
attended to the question of profit which each day's
labor ought to yield in order to take care of all of
life's overhead, all physical losses, and the inevitable
deterioration which falls upon all earthly things.
Moreover, there are questions having to do with
the pre-productive period, which would have to be
solved. Here is the man, let us say, ready to begin
his service to society by turning out days' work
throughout his life. How much did it cost to rear and
educate him to his present age and usefulness? And
how can that be figured as part of the cost of the
energy he puts forth as he works today? Now, if it
were the case of a machine, you would know what
to charge. The machine cost a certain sum ; it wears
out at a given rate; it would cost such-and-such an
amount to replace. It is a simple matter to figure the
actual cost of the machine and its productive work,
and add the profit.
Can we do that with men? Rather, can men do
that for themselves, so that selling a day's work they
will have as intelligent an idea of the cost of that
day's work and the profit it ought to bring as any
manufacturer ought to have of his product?
The problem becomes more complicated when you
consider the man in all his aspects. For he is more
than a workman who spends a certain number of hours
at his work in the shop every day.
If he were only himself, the cost of his mainte-
nance and the profit he ought to have would be a simple
matter. But he is more than himself. He is a citizen,
contributing by his cultivation and interest to the wel-
fare of the city. He is probably a householder, living
under conditions which represent more than mere
maintenance, in that they represent the graces of so-
cial life. More than that, he is probably a father with
a more or less numerous progeny, all of whom must
subsist and be reared to usefulness on what he is able
to earn.
Now, it is obvious that to regard the man alone,
240
PROFIT AND COST IN A DAY S WORK
refusing to reckon with the home and the family in
the background, is to arrive at a series of facts which
are misleading and which alone can never suffice even
for a temporary solution of the questions that con-
cern us.
How are you going to figure the contribution of
the home to the day's work of the man? You are
paying the man for his work, but how much does that
work owe to his home ? How much to his position as
a citizen? How much to his position as the pro-
vider of a family? The man does the work in the
shop, but his wife does the work of the home, and
the shop must pay them both ; on what system of
figuring is the home going to find its place on the cost
sheets of the day's work? It finds its place there
already in a sort of haphazard way. If a man cannot
support himself, his wife, his children, his habitation,
his position in society why, he doesn't stay at the
job, that's all. It isn't a matter of cost and profit to
him ; it is the matter of a "living."
Is a man's own livelihood the "cost"? And is his
ability to have a- home and a family the "profit"?
Is the profit on a day's work to be computed on a
cash basis only, measured by the amount a man has
left over after his own and family's wants are all
supplied?
Is the livelihood of five or six persons beside those
of the actual worker to be charged up to "profit" ?
Or, are all these relationships to be considered
strictly under the head of "cost," and the profit to be
computed entirely outside of them? That is, after
having supported himself and family, clothed them,
housed them, educated them, given them the privil-
eges incident to their standard of living, ought there
to be provision made for still something more in the
way of savings profit, and all properly chargeable to
the day's work? These are questions which call for
accurate observation and computation.
Perhaps there is no one item connected with our
economic life that would surprise us more than a
knowledge of just what excess burdens the clay's work
actually carries.
241
FORD IDEALS
It carries all the worker's obligations outside the
shop ; it carries all that is necessary in the way of
service and management inside the shop. The day's
productive work is the most valuable mine of wealth
that has ever been opened.
Certainly it cannot be made to carry less than all
the worker's outside obligations. And certainly it
ought to be made to take care of the worker's sunset
days when labor is no longer possible to him, and
should be no longer necessary. And if it is made to
do even these, industry will have to be adjusted to a
schedule of production, distribution and reward which
will stop the leaks toward the pockets of men who do
not assist production in any way, and turn all streams
for the benefit of those who do. In order to create
a system which shall be as independent of the good-
will of benevolent employers as of the ill-will of selfish
ones, we shall have to find a basis in the actual facts
of life itself.
It costs just as much physical strength to turn
out a day's work when wheat is $1 a bushel as when
wheat is $2.50 a bushel. Eggs may be 12 cents a
dozen or 90 cents a dozen it makes no difference in
the units of energy a man uses in a productive day's
work.
One would think that the real basis of value would
be the cost of transmuting human energy into articles
of trade and commerce. But no ; that most honest
of all human activities is made subject to the specu-
lative shrewdness of men who can produce false short-
ages of food and other commodities, and thus excite
anxiety of demand in society.
It is not in industry that the trouble lies, but in
those regions beyond, where men lie in wait to seize the
fruits of industry and create false scarcities for the
sake of arousing an anxious demand for things which,
normally, are and ought to be accessible to all who
engage in daily productive pursuits.
