New-York tribune., 1918-06-14
Jobs and the Man,
From an Address by Professor Trving
Fisher
TNHERE is another lesson which I hope
Il the war may help teach, and that is
Fisher

that in order that labor shall be con-
tented we must understand the psychology
OF the workingman. We must satisfy his
great fundamental human instincts. / be-
lieve there is field for what might be
called industrial psychiatry. have talked
about this often in my classes, but have
been rather hesitant to say anything about
it publicly; until recently 1 have discovered
that number of other people have been
working along the same line and have
reached substantially the same conclusions.
Among these is at least one practical en-
ployer Of labor, Robert B. Wolf, who has
shown, in the wood pulp industry, that it is
possible to make the work itself interesting
Wo the laboring man. believe that herein
lies the hope of solving the great industrial
problem of labor discomfort more than in
any other direction I think that if EN-
ployers would join Wolf and the few other
employers who have gone into this line,
studying the psychology as we'll as the phys
iology of labor, and try to adapt conditions
of work to the needs and yearnings of
labor, labor discomfort will be diminished
far more than By any other method l
know of.
In order that the laboring man may live
his life he must satisfy something more
than the instinct of self preservation. His
life cannot amount to much if it merely
consists in keeping body and soul together.
And yet, with strange blindness, the EN-
ployer assumes that the only thing his
ploye is, or be, interested in is his
wages. Hence these ingenious schemes,
like the Taylor system, for trying to get
more work out of labor consist entirely OF
drumming on this string-trying 20
hold out bale of hay for the donkey and
as he approaches it making him walk the
faster to reach it. believed thoroughly in
these systems, and in piece work, until I
began to understand what at first had ap-
peared to me strange, the objections on the
part of the laboring men, though they did
not and do not themselves understand the
nature of their objections. Their souls are
hungry and thirsty to satisfy these great
instincts, but they do not know it.
Now, what Robert B. Wolf did was TO re-
store, in the first place, the instinct Of
workmanship, which has been subtly alb
stracted from industrial life through snc.
clalization of work and division of labor.
Originally a interested in his
product, just as an artist is interested in
his picture. But to-day, with the minute
division of labor. laborng man sees his
work sweep by him, a peg in shoe, bolt
in an automobile, and since he is not able
to visualize his part in the product his
work ceases to be interesting and becomes
drudgery. He wants to shorten his hours;
and the employer, whose work is interest
ing, whose work is his life cannot under
stand why the employe is always trying to
shirk, whereas he himself is willing to work
twelve or sixteen hours day The reason
is that in case the instinct of work
manshp is satisfied and in the other case
it is not. l have sometimes thought how
much wages / would have to be paid to
give up my job to put pegs into shoes or to
take up some other monotonous work If
you paid s1,o00,000 minute l would
not give up my work and go into an auto
mobile factory a shoe factory ! might
for few minutes! But if it means sacri-
fcing my life work I would prefer suicide,
after having had taste of the satisfaction
that comes from doing work which [ love.
What Wolf did was to show each of these
men, some of them, what their own par
ticular work was. At first he tried to in
troduce the Taylor system, but those asso-
ciated with him practically forbade it. So
he put into operation system of charts
whereby men could record by a series of
curves just what happening at each
stage of the process. They watched their
records, and did more work than could have
been gotten out of them By the Taylor sys-
tenn. The men in this wood pulp factory
have to raise gradually the temperature of
the cookers into which the chips go, keen
the temperature there for a certain num-
Der of minutes, then raise it again, and so
on through certain cycle in order to get
the results Eight years. ago when WOLF
went into this plant they were making, if
remember correctly, with certain equip
ment 100 tons of the worst wood pulp in
the country. To-day, with the same equip
ment, they are making 200 tons of the best.
and the Transformation has been due to
giving these men record of their work
and getting them interested in betterine
this record. Meanwhile, wages have risen
40 per cent; there have been no strikes
the men are loyal to the organization; and
altogether the industrial problem has been
largely solved. All day these men trace
with lead pencil their work. Their own
part in making that wood pulp is that
little picture or graph. And they are just
as much interested in making that picturs
every day as an artist is in painting new
picture. 1t is theirs. They get credit for
it in the eyes of their fellows and in the
eyes of their boss.
There is more in the system, because
Wolf has tried to satisfy also the other
great natural instincts, the instinct Of self
respect and respect for others, the instinct
of loyalty; making them feel as though