of
attractive prices and easy methods of payment made them by the company's
management. There are already many other concerns where this is true in
greater or less proportion.
These are facts that certain types of labour agitators or even leaders
as well as special pleaders for labour, find it convenient to forget, or
at least not to mention. The same is true also of the millions that are
every year being paid out to make all working conditions and
surroundings cheerful, healthful, safe; in various forms of insurance,
in retiring pensions. Through the initiative of this larger type of
employer, or manager of capital, many hundreds of thousands both men and
women and in continually increasing numbers, are being thus
benefited--outside and above their yearly wage or salary.
A new era in connection with capital and labour has for some time been
coming into being; the era of democracy in industry has arrived. The day
of the autocratic sway on the part of capital has passed; nor will we as
a nation take kindly to the autocratic sway of labour. It is obtaining
a continually fuller recognition; and cooperation leading in many lines
to profit-sharing is the new era we are now passing into.
Though there are very large numbers of men of great wealth, employers
and heads of industrial enterprises, who have caught the spirit of the
new industrial age upon which we have already begun to enter, and who
are glad to see labour getting its fairer share of the profits of
industry and a larger recognition as partners in industry, there are
those who, lacking both imagination and vision, attempt to resist the
tide that, already turned, is running in volume. They are our American
Bourbons, our American Junkers. They are, considering the ominous
undercurrents of change, unrest and discontent that are so apparent in
the entire industrial and economic world today, our worst breeders and
feeders of Bolshevism and lawlessness.
If they had their way and their numbers were sufficiently large, the
flames of Bolshevism and anarchy would be so fed that even in America we
would have little hope of escaping a great conflagration. They are the
ones who are determined to see that their immense profits are
uncurtailled, whose homes must have ten bathrooms each; while great
numbers of their workers without whom they would have to close up the
industry--hence their essential partners in the industry though not in
name--haven't even a single bath-roo
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