Shop Management | Page 7

job can be done
faster than it has been, but he rarely cares to take the drastic measures
necessary to force men to do it in the quickest time, unless he has an
actual record, proving conclusively how fast the work can be done.
It evidently becomes for each man's interest, then, to see that no job is
done faster than it has been in the past. The younger and less
experienced men are taught this by their elders, and all possible
persuasion and social pressure is brought to bear upon the greedy and
selfish men to keep them from making new records which result in
temporarily increasing their wages, while all those who come after
them are made to work harder for the same old pay.
Under the best day work of the ordinary type, when accurate records
are kept of the amount of work done by each man and of his efficiency,
and when each man's wages are raised as he improves, and those who
fail to rise to a certain standard are discharged and a fresh supply of
carefully selected men are given work in their places, both the natural
loafing and systematic soldiering can be largely broken up. This can be
done, however, only when the men are thoroughly convinced that there
is no intention of establishing piece work even in the remote future, and
it is next to impossible to make men believe this when the work is of
such a nature that they believe piece work to be practicable. In most
cases their fear of making a record which will be used as a basis for
piece work will cause them to soldier as much as they dare.
It is, however, under piece work that the art of systematic soldiering is
thoroughly developed. After a workman has had the price per piece of
the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his
having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely to entirely
lose sight of his employer's side of the case and to become imbued with
a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it.
Unfortunately for the character of the workman, soldiering involves a
deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive his employer, and thus
upright and straight-forward workmen are compelled to become more
or less hypocritical. The employer is soon looked upon as an antagonist,

if not as an enemy, and the mutual confidence which should exist
between a leader and his men, the enthusiasm, the feeling that they are
all working for the same end and will share in the results, is entirely
lacking.
The feeling of antagonism under the ordinary piecework system
becomes in many cases so marked on the part of the men that any
proposition made by their employers, however reasonable, is looked
upon with suspicion. Soldiering becomes such a fixed habit that men
will frequently take pains to restrict the product of machines which
they are running when even a large increase in output would involve no
more work on their part.
On work which is repeated over and over again and the volume of
which is sufficient to permit it, the plan of making a contract with a
competent workman to do a certain class of work and allowing him to
employ his own men subject to strict limitations, is successful.
As a rule, the fewer the men employed by the contactor and the smaller
the variety of the work, the greater will be the success under the
contract system, the reason for this being that the contractor, under the
spur of financial necessity, makes personally so close a study of the
quickest time in which the work can be done that soldiering on the part
of his men becomes difficult and the best of them teach laborers or
lower-priced helpers to do the work formerly done by mechanics.
The objections to the contract system are that the machine tools used by
the contractor are apt to deteriorate rapidly, his chief interest being to
get a large output, whether the tools are properly cared for or not, and
that through the ignorance and inexperience of the contractor in
handling men, his employees are frequently unjustly treated.
These disadvantages are, however, more than counterbalanced by the
comparative absence of soldiering on the part of the men.
The greatest objection to this system is the soldiering which the
contractor himself does in many cases, so as to secure a good price for
his next contract.
It is not at all unusual for a contractor to restrict the output of his own
men and to refuse to adopt improvements in machines, appliances, or
methods while in the midst of a contract, knowing that his next contract
price will be