INCREASING OUTPUT.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4889, 12 October 1925, Page 1

INCREASING OUTPUT.

INDUSTRIAL PROBLEM AT HOME. AN IMPORTANT ASPECT. "With the practice pf ca’ canny or need for; men who work strenuously with brain and hand, to have adequate relaxation I am in complete agiceemnt; but, really, the whole thing is getting somewhat oyerdbne,” writes “An Untired Business Man” in "Truth.” “For every captain of industry who rushes off to his country nouse at the week-end, and makes himself ill in consequence, there are thousands of business men who have no country house to rush off to, but who, as a matter of fact, are Seldom to be found at their businesses before ten o’clock in the morning, who are never there after five o’clock in the afternoon, and who are usually absent from those businesses for lunch between 12.30 and 3, while any reasonably fine day they can always be beguiled into a game bf golf. “As a. director of a fairly wellknown business myself, I have come to the definite conclusion that, however necessary and desirable relaxation and week-end holidays may be, the only way in which we sahll. get a bigger output from industry is by the men who are in responsible positions at .the top themselves working harded. Ido not see how appeals for more exertion from employers who average six hours a day to men who average eight can produce the slightest effect. “After all, you. cannot expect a working man, whose income is never more than enough to keep him in >;he necessaries of life, to .take the same intelligent interst. in maintaining the British Empire at the head of the nations as the man who . has a very much greater, share in the products and cpmforts oi that Empire.

“If I personally were faced with the certainty of spending the nest of my life as a workman, .say, at £3 a week, with intervals of unemployment (when I should, presumably, receive about 25si), I am afraid that I could not possibly take the, high altruistic attitude that certain writers are apt to suggest the worker ought to take, particularly when I saw other people working a good deal less and getting .a good deal more for it. “Yet, unless the. British worker does put his back iritp the jo.b much more thoroughly than he has done of late British trade,will undoubtedly go down, and the British nation, instead of leading the world, will have to take a very inferior position. Obviously, that is not desirable, and the only way I think it probable that any great way Ltihnk it probable that any great national industrial effort will, be made —is for those who are the natural leaders of industry themseves ,to get down to the job, and by harder work set an example. “That may not exactly make, for a rest cure for tired business men. There is ,a very old quotation which says: ‘Do the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.’ I commend it to those business men who at the moment are feeling particularly tired.”