Loving fathers of industry
An interesting advertisement booklet recently published by Messrs. Joseph Crosfield & Sons, the Warrington soapworkers’ exploiters, shows how “model employers” dominate even the “private life” of their wage slaves, dictating as to how they should spend their scanty leisure.
After giving the names of the directors and other parasites who “run” the business, the pamphlet shows us how increased efficiency in the worker only benefits the capitalist class. For it states: “It is compulsory upon all boys and girls (employees) between the age of 14 and 17 to attend an evening school at least three nights a week. The course of instruction for boys is naturally concerned with questions relating to their line of work.” (Italics mine.)
Not a bad wheeze, teaching the poor kiddies their trade at night schools in their all too meagre spare time, after they have put in 8½ hours hard graft at the works for their lords and masters ! It is obvious, of course, that no time will be lost at work in teaching these youngsters soap making ! For the workers’ time is money to the capitalist.
We are then told that in the day-work departments, the 9½ hour day has been reduced to an 8½ hour day, “and events have proved that as much work as previously is done in the shorter hours.” Will the “B.S.P.” please note, that if the 8 hour day for all workers came into vogue, the capitalists would see to it, as they have done in this case, that the workers’ output was not lessened, but that they would be “speeded up,” so that the same or even an increased output was maintained in the shorter working day, with less expense to the masters in running machinery, lighting and heating the factories, etc.
With an eye to business the firm tells us: “The physical aspect of education is not over looked, for all work-girls up to the age of 17 undergo a course of gymnastics during the winter months.” Because strong, healthy, well-developed workers can obviously turn out more and better work than weak, unhealthy, and ill-nourished workers. So that from a purely business point of view—the point of view the master class always take—this little incidental expense well repays the employers.
Under the ironical heading “Social Recreation during Leisure Hours,” we are informed that the firm provide a company of the 4th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment (Territorials), also a company of boy-scouts.
Note the masters’ determination to inocculate their workers with that brain-disease, patriotism. One can imagine how useful would these same workers be in defending their masters’ property against foreign invaders, or more probably, strike rioters.
Verily, the capitalist moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform !
This, we are told, is how the firm take a keen interest in the social life of the work-people ! Not much time for these workers to study their slave position in society. The firm see to it that their workers’ minds are diverted into less revolutionary and dangerous channels.
“Garden Village” employers go one better even, by providing their workers with libraries filled with capitalist works, libraries from which working class books and papers are vigorously excluded. Gardening, too, is taught, and thus the workers keep the “garden village” well cultivated in their spare time, without ex pense to the employers. Free fire brigade staff, ambulance staff, and gardening staff ! And so on, ad nauseam.
After giving a description of the soapmaking the pamphlet concludes with photos, several showing the work-people cheering and flag-wagging, on the occasion of a recent visit to the works of our royal parasites.
The enormous profits made out of the unpaid labour of the workers by soap kings was de monstrated by the “Daily Chronicle,” (24.4.14). According to that rag, Messrs. Joseph Watson & Sons, the Leeds soapmakers, made a profit of £103,999 last year, as compared with £84,215 in the year previous.
How much more of this devilish game will you workers submit to ? Aren’t you tired of being referred to in contemptuous terms as the working asses? or are you going to quietly wait for that last phase of this rapidly decaying system, State Capitalism, with its universal “model employers,” “garden villages,” “ideal conditions of labour,” “co-partnership,” “profit-sharing,” etc.; which is really more intensified slavery still—to a hide-bound State, instead of private employers—than that which exists at present ?
Capitalism has long since outstayed its welcome ; why not organise with us and overthrow it at once ? “Now is the accepted time ”
A. C. KELLY