why men have some of these peculiar queernesses in their minds with regard to facts and circumstances as they are. I talked with one man in London who had had three days' work in six weeks, and he said some mighty unkind words about Lloyd George. I said, "How about the fellows down on the dock? They had work and were getting fifty shillings a day on piece-work, carrying frozen beef that came from the Argentine." He came back at me and said, "Yuss, I know them piece-work fellies. They're fellies that do three days work in one. They're traitors to their clawss. They tikes the bread and butter outa the mouths of the women and kids of such honest workmen as you and me. But wot do they care so long as they get theirs, and the rest of us can bloody well starve!" The second important thing that seems to me to come out in this matter is the unholy alliance between "tiredness” and “temper." I want it borne in mind that a tired body and a tired mind come from the long hours of work. I cannot possibly take time to go into the details of the way a man feels as the result of a twelve-hour day in the steel business, especially when it is added to by the eighteen-hour Sunday or by the twenty-four-hour Sunday. I am hoping and believing, and have assurances from high quarters that within the next year the twelve-hour day is likely to be done away with in the steel industry. That something must come also from bad living conditions came very forcefully to me in one place where they had an eighteen-hour Sunday, and the only place to live that I could find was a room through which all the roomers had to pass on their way to the bathroom, and through which also all the ventilation had to pass on its way from the bathroom. There were thousands of men living under those conditions; and I am persuaded that a tired man cannot do his part toward making an efficient industry simply because he is paid for the delivery of energy which he cannot possibly deliver because he hasn't got it to deliver; and I am sure also that such a man is bound to make an inefficient and dangerous citizen, just because a tired mind doesn't want to think, and this condition is sure to result in a feeling of meanness and other nasty grouchy, dangerous feelings. Then the third thing is the tremendous ignorance I found in the worker's mind as to the plans, the purposes, and the ideals of his employer; but this I found also equalled by the ignorance on the other side, an ignorance on which is built a great wall of suspicion and distrust. But I must not take time to go into details. I want to say that in spite of this tremendous trend of unemployment and this tremendous fear of the loss of the job that hangs over the heads of so many thousands of workers in this country, I believe there is a tremendously important connection between tiredness and temper; and in spite of this tremendous wall of distrust and suspicion reared upon the platform of ignorance, in spite of those three things I have mentioned, I am convinced that the average workman is not a Bolshevist, and never will wish under present conditions to be a Bolshevist; but I do think we ought to recognize that there is going on in the world today a tremendously important selling contest. If you are going to sell to the thirty millions of workmen in this country, you will have to see that they are prospects and that they are your best customers in this selling contest. In comparison with this whole platform upon which I am standing you could represent by something the size of only my fist the men who are trying to sell to this body of prospects the belief that the only way they can get all the things they want is by means of a sudden, bloody revolution; and then you would have to represent by something the ales of this table the men, employers, and foremen, white-collared people like yourself, who are trying to sell to that same body the belief that the better way for them to gain the commodities and their necessities is by means of a gradual evolution. Elite ought not to be any particular danger as to the result of a selling contest at that work and there would not be save for this one thing; that is, that this salesman wt the Bat," the representative of revolution, is a better salesman to those thirty million pustapes fa than we white collared people are, and just for this one reason—that they better tubull that fist and that final requirement of all good salesmanship, that they always have puluence with their customers. It is important that you should be able by nude apaud and state to some extent at least, their situation, and to respect Plow VPWANAG and their votes and the bankerings which are down there in their Avares and which are a faut to them and which mean so much to them while PAVY TN 4 Hard and dee the Awly be the Rakde ist you will ind a great Find My pakyan Da Honey, that the workman Fees and My pa hay day Nong Noopwerheid You ad me why they are members of MAXVAK 44 di pipe the the exposta matter of the ivè and say, “I ape A de prata NATO in't have a good mart's dog ik wil) da any. No wiii sp. "Čet out of here, y Alla damba a de unot, I sp. Where to pou get that We have any duxit 0 4 2014 Sie morning. ized by years of irregular work. One man said, "Irregular work, I have found, always makes an irregular worker; and an irregular worker is bound to be an irregular citizen." When you have bad living conditions, you will find men taking an interest in, and linking up arms with, our old friend