Mismanagement

“ We are both convinced altogether that there survives no reason for lives of toil, for hardship, poverty, famine, infectious disease, for the continuing cruelties of wild beasts and the greater multitude of crimes, but mismanagement and waste, and that mismanagement and waste spring from no other source than ignorance and from stupid divisions and jealousies, base patriotisms, fanaticisms, prejudices and suspicions that are all no more than ignorance a little mingled with viciousness. ”

“ No doubt the organization and management of those insitutions by government are liable, as are all things human, to great abuses. The multiplication of public placeholders, which they imply, is a serious evil. ”

“ Some employees engaged in blatant and criminal conflicts of interest and self-dealing. It is one of the worst examples of corruption, abuse and of government putting special interests before the public interest. ”

“ It is not only that abuses without number prevailed, but the whole system of Government was an abuse, a sea of corruption without a bottom or a shore, an engine of robbery, crushing the life out of all industry. ”

“ If it be an error, that the woes, which come with ever-returning tide-like flood to overwhelm the workmen in our manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the sufferers, it is at any rate an error so bitter in its consequences to all parties, that whatever public effort can do in the way of legislation, or private effort in the way of merciful deeds, or helpless love in the way of "widow's mites," should be done, and that speedily, to disabuse the work-people of so miserable a misapprehension. ”

“ Whatsoever faults of management are properly attributable to them—and there are many—are easily traceable to that system itself, which, from its very nature, has always been, and must continue to be, inflexible. ”

“ It is not here claimed that any single panacea exists for all of the troubles of the working-people or of employers. As long as some people are born lazy or inefficient, and others are born greedy and brutal, as long as vice and crime are with us, just so long will a certain amount of poverty, misery, and unhappiness be with us also. No system of management, no single expedient within the control of any man or any set of men can insure continuous prosperity to either workmen or employers. ”

“ Every step towards organization raises a crop of vices peculiar to itself, fresh developments of the egotism and greed and vanity of those into whose hands there falls control, fresh instances of that hostile pedantry which seems so natural to officials and managers, insurgencies and obstinacies and suspicions on the part of everyone. ”

“ Under the influence of this pernicious error public employments have been multiplied; the numbers of those gathered into the ranks of officeholders have been steadily increased beyond any possible requirement of the public business, while inefficiency, peculation, fraud and malversation of the public funds, from the high places of power to the lowest, have overspread the whole service like a leprosy. ”

“ In the whole system of management, as I have described it, you will see that there is no reward for, or incentive to, excellence; it is all debauching and demoralizing; it is a disgrace to the Government, which consents to maintain at the public cost what is, in fact, nothing else but a pauper shop and house of prostitution. ”

“ It is a typical example; even such work as is done, is done in such a discontinuous and futile way that it is impossible for any one doing it to feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. Time, toil and money are frittered away, with nothing definite or substantial to show for it. Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. The overseers may not be to blame; they may be incompetent; they may be hampered by the ignorance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the prison authorities; the consequences, at all events, are disastrous. ”

“ Even at the commencement of the present century, the service seems to have been carried on regardless of economy, and not without traces of that wastefulness—we might almost say corruption—in the management, which, a hundred years previously, would not have been regarded as very remarkable. ”

“ With the natural instinct of the spirit of mischief they hit upon the poison which, if injected into the body of the public service at large, would mot unfailingly kill every reform that has been accomplished in it. ”

“ A large portion of our vices and crimes are created either by law or its maladministration. These laws exist because organized ignorance, like a highwayman with a club, is permitted to stand in the way of wise legislation and honest administration, and to demand satisfaction from the spoils of office and the profits of contracts. Of this state of affairs we complain, and on great occasions the community arises in its wrath and visits summary punishment on the offenders of the hour, and then relapses into chronic grumbling until grievances sufficiently accumulate to stir it again to action. ”

“ Whatever more direct measures we may hereafter devise, to reduce the evils of corporate selfishness and to harness capitalistic organization to public tasks, society cannot afford to persist in rule-of-thumb policies toward agencies with such enormous capacity to promote or to endanger the public good. ”

“ In short, society must be reorganized, and a capable management put at the head. That the present management is incapable, there can be no discussion. It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood. ”

“ The great practical defect of institutions like ours, is the circumstance that “what is everybody's business, is nobody's business;” a neglect that gives to the activity of the rogue a very dangerous ascendency over the more dilatory correctives of the honest man. ”

“ The public was prone to place an ethical responsibility upon an individual or groups of individuals, and there came a series of revelations or exposures that appeared, in part, to fix the blame. All the old uprisings against boss-rule were revivified, and capitalistic control was placed upon the Index. ”

“ And the whole complex organization, the last achieved result of man's age-long struggle for civilization, works on the perilous verge of breaking down. The fine lady at the one end of it may buy what she cannot pay for and disturb the delicately balanced calculations of the shopkeeper. Some well-intentioned Government somewhere may insist that the women who sew shall have fire and a share of the sunlight, things which cost money. Inspectors come, with pains and penalties ready in their pockets, and it seems possible that they will dislocate the whole machine. ”

“ XXXII. This last inconvenience is so common and apparent, as to be hidden from no man; and what is worse, no one endeavours to hide it. This pestilence of partiality to countrymen is, to the perversion and corruption of good regulation, introduced and cherished in the most bare-faced manner, into those departments which are vested with the power of distributing honourable and useful employments. What sanctuary has been able to protect or preserve us, from the violencies of this declared enemy of reason and equity? ”

