an unusual time, but it illustrates in an exaggerated way the labor difficulties. What this manager told me out of his experience about the lack of family discipline and the disrespect for authority shown by these hordes of American youth wasn't reassuring. For example, he said that the records of his factory showed that sixty-five per cent of these young men left without even telling the foremen.

Here is evidently a great boom town, with a boom factory population, a vast and swiftly growing demand for production, extraordinary opportunities for velvet profits, with wages averaging ninety cents an hour. It is not to be wondered at that modern management, with this gigantic labor problem to face, has developed in Akron a tendency towards the most up-to-date stabilizing of the physical, mental, and moral life of the workers that has been attempted on so large a scale in any single city of the United States. In one plant or another you can trace the rapid growth of the idealisms which lie at the base of good workmanship and good citizenship: namely, good housing, good health, good education, thrift, creative interest, cordial co-operation between management and employees. Of course you can trace in all this on the part of the industrial management a mixture of benevolence and design. Of the great trio of plants, the Firestone seems to have been the conservative pioneer in the development of sound industrial relations, laying the emphasis especially upon the economic stability of the workers; the Goodrich is more cautious still, and, though ready to move in the direction of the great idealisms, moves slowly, and insists on being shown that the new way is better than the old; the Goodyear has at least tentatively marked out a far-flung battle-line of progress, probably as daring as has ever been suggested by any important industry in

the United States. For the present the advance of the Goodyear projects is necessarily checked by the slowing down of the tempo of all rubber production, but the future of the unusual experiments which this corporation is making will be watched with sympa thetic concern by all students of industrial democracy.

Firestone and Goodyear have developed extensive new sections of the city of Akron into areas of modern homes for employees. Firestone Park is four years old and has a thousand houses, each representing an investment of from four to ten thousand dollars. Thus far the number of factory workers who have purchased homes in Firestone Park is not large, but there are very many homes of foremen and superintendents and members of the clerical force. Also expert real estate suggestion and legal aid, paid for by the corporation, are given on a wide scale to shop employees who are buying and building their own homes in other parts of the city. Fire stone Park is a model in varied architecture and artistic landscape. Good year Heights is more compact, and probably a third of the whole Goodyear population is already homing there, the employees slowly purchasing the houses at cost, in monthly payments which are less than rental would be elsewhere in the city of Akron.

Good health! All these great companies recognize that the care of illness and prevention of illness and reasonable financial benefits during illness, reaching to the family of the worker as well as to the worker himself, are a part of the economy of industry as well as a phase of the humanization of industry. As one of the managers said to me: "How can a man work well if he knows his

wife or child is sick at home and improperly cared for? If a man is absent, we look him up and find out if he is ill or if there is illness in his home.

Very frequently we find that the man is at home taking care of the house because his wife is sick and it has not been possible to get anybody else to do the work. We are losing the man. The man is losing money. He is letting slip eight or nine dollars a day to do a housework job. So we see that the wife or the child gets a nurse, if a nurse is needed, from our regular staff. And if he has no doctor or a good-for-nothing doctor, he can have the advice and help of one of our medical staff. If he able, we ask him to pay a reasonable price for the nurse, but not for the doctor. And if he is hit hard, we carry the burden as a loan, and finally charge it off if the man proves deserv ing. We have found that worry over the conditions at home is one of the chief hindrances to full and intelligent pro duction. And we have found also that a great number of people falsely believe that they are saving money by not har ing a doctor in time. 'It will wear off, they say. We have learned that much economic loss as well as suffering and sorrow can be avoided by taking ill ness in time. And we try to show our workers the way to do this."

The Goodrich plant depends upon system of group insurance against il ness and death, and accident if it occurs outside the plant. Of course accident inside the plant is taken care of by the very perfect system of workmen's com pensation insurance which has been de veloped in the State of Ohio. But even so, in addition to this the Goodrich organization keeps twenty-four nurses and twenty-four doctors constantly at work in physical examination of em ployees, in first aid to accident and illness, and in extreme cases reaches into the home.

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Goodyear has a diagnostic clinic which may lack something in skill but which does not lack much in equipment when compared with such a diagnostic clinic as exists, for example, at Johns Hopkins. The employee may find out what is wrong with him, if it is humanly possible to know, without cost to him self. All accident cases and all surgery are taken care of in the corporation's hospital and by the corporation's surgical experts. All medical cases from the clinic are turned over with the diagnosis to family physicians on the outside. The corporation watches through its nursing staff to see that no burden of illness too great to bear falls upon any home. And in the case of tuberculosis developing after an em ployee has entered the plant, Goodyear assumes unusual responsibility for the cure. The policy of the corporation is not to allow wage loss through genuine illness to fall on the workers. But there is no funny business about it. I urging the necessity for the develop ment of illness care and prevention inside of industrial plants I have often been met by the assertion that the tend

