Efficiency As a Basis for Operation And Wages

s Government, equally in what it attempts and in what it fails to attempt. The great industrial and transportation corporations are often very efficient in manipulation, but content with low efficiency of operation, although there are notable exceptions. The great ocean shipbuilding yards from Maine to Virginia, from Puget Sound to the Bay of San Francisco, depend not at all on the internal efficiency (which enables the International Harvester Company, although a thousand miles inland, to export in competition with the whole world), but solely on absolute prohibition of competition and on lavish government appropriations. It is the little American plant manufacturing automobiles, motor boats, or bicycles, making locomotive repair parts, or some other specialty, that defies the competition of the world. The ten-million-dollar and upwards company ought to to be able to supplement every dollar- a-day worker with a two-hundred-thousand-dol- lars-a-year staff of assistants, thereby making the worker four times as effective and gaining a crushing advantage over the smaller concern which cannot afford the same aggregation of specialized knowledge. The great concerns, however, have conspicuously failed to develop this advantage, even if they do have a large staff of experts?a very different thing from a staff organization which gives the least worker the needed direction, stimulus and advice. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar staff for a dollar- a-day man is neither Uto... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.