Mr. Everyman, Manager
As a producer, my neighbor John Black is one of many ‘hands.’ He cooperates with several hundred others in a complicated process of fabrication and assembly. His contribution to that process is not highly individual. He does what his foreman says, and the foreman says what the superintendent indicates should be said; and what the foreman says is predicated upon what the general manager ‘out front’ has decided should be done. Black’s work, clearly, is cut and dried. His opportunity to innovate is strictly limited by the fact that any prospective change must be considered with reference to all the other factors in the production scheme, to the capabilities of the men who handle the goods before he gets them and after he passes them on, to the potentialities of the machine equipment, to the possible effect of such changes upon a market created by a definite selling policy and consistent advertising. In other words, Black does not manage his job; if he tried to, he would be fired.
One of the inevitable results of largescale business is the concentration of the managing function of production in relatively few hands. Black’s grandfather had a small shop of his own, and, perforce, met his own management problems. Black’s father was a partner in a somewhat larger enterprise, and shared responsibility for production and sale. But the enterprise could not hold up against competitors organized as corporations, in command of large resources with which to hire engineers, salesmen, and advertising space.
It is an old story and common — this concentration of the control of production.
Note, however, that my neighbor Black works under orders only eight hours a day. For but a third of his time does he function as a producer exclusively. The rest of the time he is a consumer. No one supervises his consumption; he manages that end of his life for himself.
The results are eminently satisfactory, not only to Black and his family, but also to the community. Black is one of our leading citizens; owns a home, paid for through fourteen years of thrifty living; and has enough margin, so that fears of sickness and old age no longer worry him. He is a good manager of consumption; in fact, the zest for management which he inherited from two generations of managers finds expression in the management of a household now that it is denied management of work.
Every so often the ladies of our onestreet village give a church supper. Upon such delightful occasions Mrs. Black will be found ‘out front,’ bossing the fresh-cheeked country girls who wait on table. She, too, is a manager; but whether she picked up the knack from her husband, or he chose her because she knew how to manage, is something I have not determined. But Mrs. Black is ‘out front’ at these suppers, not merely because she is a good manager, but also because ske is a recognized pillar of society. Even in our little village there are social gradations. Here, as elsewhere, the social organism builds itself around dependables. Mrs. Black we feel sure of; she was here last year, and will be here next; our knowledge that the Blacks have a deed to their two acres and nineroom dwelling gives us confidence. In the country social standing gets back to landownership eventually.
While Mrs. Black orders things about in the dining-room, Mrs. Snover is standing over the cookstove in the kitchen. The social cleavage between the two women is not wide; yet it is unmistakably deep. If we patrons of church suppers should discover, on entering the church basement, that Mrs. Black and Mrs. Snover had changed places, we should be shocked out of our appetites.
Have no fear; such a revolution never can occur. For one thing, Mrs. Snover has no black silk dress, and is not likely to have one. For another thing, Mrs. Snover has no joint deed to land, and is not likely to have one. For another thing, though Mrs. Black can cook as well as Mrs. Snover, Mrs. Snover cannot manage as well as Mrs. Black. Sooner shall these eternal hills gape asunder, than that our little gathering shall fail in this significant tribute to the Blacks’ superior management of consumption.
For, when you analyze the favored position of the Blacks in our midst, that is what has put them where they are — superior management of consumption. The Snovers get rather more real wages into their house in a year than the Blacks. Snover is a farm-hand, a steady, reliable fellow. In addition to money wages, he gets free house-rent, potatoes, and firewood. If you account for these items justly, and then subtract the cost of getting Black into town and out every working day, you will find the earnings of the two men almost balance. Both their wives work, as loyal, healthy women have worked since the dawn of time. The parasite woman has always been an inconsequential part of feminity, both in numbers and in social significance. Both do their housework — and more. Mrs. Black keeps three hundred white Leghorns and makes the best butter in the township, while Mrs. Snover ‘helps out’ for wages.
