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Show I International Harvester Company ; I "WELFARE WORK" BY THE I HARVESTER COMPANY. H The nerve centre of whatever lias 'o H do with welfare work at the McCor- H mick plant of the International Har- H vester Company is the club-house. It H stands in Blue Island Avenue, a long B and rather cheerless street that bi H sects the southwest industrial section. H The building is an attractive struc- H titrc of brick with high iron palings, H and with greensward and tennis courts H in the rear of it. Its actual title is B vested in one of the McCormicksV B and the Harvester Company holds it H on lease. 'It coSts a pretty penny, over H a huifdrcd thousand dollars, I am told. H Inside the place is tasteful. I have H sccn'plcnty of clubby clubs, with golf B links and garages, that weren't .13 H good. There is first-class oak wood- H work and 'good color; the appoint- B ments archill commendable. B An officcrin the company asked me B whit I thought' of it from a business H standpoint. - Having acquired a prcJ- H ty good idea of the work done there, H I told him 1 thought it was and would H continue to be a pharos of decency H to the whole district, and that if it H was good for the-business, which cm- B ploys about 7,000 men and covers, H with its yards and buildings nearly H 300 acres, to have clean and orderly H environment and a l'cccnt and am- H bitious class of people about if, the H game was worth the candle. If the B candle happened to be wax, so much H the better. The best proof of this ap- B pears to be the existence of the 'Mc- H Cormick District Improvement Club, B in which the business people of the H neighborhood and the local aldermen H. arc interested. This institution has H' done admirable work in cleaning .up B dirty streets, putting disreputable H dance halls out of business, extending B .street-car lines, and providing gen- B erally for the improvement of ' the B neighborhood. B Whoever designed the club-house B had a pretty cle,i understanding of B the needs it was to supply. It is at K once club, library, gymnasium, ly- Bj ccura, theatre, -chapter-house, ball- R room, restaurant (where the men cat K at noon for fifteen cents or less), W sohoolhouse, and many other things - B bosfdes The charity element ifes m been so thoroughly eliminated from its operation that not only the mill employees have come to look upon it as their own natural heaven, but the neighborhood people who have nothing to do with the works are making constantly more general use of it. A lot of local fraternal orders meet there in the lodge room. There Were- just two Saturday nights between be-tween the first- of September and the first Iay of June, last year, when doings do-ings of softie sort, in the way of entertainment, en-tertainment, were not iri progress there. Over a hundred' special entertainments enter-tainments were held, with only a dozen doz-en of which the company had anything any-thing to do, and the place is so big that very often, two parties arc going on at once. At first the only dances that were held there were those of the mill-girls, but latterly all sorts of clubs, circles, and associations have used it and abandoned the outside dance lulls, usually with saloon attachments, at-tachments, which speckle that part of the city. Now, there arc over thirty such organizations on the list. I matfc several visits to the little office of-fice where Director Price sits keeping watch of everything that pertains to the welfare of the workers in the Mc-Cormick Mc-Cormick plant. There arc not many idle minutes in his day. The threads that run all through the establishment, establish-ment, from the wheel shop on the north to the foundry and finishing shop on the south, have their ends in the telephone on his desk, and it is interesting to sec, as bearing out what I have taken to be the company's spirit, how perfect is the co-ordination of this system. 'There arc some 160 odd departments in the plant, and the foreman of every one is an assistant welfare worker. Into the director's office, for example, come slipsprinted slipsprint-ed forms sometimes a half dozen in a dlay, from varjous foremen, notifying notify-ing that So-and-so has been off work for two or three or five days, and will 1: 1 please investigate it? There aYe appealing ap-pealing stories back of these report slips sometimes. I have gone with him on some of these journeys of investigation in-vestigation and know, "I merely do what the foreman hain't time to do," he said. "The mill foreman is traditionally pictured as 1 , hard proposition, but I have come to 'know tfiese men on the human side, and I have found thinga in their make-up that you wouldn't expect. It's a workshop, an'd ' they do their work unsparingly, like soldiers, but every man over there knows that while he works for this company he has a human duty, too, and the foreman fore-man who' fails of it is discredited. They arc a unit in their purpose and their principles and their loyalty, and a plug-ugly 'foreman would last about as long in one of these buildings as it took him to show the cloven hoof. You invariably find an attitude of consideration con-sideration for the workman. "Yesterday I got a slip from one or the stiffest foremen in the plant, asking ask-ing me to go sec why a certain man was absent from work. Before I could get out to investigate, he had left the shop and come over in person to see me. '"Thc.mapis on a drunk,' said ho, 'and has been on it for days and won't quit it. I ought to, have fired hirn long ago, but I simply can't do it until I find out what sort of shapo his family is in.' "Now, there arc four things essential essen-tial to the success of -any welfare work. One is fair wages, another is a decent day, another is sanitary conditions, con-ditions, and the last and the greatest is the right spirit in the management. Lacking that, even all the other three will prove ineffective. The working body that knows the spirit of the management man-agement is right and fair and kindly will never resent the welfare work. They'll accept it and welcome it and profit by it, and it will return to the company manifold in the output and in the fidelity of its men." What this singleness of spirit means I first discovered by going to a monthly Dinner of the department heads of the Decring plant, an enormous enor-mous institution away over on the North Side. It was a rainy night, as bad as -bad could be, but a hundred nnd twenty of them were on hand when we got there, and dinner was ready on the long table. You might have thought it was a lodge meeting, there was