Fairman had the comical delusion that by expanding wages and contracting the workday he could cut off a lot of worry from the minds of his laborers and their weary wives, and that this in turn would mean increased bodily vigor, clarity of thought, efficiency of action and other things that would sound well if we could think of them at this moment.
With the recklessness of Irresponsibility, Fairman went so far as to put his spooly ideas into effect. He paid a minimum wage so high that when Grabit heard about it he let out a roar that shook the apples all off the trees in an orchard scene that his daughter, Eleanor, had painted when she was at the Academy.
He swore that Fairman was demoralizing the Labor Market and nervously pulled scotch hairs out of his dilating nostrils.
Visitors to the plant of Fairman began to comment on the clear merry eyes of the workers. The men went about their tasks with speed and accuracy.
The factory’s output increased fifty percent without straining a ligament. The puddler seemed as interested as the President in everything that was doing around the Works.
If you had stood on the corner when the morning whistles blew, and watched the dinner-pailers heading up Main Street, you could have picked the workers of Fairman from the toilers of Grabit with your eyes 22° off centre.
The Grabiters all had that “I wasn’t-hired-to-do-that” air, and groused about the Boss in low dismal tones all the way from liver-and-coffee to forge and furnace, and back again. Every shoulder balanced its chip; and grouch, gruff and grump settled over the Works so thick you couldn’t rip it with a rapier.
Every morning when Grabit opened his mail he was regaled with much pleasing news from Kicking Kusstomers about defective Goods, shortage and all those things that wallow in the wake of a system of inspection that has sagged to a dull routine through indifference and the lack of pussonel interest.
Grabit didn’t sneak behind any door and whisper to himself what he really thought of the unreasonable dubs that made these complaints. On the contrary, he called his melancholy stenographer and dictated a masterful piece of satire and roofraising rhetoric that was calculated to double them up like a jack-knife.