Until employees are more active as citizens and more sensitive to hygienic rights, it is desirable that welfare directors be employed in factories to arbitrate between employer and employee, to raise the moral standard of a factory settlement, to organize amusements.
Welfare work at its best is a method of dividing business profits among all who participate in making these profits. Too often welfare secretaries teach employees how to be happy in the director's way, rather than in their own way. This adventitious position increases suspicion on both sides, disturbs the discipline of the foreman, weakens rather than strengthens the worker's efficiency, because it depends upon other things than work well done and the relation of health to efficiency. In a small factory town the owner of a large cotton mill has recognized the financial benefit of physically strong workers, and is trying the experiment of a welfare director. The man himself works "with his sleeves up." The social worker has an office in the factory. A clubhouse is fitted up for the mill hands to make merry in. A room in the factory is reserved for a lunch room, with plants, tables, and chairs for the comfort of the women. Parties are given by the employer to the employees, which he himself attends. He has thrown himself into whatever schemes his director has suggested. The director complained that the reason the new lunch room was not more popular was because a piano was needed. A second-hand one would not do, for that would cultivate bad taste in music. This showed the employer that soon everything would be expected from the "big house on the hill." An event which happened at the time when the pressure was greatest on him for the piano, convinced him that his employees could supply their real needs without any trouble or delay. The assistant manager was about to leave, and in less than a week five hundred dollars was raised among the workers for his farewell gift. Walking home that night late from his office the owner was attracted by the sound of jollity, and saw a little room jammed full of mill people enjoying the improvised music of a mouth organ played to the accompaniment of heels. He resolved henceforth to train his employees to do his work well and to earn more pay,--and to let them amuse themselves. From that time on he refused to be looked upon as the _deus ex machina_ of the town. He decided that the best way to give English lessons to foreigners was to improve the school. His beneficence in supplying them with pure water at the mill did not prevent a ravaging typhoid epidemic because the town water was not watched. He saw that the best way to improve health was to strengthen the health board and to make his co-workers realize that they were citizens responsible for their own privileges and rights.