THE RANK-AND-FILE WORKER 1. Men and machines.—For many hundred years men have been busy seeking ways of making their work either lighter or more productive. A certain amount of muscular or mental activity is pleasurable and healthful, but when pushed be:vond a certain point fatigue, discomfort, exhaustion and various aches ensue. Primitive man and woman carried their bur dens on their backs or on top of their heads. They gradually dropped this custom when they found they could shift the work to the backs of various beasts of burden which they had tamed. Thus the dog, the donkey, the ox and the horse were trained to be har- • nessed, and in the course of time it was discovered that a man and a horse, or a man and a donkey, could do more work of a certain kind than two men. For this increase of efficiency man claims and deserves the credit, for without the directing power of his brain no beast of burden would have any industrial value.
Next, or perhaps at the same time, came the in vention of tools and machinery. One man with a hand-saw can work up more firewood than ten men without the aid of the saw. But sawing wood makes a man's back ache and is a most monotonous occupa tion, hence it is being supplanted by the buzz-saw operated by an engine, with which one man without much muscular effort can cut up more wood in a day than can a dozen or more with hand-saws. Over half the work that women did fifty years ago is now done by machines, looms, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, churns operated by gaso line or electric power, knitting machines, hat ma chines, dish washers, fireless cookers, etc., but I need not elaborate or give more illustrations. Every reader knows in a general way that tools and ma chinery are now doing with great accuracy and ra pidity a vast amount of work which was formerly done by the hand of a man or woman.
But it may not have occurred to some of my readers that in both business and industry a lot of work is still being done by men, women, boys, and girls which is much like that which men have learned how to un load upon machines and beasts of burden. Much of this work is monotonous in character. The same kind of task bas to be done over and over, day after day, week after week, for only thus can the worker get the highest skill and speed. There are boxes to be
packed and nailed down, messages and packages to be delivered, endless rows of figures that must be ac curately copied and added, memoranda and letters to be filed and recorded, letters to be written or typed and filed, the cash to be counted and cared for, the mail to be distributed, and so on ad infinitum.
Readers who have had any experience in business will recognize at once the type of work I am talking about. It can be known by either one of two ear marks. First, it must be done in the prescribed way, the worker having little or no discretion as to the method he must adopt; second, the work calls for the exercise of very little brain power and closely re sembles the kind of work that is already being done by machines. The man who does this kind of work in business I call the rank-and-file or routine worker. Some of the tasks are more difficult than others, but in general all of them can be performed after a cer tain amount of practice by any man of ordinary edu cation and mental ability.
2. Work and responsibility of the can imagine that certain thoughtless peo ple after reading the foregoing section might feel like skipping this chapter on the ground that the work of "men who are little better than machines" is not worth thinking about, but I have not said that men are little better than machines. I have said merely that the men are doing work very much like that which is already done by machinery, and that is a very different proposition.
The work that these rank-and-file workers do is exceedingly important. For example, much of the concern's business may hinge upon the accuracy with which its orders, instructions, and other communica tions are transmitted to those with whom it has deal ings; once it relied much upon the messenger boy, now it utilizes the telephone as well; but the messen ger boy of forty years ago was not a negligible per sonage merely because a mechanical device has been invented that does most of his work. Thomas Edison, by the way, was once a messenger boy.