Carolina watchman. [volume] (Salisbury, N.C.) 1871-1937, 1936-01-03
TODAY AND
TOMORROW
FRANK Parker SToCKBR1DGE

1 ftNREN I
SALARIES ability
A great deal of publicity is being
given these days to the salaries re-
ceived by the heads of big business
enterprises. To superficial thinkers
it seems unfair that one man should
receive for his services so much
more than most men do.
1t depends, of course, on the val
ue of the service rendered. If one
man has the ability to manage the
affairs of a great corporation so
well that it is able to keep thousands
of workers employed, and at the
same time earn profits for the cap
ital invested in the business, it
wouldn't seem unfair to me if he
were paid, say at the rate of 81 a
year for each employee. l know
dozens of cases, though, where the
executive head of a big organization
gets nothing like that. One of my
friends draws ; salary of 100000
"a year-but his company employs
100000 persons all the year round.
The scarces commodity in the
world is administrative ability.
Without it, no great enterprise
could flourish, and the man who has
it is worth whatever he costs.
WORKERS who rise
! Few wage-earners work as hard
as their bosses do. That is my
considered belief, based on many
years of experience and observation.
| have seen so many w%age-earners
rise through the ranks to high ex-
! ecutive posts that l began, years
ago, to ask how they gained ad-
vancement.
In every case the answer was to
the general effect that they always
did a little more than they were paid
for, liked their Jobs and regarded
the company's interests as their
own. While most of them did not
say so, it was always clear that
these men who started life as
manual workers had higher intelli-
gence and better control of their
appetites than their fellow-workers.
And they had ambition.
There isn't any other route by
which men rise to the high places
in our industrial system, but the
route of hard work plus intelligence,
plus ambition. And they don't stay
long in the high places unless they
also have the pricesless element of
character.
WAGES the gauge
I talked not long ago with a
friend, who heads a great nation
wide corporation, about wages.
"What we try to do is to put
every dollar that it is possible to put
into every employees p~ay-envel-
ope." he said. 7 know that is trre
of most great business concerns, in
spite of the belief which many
workers have that the effort is al
wavs to pay them as little as pos
sible.
The man who is content to do a.
little as he has to, to get by, is usu-
ally the one who grumbles about hi
wages. But the National Indus.
trial Conference Board reported thu
other day on 2,4oo business estb.
lishments, employing 4 IL millior
. workers., all of which offer theil
employees opportunities to earl
higher wages. More than half o:
them pay on the basis of work dom
much for each item turne<
out. That makes it worth while TO-
the worker to be industrious. 4
third of these companies have pre-
miums and bonus payment systems
many are on a profit-sharing basis
The bigger the concern, the NOR
Hit is interested in putting as mucl
Into every workers pay-envelope a
possible.
PR GIFTS small
l I have been studying some sta
tistics-as accurate as any statistic