Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

156 EFFICIENCY METHODS take food, the provision of food itself, of a rest-room, of proper lavatories and cloak-rooms. We need not enumerate them all. The other type of betterment is the one of which workmen are more suspicious, as it tends to interfere with their liberty. It often strikes them also as an intention to grant them houses, libraries, club-rooms, and so on, instead of better wages. Now if a “ fatigue eliminator ”—it is not a very prepossessing title—is going to be quite thorough, he has been told by Miss Goldmark in no uncertain way that he is concerned with home conditions, most of all housing. The scientific manager values each worker, and wants to keep him at his best. How can this be done if he arrives each morning jaded and worn from sleeping in an insanitary room, and continually combating cold, damp and draughts, or dirt, bad drains and effluvia ? Yet it is often treading on very difficult ground to attempt to solve the housing problem for him. The manager may have to be content with his provision of high wages as the best solution he can make to the problem, and trust to his men being able to make their homes comfortable by the help of their well-filled pockets. Apropos of the high wages, the author of " Welfare Work ” makes an observation which in general drift agrees rather remarkably with Taylor’s estimate of its place in a programme—that nothing of the kind ought to be attempted in a works where the wages are not at least as high as any in the neigh- bourhood (p. 136). She adds that this condition is