We must begin with the land ; we must continue
with the day's labor; and we must keep so close, so
jealously close to both these fundamentals that we
shall be suspicious and fearful of all that robs the
242
PROFIT AND COST IN A DAY S WORK
land of men, and robs labor of its primal importance
in material life.
We shall think out, and try out, and establish
more enduring economic systems as we go on about
our work, than we shall ever be able to do sitting idle
with our heads in our hands trying to "think" a new
world system out of our brains.
The day's work is the hub around which the whole
wheel of earth-life swings. It must be kept central,
both in our thinking and our action. Any system that
shunts the day's work off to one side as unimportant,
is riding to a fall.
243
Who Is the Producer?
WHO is the Producer? It is really an important
question in these days of revised thinking, be-
cause there is growing up a new class-conscious aris-
tocracy which calls itself "the producers," and is very
exclusive of everyone else. It is, of course, a good
sign that emphasis is being placed on production and
that a new appreciation has come for the producer;
and perhaps it is natural that a kind of class pride
should grow up which would limit the right to wear
that honorable name; but all this makes it the more
necessary that we should be clear in our minds as to
who the Producer really is.
The most common description of the Producer
would lead us to believe that he is the man from whose
hands comes the finished product. We are easily de-
ceived on this point. This man, we say, makes horse-
shoes. He produces something useful. He is thus
a valuable member of society. We can see his work,
we can see him perform it, we can see how it serves
the immediate needs of the community. Therefore,
we have no hesitancy in awarding him the title of
Producer.
But behind that man are others whom we do not
sec. There is the miner who dug out the iron ore.
There is the mule-driver who transported the ore to
the mine shaft. There is the engineer who hoisted it
to the top. There are the men who handled it in the
smelter. There are the other men who sailed the ships
that carried it to the steel mills. Then in the steel
mills it passed through the hands of many men who
transformed it into steel; and there were railroad men
and truckmen who carried it to the place where ma-
terial was needed. Finally there was the blacksmith
who with his brawny arm and practiced eye shaped it
into the article that was needed a rod, a brace, or a
horseshoe.
244
WHO IS THE PRODUCER?
When you actually trace any article of use through
the numerous hands that worked upon it, and then
attempt to divide the price of the article among those
various men, you not only get an idea of the vast co-
operation which production involves, but also how
quantity production is the only method by which a low
price to the purchaser and an adequate wage to the
producer can be maintained.
During this process of tracing, you would also
come upon another fact which is often overlooked ;
you would become aware of a very considerable body
of workers whose hands did not directly touch the
product at all, but whose whole work was in serving
the Producers during the time they were actually en-
gaged in the work of production. We are not now
speaking of the various forms of service rendered to
the Producers outside the shop, but that service which
is rendered them inside the shop.
Take the shop sweepers, for example. They never
touch the product of the shop. To the careless eye
they are not producing anything at all. They are
mere "extras," so to speak. Many would indignantly
deny them the title of Producers.
Yet they serve the processes of production in an
indispensable way. Sweeping the shop has a direct
bearing on the production of the special article which
the shop exists to make. For example, an accumula-
tion of waste would hinder production in two ways;
first, the waste itself would get in the workers' way;
second, to get it out of his way the worker would have
to leave his job and go sweeping.
Now, when the sweeper goes through his appointed
section of floor space with his broom, he is clearing
the way for the worker, he is allowing the workei
to continue straight on with his job, unhindered.
Again, the sweeper serves the worker in a still
more indirect yet important way : cleanliness of the
shop brings sanitary benefits with it, and so the
sweeper serves the worker's health, and through it
production, by cutting down lost time clue to illness.
Perhaps the most subtle service the sweeper ren-
tiers is a psychological one. A clean shop has an in-
245
FORD IDEALS
fluence on the men. They become more clean-cut in
their own work. Wherever you see a shop cluttered
up with a mass of waste, or with material dumped
around anywhere in disorderly fashion, you will find
that the workmen's minds become cluttered too ; they
partake of the general disorderliness. Now, the
sweeper has worked for weeks and months and has
not touched a single process of what we call produc-
tion, and yet he has served the Producer and aided
production.
If the man whom we call the Producer had been
compelled to stop and do his own sweeping, he would
have drawn the same rate of pay for handling a broom
as was given him for the skilled use of a tool. It
would have been a waste of skill. The sweeper re-
lieved him of that necessity, and so made it possible
to keep the mechanical skill where it was most needed.
And because the sweeper is thus a contributor to
production through rendering service to the more di-
rect Producer, it is believed that he is entitled to a
wage that recognizes his value. That is why the min-
imum wage, which always ought to be high enough
to support a very creditable standard of living, should
include the sweepers also, or any other similar workers
whose efforts contribute to the general work of pro-
duction.
Are we going to deny the name of Producer to
those whose services are a part of the immediate pro-
ducer's services?
