|
|
 |
 |
|
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 15
BLOGS 14
BLOGS 13
BLOGS 12
BLOGS 11
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
| Conservatism | Women are Fickle, You Say? |
Labor and Leisure
by Christopher Chantrill
September 03, 2007 at 9:45 pm
THEY ARE having a problem in the old manufacturing city of Milwaukee these days, writes Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Once studded with factories, it’s now lined with old, empty buildings along rail lines.”
Don’t worry though. There are are still plenty of manufacturing jobs in Milwaukee. They just don’t lie along the rail lines any more, but in newer buildings close by.
But there’s a problem.
Manufacturers have a work force dominated by baby boomers now starting to retire, and they find they cannot get enough replacements, even for jobs requiring no skills.
No, this is not an article about immigration. It is an article about labor efficiency, the famous labor efficiency of the industrial worker that first emerged in Britain in the Industrial Revolution and then assisted the rise of the United States to world power.
It wasn’t just capitalism and technology that powered the rise of the West. That’s what Gregory Clark argues in his book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. 
When British inventors revolutionized textile manufacturing with Arkwright’s water frame for cotton spinning and power looms for weaving, they didn’t just create a textile industry in Britain. Pretty soon they built a textile machine industry in Manchester, England, that exported textile machinery to the entire world. And they sent good Lancashire toolmakers, men like the capable William Rhodes in A. G. Macdonnell’s comic novel England, Their England
You would think that once the textile factories were set up in India and elsewhere that they would soon have put the British textile mills out of business. But they didn’t. For over a century the textile workers in India failed to compete with the British and American textile workers. The reason is simple. Textile factory managers in India found that they had to hire three or four times the number of workers that they needed in Britain or the US. Indian workers just did not submit to factory discipline like British workers. Writes Clark of Indian factory conditions in the early twentieth century:
A substantial fraction of workers were [sic] absent on any given day, and those at work were often able to come and go from the mill at their pleasure to eat or to smoke.
The fictional William Rhodes had similar experiences.
I’d spend a week teaching a fellow, and then, just as I’d got him in good shape, he’d remember that his cousin’s aunt had got scarlet fever or something, and off he’d go and I’d have to start again with a new fellow.
The societies that led the economic growth of the last two centuries had become by the time of the Industrial Revolution “increasingly middle class in their orientation,” writes Clark.
Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving.
Since Clark diplomatically avoided mentioning in A Farewell to Alms Max Weber and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published a century ago, you can say that he earned his favorable review in The New York Times with his respect for tender liberal sensibilities.
But now it seems that people everywhere are learning the ways of the Protestant Ethic, and it probably doesn’t hurt that millions of them are actually becoming Protestants, in South America, in Africa, in China, and in South Korea.
Now listen to the experience of Lance Rakow, general manager of an INX International plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that makes specialty inks. He hires production workers at $13.50 an hour. Felons? Not a problem.
If only he could get people to show up, or at least call when they don’t. Last autumn and winter, he says, he lost nine guys — one star opted for Bible college, and the rest were fired, mainly because they accumulated too many unexcused, unexplained absences.
Is it possible that the good old North American working stiff is losing his appetite for work and his willingness to submit to factory discipline?
It may be significant that the nation that leads the world in number of hours worked per year is South Korea. The average South Korean, according to the OECD, works 2,390 hours per year, compared to 1,777 in the United States.
Those pesky Mexican immigrants are also hard workers. Mexican workers are ranked #3 in the world at 1,980 hours per year, right after South Korea and Poland.
Maybe it’s just as well that lots of hard-working Koreans and Mexicans are coming to the United States.
Otherwise we might have to rename Labor Day as Leisure Day.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990