John Barleycorn, because there is a very close connection between a bad job, an irregular job, bad living conditions, and Barleycorn. I have in mind an old fellow who sat outside of the employment office in Duluth, who said, "Of course you drinks lots of whiskey in the lumber camps, because the drunker you be, the less you will be minding of the flies and the bugs; and when you sober up, you are used to them." Quite naturally there in Glasgow, you find a perfectly outrageous amount of drunkenness, such that when I went to visit the slums on a Saturday night, I not only looked as drunk as I could, but I also staggered, because it is absolutely true that there are certain parts of Glasgow where if a fellow visiting around on Saturday looks sober, he is regarded with suspicion. You can go from Glasgow, where you see men being demoralized by bad jobs and bad living conditions, to the center of the British steel industry, and find men there in a state of continual agitation. I went to the local round-house, and a man said to me, "Perhaps you can help me save my job, because if I do not get some of the steel men into our radical unions for revolution at the end of this year, I have got to go some place else." I said, “You are up against it simply because the public and the employers are better salesmen than you are, because they have given these men protection against this terrible T.N.T., this awful explosive powder of tiredness and temper, by cutting out the twelve-hour days; and since March, 1919, they have had an eight-hour day." They also have given them four- and six-room houses, sometimes with bath, and a good wage, graduated to the selling price of steel. I have been talking about the unsteadiness of the job; I have been talking about the connection between bodily states and mental states; and I have been talking about this question of misunderstanding. I want to talk about this further thing, namely, that every workman, like every one of the rest of us, wants somehow to feel that his life is worth while, and that the things he is doing are things worth while. The workman wants, more than he wants anything else, the feeling that he has a share of responsibility, of worthwhileness on the job. I learned this when I was taken for promotion into the millwright gang. I thought I was doing just exactly what the laborer would do when I asked, "How much more do I get ?", and when he told me I would get only two cents an hour more, I thought, Far be it from me to get "het up" about it. But the moment I took my wrench in one hand and my oil can in the other and walked past my old buddies, I made a sensation. They were all there, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles, Mexicans, and all the rest of them; every one of them stood there in amazement at my good luck. That same thing is true in the coal mines. So when I went to South Wales and got my job and found the place in the hands of the Bolshevists, with the men on strike, and windows broken all over the place, I began to go through my formula. I said, "It cannot be the irregular job because these men have regular shifts; it cannot be this matter of tiredness and temper because they work seven hours; it cannot be a matter of misunderstanding. It must be a matter of self-respect. The men want to feel their importance on the job, or rather I should say, they want to feel that their importance on the job is being properly respected. I found that true, because when old Evan Pugh and I found ourselves as laborers, we found that the mechanics felt that they were a bit above the haulers, and the hauler's wife had an edge on the wife of the miner, and the clerk's wife at the office had it over the wife of the miner, and so down the line; so that Pugh and myself found ourselves in the very cellar or basement of the whole social structure. It is true that on this one proposition, social levels always follow job levels. And even old Evan Pugh—you could just see how he swelled up as we worked there, just like the doctor does when he comes into the sickroom, and everbody says, "Yes, doctor," and "No, doctor." He often would say to me, "Stawnd you not by there! Stawnd you quick by 'ere! For if it fall by 'ere, it 'ave to bounce by there!" And I would obey him with alacrity. Just as the fireman said to me one night when he was explaining the whole thing as we sat in a group, "Yusterday the oonder-manager do come to me and sye to me, 'Pugh, that been a good job!' And I do sye to 'im, 'In forty-three year I been in this pit; in forty-three year thot do be the first time thot any mon do sye to me, 'Pugh, thot been a good job." And another man took it up and said, "Oh, aye. Oh, aye, thot been it; look you. Every man do know that for a kindly word a mon will work 'is guts out. But every mon do know thot no dog be'ave well for a mon with a w'ip. Awnd ev'ry mon o' feelin' and sensibility do know thot for 'im the w'ip o' the tongue and the lash o' the lip been worse nor any w'ip on any dog." I have in mind one old fellow that knew that he was slipping, because every day the foreman would give him an easier job, and in the evening when I would meet him at the bar, he would say to me what a wonderful career he had had and tell me about this job, and how he had done things up on that job. I said, "Well, how much do you like to drink?" He drew himself up and said, "Oh, I just like to drink enough to get the feeling of my old position back, like, you know." I say that there