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large expenditure of time, of care, and of money. The Hall is new, and has suddenly attracted wide attention, but the enterprise of factory education has been in progress in Akron since 1915. Up to the present period of depression in the rubber industry there was an enrollment of several thousand. There are general factory classes open to any one, where any man may cure the defects of early neglect in training and get at least a good high school education at any age. Then there is the school for apprenticed machinists, which takes boys between fifteen and eighteen years of age, pays them the apprentice rate of from 32% to 55 cents an hour-pays each boy for going to school two hours a day as well as for his shop work. He is committed to a three years' course, and if he becomes eighteen before he completes it, and is therefore entitled to the ruling six dollars a day minimum wage, this excess is held back until he graduates, and on that proud day he receives not only his diploma but the excess check figured at the sixdollar-a-day rate. Side by side with the shop and the school go the recreational activities, the Boy Scout training and the Wingfoot Lake camp with the chance for a joyous week-end at the cost of $1.10 in hard money.

These young apprentice machinists, having graduated, can now, if they wish, go into training for the Flying Squad rou for another three years' curriculum and graduation. What is the Goodyear Flying Squadron? It is a body of picked men who can pass a rigid physical examination and show eagerness

and mental initiative in workmanship and scholarship. There is the Production Flying Squadron, which, before the depression, consisted of twelve hundred picked men, the ranks of the older members being constantly depleted by promotions. This is intended to be the brain matrix of Goodyear. During the three years' curriculum During the three years' curriculum each man in the squadron works at one time or another on every operation in the factory. He is instructed in Engpublic speaking, salesmanship, economics, organic and inorganic chemistry, industrial relations, and labor management. At the end of the course he gets the degree of Master Rubber Worker. He is also entitled to certain general stock participation.

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There is also an Engineering Flying Squadron into which are allowed to go only selected men who are deemed fit to develop into broad, level-headed industrial leaders with a natural aptitude for machinery. Besides all the general training of the Production Squadron, twenty-five months are spent in studying and operating every phase of machine control and construction. Once every week the men come together for a one-hour meeting of experts from the outside as well as inside the plant. At this meeting the personal and inventive side of the men is brought out and charted by the experts, and the men are given credit for inventiveness and suggestive power and are encouraged to try out new mechanical methods and perform new experiments. So much has been attempted in this field by Goodyear that it is of course impossible to believe that everything is yet functioning effectively.

Creative interest! This is, of course, the ultimate purpose of the projected educational system of Goodyear. It is for the purpose of developing that personal initiative which modern industry has too often stifled. Firestone and Goodrich also seek to develop a mental

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keenness which will be of utility within the industry. The workers are stim lated by a system of prizes to the crea tion of new ideas which will improve any operation within the plant. Many suggestions of value are constantly being made by employees. The manare gers of Goodrich and Firestone told me that the plant committees on new ideas Ther were hundreds of suggestions behind and were sifting out many proposed changes of real worth which the eng neering corps at the top had not ob served in combing the plant thoroughly The for possible improvements. The grea working democracy of industry, it stimulated by adequate appreciation and reward, is able to furnish valuable stores of material upon which the engineering experts at the top ma build, even if the original suggestio is partially impracticable. The resu is a lowering of cost and the impro ing of the morale and the quickening of the mental life of the labor force. By

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If you wish to get into trouble i Akron, just speak of it as a "welfar town." How both managers and me hate the word "welfare"! Nobody ere uses it except in derision. It seem to carry with it the notion of bener lent autocracy, which the men will abide and which modern managers an very anxious to get away from. An yet Akron has everything that or narily goes by the despised name: eight-hour day, the intimate care o health and homing, insurance agains the lightning stroke of human ills, reth reational activities, the club-house the gymnasium, the Americanizatio classes, the athletic fields, the band the cafeteria lunches at cost, the ma choruses, the players' groups, the vande ville and the minstrels, the dramatics the lecture courses, the sewing and cooking schools, the social activities every name and nature-nothing missing of this kind of thing in Akro town.