“ The men very much prefer to take punishment on the installment plan, in the dark, to any settlement on a cash basis in open and above-board fashion. Discipline in the dark, on the installment plan, has all the facts, experience, and records of the past and present, and the probabilities of the future, arrayed against it. When you ask the manager how it happens that the United States does not recognize the efficacy of the mental method on the installment plan, and treat him as the Brown system treats the employees, he merely shrugs his shoulders. ”

“ Make intelligence property, and its manager will have his match; he is met at every turn by an opposing will, not in the form of down-right rebellion and defiance, but yet, visibly, an ever-opposing will. He sees it in the dissatisfied look, and reluctant air and unwilling movement; the constrained strokes of labor, the drawling tones, the slow hearing, the feigned stupidity, the sham pains and sickness, the short memory ”

“ The central mischief is done, and cannot be undone.
But that is no reason why an evil political and economic system should be allowed to grow, any more than a human disease. If it cannot be extirpated, its progress can be checked. ”

“ Nor are the members of a corporation or a board, in the administration of an area of which they have undertaken the charge, less guilty, under these circumstances, than is a private individual in the management of his own premises. If men were properly instructed in the results of their actions or pretermissions, in matters of this nature, and made fully conscious of the responsibility which those results entail upon them, there would soon be a marked decrease in physical suffering, disease, and premature deaths. ”

“ Complaint is often made, in these times, of what we call the disorganized condition of society: how ill many forces of society fulfil their work; how many powerful are seen working in a wasteful, chaotic, altogether unarranged manner. It is too just a complaint, as we all know. But perhaps if we look at this of Books and the Writers of Books, we shall find here, as it were, the summary of all other disorganizations;—a sort of heart, from which, and to which all other confusion circulates in the world! ”

“ That point may be ever so far off yet, and the efforts to reach it may be ever so ill-advised and bungling, still those efforts will result in more and more strikes, and thus the evil complained of will grow worse and worse as long as it is treated in the old way. Sensible business men see this very clearly. ”

“ The common indignation always confused by a shifting responsibility is most baffled when responsibility is traced back and is found to be lodged in a body of men. It is this fact that accounts for the increasing disregard of public opinion in the management of business. Corporate organization opposes to public fury a cuirass of divided responsibility that conveys away harmlessly a shock that might have stretched iniquity prone. ”

“ When one was not engaged in official activity one did nothing. And is it the official project, the daily routine, the working day, the job, that suddenly explodes? Does one suddenly have to initiate a project with others so as not to miss a meal? Does one suddenly have to invent the content of every single minute of the living day? How is one to begin, and with whom? What is one to experience if not fear, desperation? No, one cannot dispense with managers. ”

“ I make no manner of doubt that there was plenty of this sort of thing under the old system. But at least there was then this advantage, that people could make a change if anything did not suit them. Nowadays, however, many of the managers seem to look upon their workgirls as little better than defenceless slaves, who are delivered over to them. Many of the higher placed officials see all this well enough, but as they themselves act not a whit differently as regards the abuse of power, they are very lenient in respect of all complaints made to them. ”

“ All in all, the system, while deceptive and dishonest on its face, was for a time a tolerated evil, apparently sanctioned by the company and became a veritable disease among the colored employees who, without exception, received and kept the company's money without a single qualm of conscience. ”

“ As usual, the people who practised the deception were scarcely so much to blame as those who, spite of every effort at reform, persisted in maintaining a system which created favouritism, hampered trade, severed family ties, and practically created the smuggling offence which scandalised the official conscience. ”

“ We consider discipline to be a private matter, to be settled between ourselves and the management; and thus the workings of the system have been arranged without any reference whatever to its effect on the interests of the millions of people whose lives are placed in jeopardy by its arrangements. As a matter of fact, then, the system of discipline which I have described is the result of long-continued pressure and consequent concessions by the management to the demands of employees. ”

“ So deeply rooted is this prejudice in the minds of the industrial and commercial world, that many managers have said to us in horror, "Why, we can't take away the power to hire and fire from our foremen. They couldn't maintain discipline. They would not consent to remain in their executive positions if they did not have this power of life and death, as it were, over their employees." ”

“ Imagine all this and then ask what will be the position of the actual workers! Already on the continent, where governmental organizations are more elaborate and coercive than here, there are chronic complaints of the tyranny of bureaucracies—the hauteur and brutality of their members. What will these become when not only the more public actions of citizens are controlled, but there is added this far more extensive control of all their respective daily duties? ”

“ The disorganization which results from arbitrary laws, from habitual violation of laws, from corruption and injustice works like a poison on the psychophysical system. A similar unbalancing influence emanates from overstrong contrasts of poverty and comfort. ”

“ We have denunciations of banks, corporations, and monopolies, which denunciations encourage only helpless rage and animosity, because they are not controlled by any definitions or limitations, or by any distinctions between what is indispensably necessary and what is abuse, between what is established in the order of nature and what is legislative error. ”

“ All this naturally tends to bring local government into deserved disrepute, and the whole system moves in a vicious circle; the discredit into which it has fallen becoming the chief obstacle to improvement. ”

“ The principle of it seems to be to absorb any public business which appears profitable, whether conveyance, supplies of material, or contracting for public work. Apart from the fact that only strong personal interest in management will make such enterprises profitable, there is also the inherent objection to the bad management which clings to the atrophy of mind of officials, as such ”