That is just what is sometimes done. There is a
sort of an aristocracy of skill growing up. There is
an exclusiveness which would shut out the contributors
to production from the status and rewards of Pro-
ducers. It is rather strange to see these divisions
arise, and to see bow the urge of human pride always
makes for separateness among men. There are others,
of course, beside the sweepers, who serve the immedi-
ate Producers of articles of use. The man who plans
the work, who makes it possible for the Producer to
begin the job at once instead of waiting to lav it out
and plan it ahead be, too, has bis part in production.
Then, before any of these came upon the scene at
246
WHO IS THE PRODUCER?
all, there is the man who had vision enough and faith
enough to win the necessary means to start the work
going in the first place: the man whose credit or
whose idea was good enough to secure capital and
machinery and a place to work. Surely it will not
be denied that he, too, had his part in Production
that he served Production and the Producer, too.
The difficulty has been in the past very similar to
that which confronts us now, namely, a tendency on
the part of one group to minimize the importance of
the other group, as if that were the only way to se-
cure its own importance.
Our enormous and insistent demand for the fin-
ished product has, in these days, given an exaggerated
prominence to the man who does the finishing. The
last man to handle the article is the first man the pub-
lic sees, and thus he is the one who is most often
given the title of Producer.
The man who "turns it out" is the man whom mod-
ern opinion acclaims as the real creator.
And yet it must be clear to all that this man could
not "turn it out" unless a whole series of processes
had produced it to his hand almost ready to be "turned
out."
When all is said and done, it is the organization
that produces, and no individual worker. And by
"organization" is meant not only the specific shop
which makes the specific article, but the whole in-
dustrial process, from those which deal with the raw
materials of the earth, to those that give the finishing
touches which prepare the worked material for the
market and for use.
They are all part of the plan. It may be that some
of the processes could be shortened up a little; it may
be that profiteers push in here and there to collect an
unwarranted tax on the completed article as it passes
along the channels of commerce ; but aside from these,
which can easily be remedied, it will be found that the
actual shaping of the article occupies a place about
midway in the whole process of Production. It is not
the whole. It is indispensable, of course ; but it is
not warranted in assuming a lordly dominance over all
the others.
FORD IDEALS
Certainly there is no place in a just and well-reg-
ulated world for any labor that does not in some meas-
ure contribute to Production. This is not to take" a
sordid view of life, but only to insist on usefulness in
the things which we support. Every man who eats and
wears clothes and enjoys creature comforts, does so
at the expense of someone else's labor. Now, he ought
to yield an adequately useful return for what he re-
ceives that is the principle.
248
All Are Members of the
Consuming Class
A CORRESPONDENT suggests that in classifying
society into groups, such as the Producing, the
Consuming and the Public groups, or the Capital, the
Labor and the Public groups, there should have been
added the Government group, thus placing the struc-
ture on four solid legs, instead of leaving it the "three-
legged stool" of recent popular expression.
The suggestion illustrates the fundamental falsity
of dividing society at all, for it is an undivided organ-
ism. If we set it off into classes and interests, we do
so simply as an aid to our thinking, as children first
use blocks to learn arithmetic ; we never imply that
society is really thus divided ; we never imply that
life is such a hard and fast matter that every man
is shut up into one caste or class.
That is where class-consciousness usually fails as
a motive, and that is why the propagandists of a
class-conscious strife are doomed to failure you can-
not cage an individual in any one class. Even while
you are tagging him, he eludes you and glides into an-
other class, if only for an hour. In a free country like
ours, a man usually does at least he always may
belong to all classes at once, except perhaps artificial
and unwholesome classes like that which we call "the
leisure class." To belong to the "leisure class" simply
means that down in the mine and at the forge and in
the shop there are men working for themselves and for
idlers whom they never saw ; it is to be a sponge, a
parasite, a sign of economic disease.
There is one class in which none of us escapes
membership, and that is the Consuming class. P>y the
law of nature we are all consumers. It means our
very life. Rich or poor, learned or ignorant, it does
not matter every living organism consumes the ma-
terial of life, and for us this means mostlv food for
2-40
FORD IDEALS
the body and the material necessities of residence on
the earth.
Every man, be he the greatest producer ever
known, is a consumer the first thing in the morning
when he sits down at his breakfast table. Whether
he produced what he consumes, or whether someone
else produced it, does not matter sitting at that table
and eating, he has joined the Consuming class. The
total produce of the world is a little less because he
sat there.
And then he goes to his work. He enters the shop
and takes up his task, and by that act he has passed
into the Producing group. No jolt and no jar attended
the transition, no change in his fundamental interests
occurred, he is not on one side of the fence while he
is eating his breakfast and on the other as he plies his
job he is just a human being trying to support him-
self and dependents in a world maze.