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But if you listen long you learn that though management knows the road i must travel, management nevertheles is not deceived about the difficultie along the road and the frailties of h man nature which it has to deal with or overcome. A man who was definitely in a position to be acquainted with the facts told me that when employees were laid off in such numbers during the past month on one day four hun dred telegrams went out of the Akro office calling for funds from the home folks back on the farms and in the moun tains, with which to pay transportation home. These men had stayed Akron a few days, and all surplus was said to gone. As one of the managers me, "The day of silk shirts and tr wives instead of one is passing." Akron six months ago bricklayer under the rules are reported to have demanded a dollar and a quarter a hour and to have laid, on the average

around

nine hundred bricks in a day. At Los Angeles, where labor was not hampered by rules, the worker was laying twenty-two hundred bricks in a day and receiving ninety cents an hour. Akron revolted and let the bricklayers out. Now in Akron you can get, I be lieve, twenty-two hundred bricks laid, on the average, in a day at a dollar an hour. There were many workers in the rubber industry who were only twenty-five to fifty per cent efficient, and the depression is said to be squeezing out the undesirables. As one employer expressed it, "There has been too much cushion.' The demand for tires has been so great that methods of inefficiency were possible and yet money could be made. It is going to be different now. There is still a lot of room for improvement in process, but, after all, even there the point of saturation is being reached. A dozen companies are making as good tires as it is probably humanly possible to build. There is no more mystery about the business. There may be a choice of compounds, but that is all. This whole experience of settling down is risky, but it is going to be a good thing for the industry after it is over."

The labor manager's troubles with human nature have made him reasonably wary about going too fast in experitments with so-called industrial democracy. Even the much-heralded Goodyear parliament represents little more than a referendum upon the plans of management in certain restricted fields. At that, the other rubber managers believe that Goodyear is pretty advanced. They believe that time is needed to develop a safe and efficient form of industrial democracy and that the work should go on slowly by trial and experiment. "The great thing," said the indomitable Middle Western Yankee who owns a majority of the stock in the Firestone plant, "is to obtain by fair means the confidence of labor. A rightdown, rugged honesty of purpose on the part of management beats all the schemes of representative machinery. Machinery is of no use if labor knows or thinks that management isn't on the level. And if labor knows that management is cn the level, almost any kind of machinery will work, even none at all."

Said one of the men at the top in Goodrich: "Sometwenty-five or twentyeight thousand men in Goodyear have had what is called the great benefit of a House and Senate and all the other paraphernalia of industrial democracy now for over a year. And all the eighty thousand workers in other factories in Akron have read about it and heard about it from every angle; but isn't it somewhat significant that no body of workers in any other factory in Akron have even asked for it? The Goodyear experiment in representative democ racy may be a very good thing, but

Courtesy of Goodyear News Service

A CLASS OF GOODYEAR FOREMEN IN THE INDUSTRIAL UNIVERSITY

certainly there are no signs that the rest of the industry is demanding it or needs it."

But Goodyear is not daunted. It has faced the fact that the desire for selfexpression in the great mass of the workers of the world creeps resistlessly on, and it has undertaken an experiment in satisfying that desire. By a system of secret primaries and elections forty men are selected to represent the body of workers in a "House of Representatives" and twenty men to represent them in the "Senate." The chambers in which they meet in Goodyear Hall are worthy of one of the smaller State capitols. They follow the legislative rules from the Blue Book at Albany, they have their committees, their bills and resolutions, their thoroughgoing debates upon factory rules and regulations and matters of wage adjustments, working conditions, and grievances of every sort. A voter or "Industrian," as voters are called at Goodyear, must be eighteen years of age, an American citizen, understand the English language, and have had six months' continuous service record in the Goodyear factory immediately prior to election. A member of the Goodyear "House of Representatives" must be must be twenty-one years of age and have had one year's continuous record in the fac tory. A "Senator" must be twentyfive years of age and on the pay-roll of Goodyear for five years, the last year being continuous.

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These assemblies have power over all plans pertaining to workers. The tion may be one of adjusting piecework rates on a man down in the curing room. The industrial parliament appoints an investigating committee and makes its own study of the situation and perhaps recommends that the rate be changed. What it shall be exactly is left to the experts of the executive staff. An order of the representative

parliament, if a two-thirds vote is obtained over the possible veto of the factory manager, is final as to whether the rate shall be changed. The experts of the company determine what the change onght to be, bearing in mind the rough justice indicated by the committee of the representative assembly.

During the year of the operation of this representative assembly there have been many differences of opinion, but the two-thirds power to override the veto of the factory manager has never yet been invoked. The two parties have always found a corrective way. A member of the "Senate" told me that they had to put a bill up to the manager the third time before he signed it, but they have yet to find their confidence in his sense of fairness and justice to be misplaced. The really great good is the human element, the bringing of management and men together so that they understand each other and are not looking for trouble on either side.

It is probably well for the sensible development of democracy among the workers in the rubber industry that there should be conservative as well as advanced managers. Political democracy has slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent. It is probably better that it should be so with industrial democracy; sometimes an industrial council, sometimes a senate and assembly within the plant, sometimes a shop committee, sometimes the silent extension of some humble institution like the safety committee of employees, until upon its foundation is built the. democratic edifice. So far as I recall, mankind has never done well with more democracy than it could properly assimilate and appreciate at the moment. And this is especially true in the midst of the intricacies and involvements of industrial organization upon the able management of which depends the economic livelihood of the Nation.