that measure of fellowship. When the feast was cleared away, a big blackboard was brought, and E. C. Clarage, proprietor of a big steel plant in South Chicago, lectured for an hour and three-quarters on the chemistry of steel-making. The eag-ernpss eag-ernpss of these men to know was written writ-ten in every lineament of them. Th.e interest neyer waned until the Jec turcr stepped down, ,,T,hen the fun- making began. There were two pian-ists pian-ists and a 'cellist from the works; there was a man out of the rolling-mill rolling-mill who sang as good songs and did as' goo'd impersonations as you would be apt to sec on Broadway. The cigars were as good as the dinner, and the spirit was better than all. They called on the general manager for a speech without any warning, and he gave them a masterly digest of 0110 of the Harper's Weekly articles on "Opportunity," and brought -d'own the house. It's that sort of alacrity and good judgment that has made him manager of a $120,000,000 corporation. A quiet, bearded man who bade us good night at the mill door was Christopher Chris-topher Borg, superintendent of the whole big Decring establishment, that j in normal times employs 5,000 men. j One morning in October, 1882, "Chris" Borg was hired from among the crowd of men at the gate of the ' Decring Works as a day laborer to ' do service "by the day with pick and shovel. He is a whole chapter on; what a man can do for himself in cor-, . poratc employ. , ,t '.-... It would take a long time to cnutrih ' crate the things that arc done here j and in other plants in the hope of bet- ' tcring conditions and making people healthier, happier, and safer. There arc picnics up the lake in the summer -time, rival ball nines and bowling . teams; there arc tennis games, fire drills in all the plants, and in musical Milwaukee a band of sixty pieces, which plays at the noon hour. There arc physical culture classes that work for an hour after closing time. There is a regular system of sick calls. The nurse, Miss Louise Palmer, who reports re-ports at the plant-surgeon's office morning, noon and night, and at 1 good many other times, is eternally on the go through the neighborhood. The important question, however, is whether the purpose of the corporation, corpora-tion, as enunciated by its president, pertains equally to all its establishments. establish-ments. In an office at the end of the long hallway in the company's head- r quarters in the Harvester Building, Chicago, I found Miss Marie Goss. Miss Goss .was for years employed in the offices of the Piano Works, another of the Chicago plants. When she was installed as welfare manager for the Harvester corporation, she took a big contract, There are four- teenr,p,lanU in different parts of the country, all with different surroundings, surround-ings, different classes of employees, different local demands.; . "There are a good many live wires in t'his work," said! Miss Goss.'"Whcn a group of workmen think they would rather bring sandwiches, go get a pail of" beer and sit on the curbstone to cdt;they are apt to consider it interference inter-ference if we send down the push-cart witlian electric coil and kct'lcs of hot oupand steaming coffee -at noon. But two months after we started 'in doing this m one plant, the SalOOll-keepers SalOOll-keepers came over and begged us to stop it, because it was driving them out of business. But we have ta better' bet-ter' -and healthier workman, and the workman's wife has a steadier bus's bus-'s 1 band, with the, beer habit cut out. To r , ,. ..- I that" extent paternalism pays. I ' "1 i H , , "There has been too little education income places, too much in others-education others-education of the wrong kind; too much devotion to purely esthetic ai-tempts, ai-tempts, things tliat don't make for I bread-winning. Technical training is ofnhc first importance. We arc look ingionly for practical benefits. Tlfci company believes that everybody j ' ought to have an opportunity to "work undcflthc best possible conditionsAaiTdl outside of work ought to diave a chance for the best kind of fun. ""One of the most necessary things 1 is to guard against accidents and to 3 provide the best plan for med'ical and surgical treatment. In some of the i plants this is well looked after, al- 1 though not by the same system in all places. Where six or seven thouF- J and hands arc employed, where a ' hundred and sixty or more shops arc full of diversified machinery, men arc bound to be hurt, and where the population pop-ulation is ignorant of sanitary and physical laws, men arc bound to be sick. Dr. Fisk and his assistant in the MJcCormick infirmary treated twenty-five twenty-five thousand! cases last year. Sixty per .cent ofl these were surgical. While the great majority of 'the injuries in-juries were scratches, cuts and small abrasions, it is, of course, clear that prompt attention to them prevented no end of Iblood-poisoning and other ill results. Of amputations there were seventy-five, but only a few serious ones, which were removed to a neighboring neigh-boring hospital under Dr. Fisk's I chargc. The company keeps an am bulance for this purpose. In the course of the year he attended five, hundred employees who were illr at home. There were three deaths front injuricsTcccived in the works, one by the breaking of a grindstone, one from a collision in the freight yards, one from the collapse of a section of flooring. " Sanitary improvement will do away with a lot of medical cases, but to prevent accidents we will establish not only effective safety appliances, if possible, on all machinery, but shop rules which will do away with the carelessness of workmen. "A 'relief system is about to be put into -ffcct also, to apply to every establishment es-tablishment we have. The technical schools for employees arc to be widely wide-ly extended, and here" laying her hand upon a huge pile of letters "arc details of- every industrial pension pen-sion system in vogue in the United States. When, by study and comparison, com-parison, the best features of all these can be combined, the Harvester Company Com-pany will adopt it. "What we arc trying to do as rapidly rap-idly as may be is to get the whole situation systematized!. When the plan is complete, getting it into operation will not be so difficult." It is plain to sec, and to feel, as yo.i touch the personal mechanism of the Harvester Company !at its various points; that the work that is' ticing done for the betterment of conditions has the best guarantee of success, to-wit, to-wit, the appreciation and co-operation - of everybody all down the line. & . r |