are thousands and thousands of men drinking today because they do not get the chance to keep their self-respect on the job. I see no hope of ever making the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment stick until we get back to the source of men's troubles and put working conditions and living conditions where they should be. I have in mind the story of the carpenter. He was working every day in the aeroplane factory, and every day while he was there, the management had made it possible for him to have the feeling that he was helping to make this aeroplane a completed thing, whether it ever saw the western front or not. Every man in a situation should be made to feel that way, and there are thousands and thousands of men in this country who have never seen the completed machines, although they have been making the parts of them for years. And that is a tragedy. This carpenter went down to Long Island, and there on the drill grounds for three weeks helped with whatever was to be done, but he got dissatisfied and came back. His friends guyed him and said, "Oh, you got fired, because you would not leave a fine job like that, with more money and less work, unless you got fired." And of course he would not if all that honor means is in the pay envelope. But this carpenter said, "No, I didn't get fired. What do you think them guys had the nerve to ask me to do? They wanted me to spend two weeks of my time, and my ability, and my tools that I have been collecting all my life, and take all them things, and pack together some rough boards into a room over in the park, and then they would get one of their big cannon, going fourteen miles a minute, and blow the whole damn thing to pieces. They don't want to try to make a monkey out of me." We make a tremendous mistake when we say that these men are skilled workers, because I say every man clear down to the very bottom of our whole industrial structure is trying to justify himself as a man by what he does, and I have the exact wording of the secretary of the International Hoboes' Union on this point. Before I talked to the secretary of the International Hoboes' Union, it was always my understanding that a hobo and a tramp were the same thing; but he said, "You don't suppose I would be a tramp, do you? Do you realize this country of ours could not get along without us hoboes? Do you suppose Minnesota could afford to pay men to stick around all summer because it needs them in the winter for the lumber, or do you suppose that Oklahoma could afford to keep us around all winter because it needs us for the harvesting in the fall? We are migratory workers who go from place to place, and we don't believe in spending money recklessly on railroad fares." He said, "A tramp is a man who walks from job to job because he don't give a rap whether he ever gets there or not, and nobody else does. If you give him a job he will take it periodically and pass on." "But don't ever make the mistake of letting a tramp see that you do not know the difference between him and a bum, because,” he said, “Good Lord, a tramp is miles above a bum, because a bum is a man who neither rides, nor walks nor works." I wonder how many of you know or appreciate that even under normal conditions, one-fifth of the time of the average worker is spent in unemployment. The average man wants to hold a job because he takes more pride in that than he does in eating his daily bread. Some of you may ask if I think that capital is to blame, and others of you may ask if I think that labor is to blame. What I can say is that we are all to blame, and it is about time we stopped the system of trying to pass the buck to the other fellow. I would like to say to social workers particularly, that there is a tremendous connection between men's minds and men's bodies, and that you cannot possibly move men forward to the place where you would like to see them so long as you overlook this fact and consider that it is none of your business what the men are doing there on their job. It is there men have to meet conditions, there is where men have to meet complications, and there is where men have to meet the exigencies of modern life, because the conditions of their living are very largely the result of conditions which they must meet on the job. No one can make better men except as they see the necessity of helping toward making better jobs. We must see that they are given a larger amount of respectability; and particularly is this true of the younger workers, and then for the older workers we must try to increase the amount of security there on the job. The laboring man must have a larger measure of opportunity and a larger measure of security. Those are the things he is after in industry. Those seem to me to be very vital things, and things which ought to touch our hearts as social workers. I think we must have a better understanding in some way in our minds and show the worker that we have sympathy in our hearts; and I am afraid perhaps the only way we can get that larger understanding and wider sympathy is to realize that the world today is in danger. Last summer when old John and I were going down to work, our friends that should have been working were singing valiantly about the beauties of the red flag of revolution; and when men do that, there is danger. And when we got down under the earth with our lamps, when we got down to the bottom and were walking up and down a hole through the darkness, we would come |