There is no discounting Mrs. Snover’s energy and usefulness. She is a community asset of the highest importance. Our village scarcely could function without her. Always ready to take on another washing at an hour’s notice, she also provides the extra muscle at housecleaning time, and holds the fort when sickness attacks our homesteads. Though she looks older than she is, Mrs. Snover is constitutionally gay. She earns and tosses into the common fund considerable cash — probably more than Mrs. Black reaps from the sale of butter and eggs. So that, by and large, the Snovers have more purchasing-power than the Blacks. Yet the Snovers get less out of life, in security, comfort, and social standing, than the Blacks.
The trouble is that the dollar depreciates the moment it crosses the Snover threshold. Mrs. Snover’s ideal is a home of her own; but that consummation, devoutly wished these many years, never gets any nearer. Mrs. Snover rarely has time to get to church, or clothes to grace her entrance. The Snover children look neither as well fed as the Black children, nor as neatly clad, in spite of the fact that they, too, pick up a little money doing odd jobs for the neighbors, while the smaller Blacks, like their mother, confine their economic activities strictly to the home lot. The Snovers, manifestly, have not mastered the problem of managing consumption. They waste more, break more, and have less buying-sense.
It is impressive to witness the social results of economic powers in a small community. All of us take the Snovers for granted, but none of us build upon them. In point of time, they have been here longer than the Blacks, yet they do not give the same impression of domestic and civic solidity. Our whole attitude toward them is colored by the fact that next May Day may find them on the move, providing Snover does not come to terms with his employer, who is also his landlord. He has worked for that employer many years, and possibly may continue so to do until he is beyond work; nevertheless, he is n’t sure of his job.
We have the feeling that the Snovers would be about the same elsewhere; but it is impossible to think of the Blacks as dissociated from our community, as living in another house, as scratching other earth than their own.
On the productive side of his life, Snover has a chance to do far more managing than Black. He is not under observation to the same extent; if he can think of work-improvements, there is nothing to hinder him putting them into immediate effect. As a matter of fact, his boss says Snover is a good hand to figure things out for himself. No man in these parts does better with animals, or gets more milk and pork out of feed. ‘Snover ought really to have a farm of his own,’ his employer told me, ‘but he can’t seem to get far enough ahead for that.’ You would think that Snover’s ability to manage production, developed as it has been through experience, would carry over to the management of consumption. But it does not; consumption is his blind side.
No enthusiast for a minimum wage can observe Snovers and Blacks at close range, without realizing that here is a basic difficulty. One man prospers and accumulates on a wage just sufficient to keep above-board another man with no greater family responsibilities. A living wage for Snover is a saving wage for Black.
No matter what formula of words you construct, no matter what ideal wage-figures you may draw from statistics, these variations in consumption competence confound your calculations when you attempt to transfer them from paper to life.
If all these individual variations could be ironed out, there would still remain the embarrassing fact that costs of living vary with locations. Black, for instance, cocksurely says that he has prospered because he dared leave town for the country. One evening, when I went over to his place to buy eggs, and remained to talk, he said, —
‘I’d still be renting if we were in town. There’s veterans in the shop earn more than me, and they’re still renters. It’s hard to get hold of a bit of city land, and after you’ve got it, it’s only good to live on and be taxed for the privilege. Here we raise a good bit of food — eggs, vegetables, milk, and a couple of fat pigs each year. But that’s not all. We’re out of the rush. We are n’t doing a lot of expensive things just because we see others doing them. When we stay in town for the movies, it’s an event, and we pick out the good ones. Of course, ten miles by train night and morning takes time; but it would take half an hour to get to the shop from any neighborhood where I could afford to live. Yes; I’ve got a Ford, but I don’t use it all the time. The train is cheaper when there’s only one to go; and I guess it’s easier on me, too.’
