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Show TH 3 PRINCIPLE O SCIENTIFI MANAGEMEN The writer had two advantages, however, which are not possesse by the ordinary foreman an these came, curiously enough, fro the fact that he was not the son of a working-man First, owing to the fact that he happened not to be of workin parents, the owners of the company believed that he had the interes of the works more at heart than the other workmen, and they therefore had more confidence in his word than they did in that of th machinists who were under him So that, when the machinists reported to the General Superintendent that the machines were bein smashed up because an incompetent foreman was overstraining them the Superintendent accepted the word of the writer when he said tha these men were deliberately breaking their machines as a part of th piece-work war which was going on, and he also allowed the writer t make the only effective answer to this Vandalism on the part of th men namely "Ther will be no mor accidents to the machine in this shop If any part of a machine is broken the man in charg of it must pay at least a part of the cost of its repair, and the fine collected in this way will all be handed over to the mutual beneficial association to help care for sick workmen." This soon stoppe the wilful breaking of machines Second. If the writer had been one of the workmen, and ha lived where they lived, they would have brought such social pressur to bear upon him that it would have been impossible to have stoo out against them He would have been called "scab" and othe foul names every time he appeared on the street; his wife woul have been abused, and his children would have been stoned Onc or twice he was begged by some of his friends among the workme not to walk home, about two and a half miles along the lonely pat by the side of the railway He was told that if he continued to d this it would be at the risk of his life. In all such cases, however a display of timidity is apt to increase rather than diminish the risk so the writer told these men to say to the other men in the shop tha he proposed to walk home every night right up that railway track that he never had carried and never would carry any weapon of an kind, and that they could shoot and be d- After about three years of this kind of struggling, the output o the machines had been materially increased, in many cases doubled and as a result the writer had been promoted from one gang-bossship to another until he became foreman of the shop For any rightminded man, however, this success is in no sense a recompense fo the bitter relations which he is forced to maintain with all of thos around him Life which is one continuous struggle with other me |