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| Conservatism | Women are Fickle, You Say? |
Labor and Leisure
by Christopher Chantrill
September 03, 2007 at 9:45 pm
THEY ARE having a problem in the old manufacturing city of Milwaukee these days, writes Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Once studded with factories, it’s now lined with old, empty buildings along rail lines.”
Don’t worry though. There are are still plenty of manufacturing jobs in Milwaukee. They just don’t lie along the rail lines any more, but in newer buildings close by.
But there’s a problem.
Manufacturers have a work force dominated by baby boomers now starting to retire, and they find they cannot get enough replacements, even for jobs requiring no skills.
No, this is not an article about immigration. It is an article about labor efficiency, the famous labor efficiency of the industrial worker that first emerged in Britain in the Industrial Revolution and then assisted the rise of the United States to world power.
It wasn’t just capitalism and technology that powered the rise of the West. That’s what Gregory Clark argues in his book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. 
When British inventors revolutionized textile manufacturing with Arkwright’s water frame for cotton spinning and power looms for weaving, they didn’t just create a textile industry in Britain. Pretty soon they built a textile machine industry in Manchester, England, that exported textile machinery to the entire world. And they sent good Lancashire toolmakers, men like the capable William Rhodes in A. G. Macdonnell’s comic novel England, Their England
You would think that once the textile factories were set up in India and elsewhere that they would soon have put the British textile mills out of business. But they didn’t. For over a century the textile workers in India failed to compete with the British and American textile workers. The reason is simple. Textile factory managers in India found that they had to hire three or four times the number of workers that they needed in Britain or the US. Indian workers just did not submit to factory discipline like British workers. Writes Clark of Indian factory conditions in the early twentieth century:
A substantial fraction of workers were [sic] absent on any given day, and those at work were often able to come and go from the mill at their pleasure to eat or to smoke.
The fictional William Rhodes had similar experiences.
I’d spend a week teaching a fellow, and then, just as I’d got him in good shape, he’d remember that his cousin’s aunt had got scarlet fever or something, and off he’d go and I’d have to start again with a new fellow.
The societies that led the economic growth of the last two centuries had become by the time of the Industrial Revolution “increasingly middle class in their orientation,” writes Clark.
Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving.
Since Clark diplomatically avoided mentioning in A Farewell to Alms Max Weber and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published a century ago, you can say that he earned his favorable review in The New York Times with his respect for tender liberal sensibilities.
But now it seems that people everywhere are learning the ways of the Protestant Ethic, and it probably doesn’t hurt that millions of them are actually becoming Protestants, in South America, in Africa, in China, and in South Korea.
Now listen to the experience of Lance Rakow, general manager of an INX International plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that makes specialty inks. He hires production workers at $13.50 an hour. Felons? Not a problem.
If only he could get people to show up, or at least call when they don’t. Last autumn and winter, he says, he lost nine guys — one star opted for Bible college, and the rest were fired, mainly because they accumulated too many unexcused, unexplained absences.
Is it possible that the good old North American working stiff is losing his appetite for work and his willingness to submit to factory discipline?
It may be significant that the nation that leads the world in number of hours worked per year is South Korea. The average South Korean, according to the OECD, works 2,390 hours per year, compared to 1,777 in the United States.
Those pesky Mexican immigrants are also hard workers. Mexican workers are ranked #3 in the world at 1,980 hours per year, right after South Korea and Poland.
Maybe it’s just as well that lots of hard-working Koreans and Mexicans are coming to the United States.
Otherwise we might have to rename Labor Day as Leisure Day.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
Responsibility
Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050
Living the Virtues
When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy