The principles of industrial welfare / by John Lee.

  • Lee, John, 1867-1928
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The principles of industrial welfare / by John Lee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    employment of a. large number of men and women, but the question arises whether this paternal aspect is best realized by a method which comes near to fussiness. The parallel of the father in the home has its lessons, they say, and the strict father probably brings up the best children. In the schools of Detroit there are hair- brushing machines of high efficiency for the com- pulsory use of the girls, but it is open to question if the brushing of hair, after all, is not done better secretly and alone, and we read with some anxiety that there are parents in Detroit who are less insistent than they were in the matter of hair-brushing. Paternalism in schools has its disadvantages. It would be easy to say that those employers who do not accept the methods of welfare work are repre- sentatives of the old school, to whom it seems beyond question that an employer has a right to purchase labour in the cheapest market and to employ it under conditions as favourable to himself as possible, in so far as he obeys the law. Even if that were the case it is to be pointed out that it is not so reprehensible to-day as it appears to be. After all, the employer has to face organized labour. He has big forces against him. Moreover, he can say that under present competitive conditions if there are to be any margins at all he would prefer that these margins take the form of increased wages. By some sort of instinct he dreads invisible wages, and it will be shown later on that the dread which is now the dread of the employer was formerly so much the dread of the worker that legislation had to be introduced. But it is unjust to employers at large to represent those who are shy of welfare methods as being of necessity of the “ old school.” They include many employers of high enlightenment who are genuinely anxious as to welfare methods. They are not convinced that those methods have been quite as soberly considered as they deserve to be. They have no desire to cast upon their
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