Union Pacific Shop Bulletin 1

A DAY'S WORK for A DAY'S PAYCO-OPERATION PERFECT UNIONTHE SHOP EMPLOYES ASSOCIATIONUNION PACIFIC SYSTEMBULLETINVol. lSalt Lake City, Utah, February 29, 1924No. 12EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZATION OF INDUSTRYIn tracing industrial organization, through the history of mankind we find in the primitive state each individual himself, conducted all kinds of industry necessary to his comfort. He kills the game, skins it, makes of the skins moccasins for his feet and a cloak for his body. He digs out the log to serve as his canoe, he erects his wigwam, cultivates his little patch of corn, makes and strings his own bow and fashions his own arrow. In short he is butcher, tanner, shoemaker, tailor, boatbuilder, house carpenter, armorer and farmer all in one. This is individual industrialism pure and simple. But gradually, he learns that he is more skillful in the chase than his neighbor and that his neighbor can make a better bow and arrow than he, so one stays at home and constructs and the other goes forth to hunt and the two exchange their products to mutual advantage. As this exchange of products become more extensive and complicated a medium for exchange is invented and thus money comes into use and barter becomes trade. It is discovered that different communities, have advantages in climate, soil, and productions, and so communities as well as individuals begin to exchange and trade becomes commerce. Steam is discovered and machinery invented and with steam and machinery comes the necessity for a larger industrial organization. Combination of capital is now required. Capital is what a man makes by his industry more than he consumes inhis support or his pleasure. Various individuals combine their savings. Thus first the partnership and subsequently the corporation is created.A corporation is at once the creation and the agency of democracy. It is a combination by which men and women unite their savings to accomplish by united action what it would be impossible to accomplish by individual action. The existence of the corporation is itself a witness to the ethical development of the community in which the corporation exists, for it cannot exist until moral character has so developed that it is relatively safe for thousands to trust their savings to the management of a few financiers of ability. The ex-istance of corporation is a testimony to the high development of standards of honesty in the community and a mutuality of trust and confidence, growing out of such moral developments. If such corporations did not exist our industrial civilization would be impossible.Organized labor is equally essential to modern civilization. There could be neither banks, factories nor mines nor railroad, nor steamships without organization of labor which carries it on. The real question is not, "Shall these organizations exist, but shall it be autocratic or democratic." Whatever evils grow out of the despotism of labor organization on the one hand and despotism of capitalistic organizations on the other, they are not to be corrected by endeavor to return to the industrial individualism from which we have emerged.Combination both of capital and of labor, property and industry is in-evitable; because it is the divine order of human development. The world will not and ought not to forget the economic benefits which cooperation and combination have brought to it.Fraternal industrialisrn rests upon the scientific principles that the struggle for others is as essential as the struggle for self; and upon the economic principle that the relation between those engaged in productive industry is the relation of partners in a common enterprise. It is true that this principle has not gotten itself established in the industrial world. Capitalists educated in the old school of individual industrialism believe that labor is a commodity which they are to buy and sell as they buy and sell their machinery and throw away when they become old or are inefficient.But an increasing number of employers are recognizing the truth that there are some other relations between employer and employee than that of a purchaser and vender of an article. That they are in some sense partners engaged in a common enter-prise that the workmen have and ought to have some voice in deter-mining profits when the enterprise is profitable.As we view the causes leading up to so many industrial disputes is the fact that there was no confidence existing between employer and employee. A suspicion lurks in the mind of everyone and distrust in action on every side.How can partners in a common enterprise work together without con-