Shop Management

SHOP MANAGEMENT 145 idea, the first falling off is instantly felt by the work- man through the loss of his day’s bonus, or his differ- ential rate, and is thereby also forcibly brought to the attention of the management. There is one rather natural difficulty which arises when the functional foremanship is first introduced. Men who were formerly either gang bosses, or foremen, are usually chosen as functional foremen, and these men, when they find their duties restricted to their particular functions, while they formerly were called upon to do everything, at first feel dissatisfied. They think that their field of usefulness is being greatly contracted. This is, however, a theoretical diffi- culty, which disappears when they really get into the full swing of their new positions. In fact the new position demands an amount of special infor- mation, forethought, and a clear-cut, definite respon- sibility that they have never even approximated in the past, and which is amply sufficient to keep all of their best faculties and energies alive and fully occupied. It is the experience of the writer that there is a great commercial demand for men with this sort of definite knowledge, who are used to accepting real responsibility and getting results; so that the training in their new duties renders them more instead of less valuable. As a rule, the writer has found that those who were growling the most, and were loudest in assert- ing that they ought to be doing the whole thing, were only one-half or one-quarter performing their own particular functions. This desire to do every one’s else work in addition to their own generally dis-