Here, you see, is another stumblingblock for the minimum-wage theory. Base your wage on the cost of town living, and you reduce to some extent the incentive for wage-earners to improve their conditions by shifting into low-cost locations where there is more elbow room, and more chance for the common man to come by that imponderable boon dear to the heart of each of us — social esteem. Among us John Black is a person of importance; in town he would be something less. If he died a townsman, he would be described in a brief paragraph as, ‘John Black, a Sanger workman’; but when his time comes as a villager, the local correspondent of our country paper will give him a half-column credit for a useful life.
That, it seems to me, is one of the things men live for — a good obituary. As long as John Black can be a leading citizen among us, he does not mind being No. 476 in Sanger Products the rest of the day.
Perhaps, after vast difficulty, town activities might be adjusted on a minimum-wage basis. But what about us farmers and villagers? Will the minimum-wage statisticians fix crop prices? They must do something about farm prices, obviously, since food prices limit the purchasing power of city earnings, and since farmers get their wages out of prices. Yet the idiosyncrasies of land-holdings are just as marked as the idiosyncrasies of human character.
This farm yields large returns; that one breaks a good man’s heart. Shall the farmer’s minimum be a return for effort or a return for produce? If the former, what vast system of espionage is to determine effort, and what superhuman judgment establish rewards? And if the latter, he who farms fat acres will himself wax fat; and he who labors on lean acres will himself be lean, as at present, and for centuries without end.
‘Ah,’ you say, ‘but the minimum wage does work. On the railroads, for instance.’ Softly, friend, softly. Have you heard the farmer or the small storekeeper talk about railroad rates and railroad wages? The fact is that, here and there, some managers — or their overlord, the government — can establish minimum wages for the labor of special groups; but let all managers, or any considerable proportion of them, do so, and see what happens. You hear from the country — buyers strike, agrarians murmur. For wages in volume enough to be socially important are then being maintained in defiance of economic law; and the productive power of those vast sections of the population whose wages are not so protected are being drawn upon unfairly to maintain a shaky business structure. When organized labor exacts and maintains a minimum, in reality it is exploiting unorganized labor. And even if all the labor of this country were organized well enough to maintain minimum wages in all lines, there would still be the outside world to hear from. We compete with all nations; despite tariff walls, our wages must go up and down with theirs, in obedience to economic laws older than the code of Hammurabi.
We are a rich nation, and so are privileged to commit absurdities suicidal for others. But not for too long, or on too large a scale. For a time we can maintain favorable minimum wages for railroaders — long enough, at least, to rouse the farmers to political solidarity in opposition. But we cannot continue that protection for railroaders indefinitely, because there are too many of them.
And as for extending any such immunity from economic storm to the producers in an even more extensive industry, such as agriculture, the thing is impossible. It could be tried only at the risk of bankrupting the country. It can be done only when Uncle Sam has learned how to lift himself by his bootstraps.
The farmer, always a practical fellow, is beginning to see that the government is working against him when it sets its seal of approval upon minimum wages for other socially necessary labor, such as coal-mining and transportation. He sees that these experiments are carried on largely at his expense, since they would be impossible unless he kept on giving the business wheel enough momentum to overcome these drags upon it.
Professional men and women are coming to the same conclusion; but the farmer’s experience is such that his ideas on the subject have crystallized into a burning conviction. For experience has taught him that some men, like some animals, are ‘harder keepers’ than others, and that putting any sort of premium on the ‘hard keepers’ in the human family penalizes all the others.
Standard of living, great are the sins committed in thy name! Let us judge any family’s standard of living by its results, not by its cost. Consider wages, not as so many dollars in the pay envelope, but as the means of purchasing life and pursuing happiness. Then we will not worry so terrifically over the fancied necessity of setting up barriers on the road down which that steady, tireless team, Supply and Demand, must travel; and down which they will continue to march, never fear, though minimum wage and all manner of law-patented absurdities clog their footsteps for a little, here and there, along the way.