Man to Man: The Story of Industrial Democracy

John Leitch's epoch marking book, "Man to Man," showing how this industrial Moses has solved the labor problem for forty-five or more corporations-how he has secured bigger pay for labor, and obtained from 30% to 300% more work, enthusiastically given, from the workers - how he has completely done away, not only with strikes, but with all labor dissatisfaction and antagonism - how he has transformed the whole relation between employer and employee. * * * * * "I CAN SEE nothing ahead but disaster if we accept it as a fact that the natural relation between employer and employee is one of competition and war and that their rights are to be adjudicated either through trial of battle or trial at law. We used to think the big function of a medical man was to cure; now we know that it is to prevent. Would we have given any particular credit to Surgeon General Gorgas if, instead of taking fever out of the Canal Zone, he had built a series of splendid hospitals so that the victims might comfortably be cured? . . . Strikes are culminations of ill-will. Is there not room for practicing a little preventive strike medicine?" Those striking words may be taken as the keynote of John Leitch's epoch-marking if not epoch-making book, "Man to Man: The Story of Industrial Democracy." Surely the author is not going too far when he says in his introduction, "The whole future of the United States is bound up in the establishment of a happy relation between the employer and the employee." If that is so, then it would be difficult to conceive of anything more fundamental, more constructive or bigger with practical promise - to say nothing of still more practical and triumphant achievement-than this remarkable volume. Do not mistake me if I say that John Leitch originated the American "Soviet" years before we ever heard of Russian Soviets; for the "Soviet" system which this industrial wonder-worker has put into successful operation in over a score of important plants, - with the hearty cooperation and to the lasting "benefit of their owners as well as their employees, - is as simply, mightily, and gloriously American as Abraham Lincoln, as the very stars and stripes themselves. Indeed, we are justified in likening these sane and conspicuously successful applications of Industrial Democracy, as Leitch calls it, to the soviets, only because the former may be thought to be our characteristic, constructive, conservatively radical answer to the same world-wide demand on the part of the toilers for their place in the sun, a demand which the Russian revolutionists, we are tempted to say, have met just as characteristically with destruction and terrorism. In a few words, this astonishing book, which is a record of practice, not of theory, tells how Leitch has solved the labor problem for forty- five or more large corporations: how he has completely done away with strikes in these corporations-how he has obtained from 30% to 300% more work, enthusiastically given, from the workers-how he has secured bigger pay for labor and bigger profits for capital-how he has entirely eliminated labor antagonism and dissatisfaction and changed the whole relation between employer and employed. In not one of those plants has there been a strike since his plan was introduced and carried out." In not a single one of those plants has there been labor dictation, labor antagonism or dissatisfaction. And every one of those plants has increased production, lowered costs, paid bigger wages, made bigger profits. By the workings of his unique method, John Leitch does away entirely with the ill-will and antagonism of labor. He does away with time-killing tactics. He does away with a gigantic waste of raw material. He completely settles the hiring and firing problem-thus doing away for all time with excessive labor "turnover." -The Business Philosopher, Vol. 17 [1919]