----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 12:41 PM Subject: Re: Where are you now that we need you Charles Dickens?
> Hi Ray, > > The story you posted 17 Dec 2001 from The New York Times "As Welfare Comes > to an End, So Do the Jobs" by Nina Bernstein, could not fail move anybody > who didn't have a heart of stone. > > But it was anecdotal and selective. It does not accurately reflect the > benefits that a modern economy actually brings . . . We interrupt this message with a word from our sponsor: True Relations of Employer and Employed This is a strenuous life. The rewards are for those who work for them-- a corollary of which is that the rewards are not for those who do not work for them. The useful man in business -- and the laborer is a man of business in his relations with his employer-succeeds in making himself efficient and still more successful in proportion as he sees opportunities and embraces them. If these involve his rising early in the morning, he rises early; if they mean that he must sit up late at night, he sits up late at night. He lends his hand to the work that is before him, wherever it is and whenever it is before him. This is true of the millionaire, who must preserve what he has from the multi-millionaire (and he has no easy time of it), just as it is true of the salaried superintendent, the clerk, the farmer, the skilled mechanic, or the laborer. It is a preposterous piece of idiocy to suppose that employers are not in sympathy with the efforts or their men to better themselves. They have proved the contrary in innumerable instances. The contrary can be proved out of the simple logic of common sense. The employer makes the most out of the man who produces the most, and the man who produces the most -- if he is dissatisfied with his present pay -- can go elsewhere and get more. The employer knows this, and he does not let the man go. Moreover, he takes pain s, whenever he can (which means that he takes pains all the time), to discover who it is (high or low, far or wide, through his force of men, whatever the branch of work they happen to be doing), that is deserving of the higher pay and the larger responsibilities (and with them still larger pay), because of the fact that he produces more and is capable of producing still more again. There is not an employer anywhere who is not secretly studying his staff of people, whether in mill or office, to find out who it is that can do more for him; and that man he rewards before the reward can be asked for. This is exactly as it should be, unless, of course, the most cruel of all the doctrines of organized labor, "Once a workman, always a workman," is held to be true. There is proof in every manufacturing or commercial business in the land that the best interests of employer and employee are thus inseparably bound up, and that the workman of to-day is almost sure to be the employer, or the higher paid foreman or superintendent or the more skillful or higher-paid workman of to-morrow. In other words, there is no limit to the reward which may be obtained by those who really think and work, for the better they think and work the more they will contribute to the production of that reward. They cannot be prevented from sharing in it because the law of supply and demand operates to make this the rule for every individual among them. [The above excerpted from "Eight Hours by Act of Congress: Arbitrary, Needless, Destructive, Dangerous", National Association of Manufacturers, 1904.]