Membership in the Consuming class is compulsory
if life is to go on, but evidently membership in the
Producing class is not, for there are some a very few
comparatively who go on consuming all day long,
week in and week out, during a whole lifetime, with-
out ever putting back a single valuable contribution
into the general supply. "They are living on their
money," we say. But they are not. They are living
on the grain w r hich other men raised, the clothing which
other men spun, the commodities which other men
made and their "money" is one of the modern
fetishes by which they are enabled to do this. Money
is always a sign of production, but its possession is not.
But returning to the normal man who has no de-
sire to escape his duty, and who is willing to replace
by production the stuff which he takes for consump-
tion, what is his relation to these two conditions? The
fomenters of labor strife say that he should be a
"bull" when it is a question of how much he shall be
paid for production, and a "bear" when it is a ques-
tion of what he shall pay for what he consumes. In
other words, make the loaf of bread cost more to bake,
but sell it for less because the man who was highly
paid for baking it will presently come around the front
door and buy it for his family.
250
ALL ARE MEMBERS OF THE CONSUMING CLASS
This, of course, would be a very favorable arrange-
ment for the baker, if it could be kept up ; but un-
fortunately for that dream, there is an inviolable re-
lation between the cost of consumption and the cost
of production ; even in the physical body, when re-
pair and replacement cease to equal waste and use,
old age comes and death is not far. Decrepitude and
collapse come to business from the same cause.
There is, doubtless, a difference in the interests of
the individual as Producer and '.hat same individual
as Consumer, but the difference merges into the same
interest at last, namely, to gain enough as Producer
to meet the demands made upon him as Consumer.
Some would-be guides talk as if all this could be
easily arranged if the Producer took what he pro-
duced and let it go at that. The matter is complicated
by another class which comes into existence between
the production and the consumption. The producer
is not buying of himself as producer, but of someone
else who has acquired his product. This gives room
for a mixture of motives to get as much as he can
as producer and give as little as he can as consumer.
This double attitude is assisted by the man's belief
that he is dealing with two sets of persons whose in-
terests seem opposed to his his employer, who he
thinks is trying to get out of him more labor than the
wage is worth ; and the merchant or trader, who he
thinks is trying to get out of him more money than
the article is worth.
The man doesn't see that banish human greed
from the equation he is dealing only with himself
after all, and that if he robs commodities at one end
of the process, they rob him at the other ; and so
equality is established, though in a very unsatisfactory
sort of way.
Now, there are advisers who insist that the way out
of this condition is for the Producer-Consumer to add
to his "class membership" and become Trader, too.
For that is all that the abolition of the commercial
class could mean. But as very few men could subsist
on the commodity which they produce (the commodity
usually being only a part in some larger process of
251
FORD IDEALS
production), and would have to stop producing in or-
der to hawk their product in the market and gain the
wherewithal to procure a subsistence, the process
might end practically in the same place as the present
one does but probably it would end in a much lower
degree of efficiency and in a much lower state of gen-
eral comfort.
In our capacity as workers we are interested in
just rates of reward; in our capacity as consumers
we are interested in just rates of exchange; in our
public capacity we are interested in the general wel-
fare, not of ourselves alone, but of all men.
So, when our correspondent suggests that we add
the Government group, it means just this : we add to
all our other "class memberships," a new member-
ship which carries power and authority with it.
The Government is not a group of men who con-
trol a group of the Public and a group of Producers
and a group of Consumers ; the Government is the
Public, the Producers and the Consumers united to
produce a political life which shall be the safeguard
of all their rights and their just interests.
Perhaps the time has come for Government to con-
sider taking over the control of economic conduct as
well as those other phases of conduct which are indi-
cated in existing laws. Certainly a Government that
has power to say what shall be the standard quart or
bushel, should also have power to say what shall be
the standard day of work and the standard rate of
reward.
The world is now moving around in a dazed sort
of way simply because some extremely simple ques-
tions have not been answered questions relating to
the cost of a day's work to the man who gives it, and
the rate of reward he ought to have to put him on
an equality with other men who also are rewarded.
There is natural wealth enough, there is human
energy enough ; one is also persuaded that there could
be found enough human good will, if mankind only
knew what to do. The race is waiting for someone
to show it the simple way out, that all interests may
be brought into harmony, and the friction of unjust
conflict abolished.
252
Every Man Needs Elbow Room
WHEN a man deals in theories it is very easy for
him to exaggerate, because a world that is spun
out of fancy can be more easily rearranged than a
world of throbbing, driving life. Men find it easy to
rear Utopia in their dreams, and make changes over-
night that would dislocate the whole human race if
they were decreed in a real world. But when we are
dealing with real days and actual conditions we find
that our very life is so bound up in the conditions
which surround us as the life of the body inheres in
its organs that sudden and total changes, which are
fortunately impossible, would be fatal, if they were
possible. The danger of our dream-worlds is that