Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/158

154 The reason for this undue emphasis is not far to seek. As has been suggested, the enormous strides which have been taken in the invention and development of various forms of power and of labor-saving machinery has in itself, no doubt, been a potent reason why the labor factor should temporarily be neglected. Moreover, the universal confusion among practical men of affairs between labor and capital undoubtedly helped to obscure the importance of the former. Even to-day the manufacturer is prone to place his labor supply in the same category as his supply of raw materials, and to think no more about it than to be sure that there are men enough to run his machines and to do the work demanded. To the consideration of the relative cost and efficiency of two machines he will give hours; to the choice of men to run the machine he will devote scarcely ten minutes. It is these and similar facts that have lain at the bottom of the failure to appreciate properly the importance of efficiency of labor as contrasted with the efficiency of machines. Not that labor unions and the backers of progressive labor legislation have been negligent, but their work lies in the main within the scope of the last half or even quarter century, and their labors are just beginning to bear full fruit. As one of our great railroads says to its employees in a recent bulletin:

The result of all this has been that even up to the present, though to the standardization of nearly everything in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms and a goodly portion of the lower orders in the animal kingdom men have worked with earnest and often enthusiastic cooperation, when it came to standardizing men and developing efficiency in them, there has existed a confusion and lack of cohesion equal to that of Babel. Efficiency in machinery has been taken for granted by those interested in production, efficiency in labor has been largely overlooked until the modern efficiency engineer appeared upon the scene.

But times are changing, and men generally are slowly coming to realize the full significance of the term "labor efficiency." Part of this has been due unquestionably to the influence of labor unions. The increasing stress given by economists upon the distinction between labor and capital, as economic concepts, has not been without its effects. The natural and inevitable failure of mechanical invention to keep abreast of the pace set at the outset of the industrial revolution has also served to detract attention from the purely mechanical aspect as soon as something else arose which demanded attention. To all this we must add the exhaustion of the frontier and the other influences