Shop Management

SHOP MANAGEMENT 121 it is taken away from some other job for which he is well trained. The work which is now done by one sewing machine, intricate in its appearance, was for- merly done by a number of women with no apparatus beyond a simple needle and thread. There is no question that the cost of production is lowered by separating the work of planning and the brain work as much as possible from the manual labor. When this is done, however, it is evident that the brain workers must be given sufficient work to keep them fully busy all the time. They must not be allowed to stand around for a considerable part of their time waiting for their particular kind of work to come along, as is so frequently the case. The belief is almost universal among manufac- turers that for economy the number of brain workers, or non-producers, as they are called, should be as small as possible in proportion to the number of pro- ducers, i.e., those who actually work with their hands. An examination of the most successful establishments wiil, however, show that the reverse is true. A num- ber of years ago the writer made a careful study of the proportion of producers to non-producers in three of the largest and most successful companies in the world, who were engaged in doing the same work in a general way. One of these companies was in France, one in Germany, and one in the United States. Being to a certain extent rivals in business and situated in different countries, naturally neither one had anything to do with the management of the other. In the course of his investigation, the writer found that the managers had never even taken the