ANXIETY AND OUTPUT
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—I should like to reply to your correspondents who have commented on my article " Anxiety and Output : a Factory Experiment."
I am sorry that I have given Miss Bloomfield the impression that I intended to disparage factory workers. This, of course, is not the case and I am sure your readers will under- stand what I was intending to convey.
With regard to Dr. C. S. Myers' remarks on vocational training ; I cannot help feeling that this is begging the question. What on earth does vocational training mean for operations such as those I have described, and should we not be suspicious of schemes of effective incentives and training whose object is to train a class of people content to work for long hours on mechanical operations ?
While admitting that much of the work of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology has been extremely valuable, it sometimes seems as if there has been an over emphasis on the methods of exact science where common sense and knowledge of human nature should have sufficed. Why was it necessary in connexion with. the experiments I have described to employ a Master of Science and two assistants for over a year to discover that young girls du not like repetitive work for long hours in a factory ; or an army of research workers, as in the American experiment, to find out that employees dislike being bawled at by foremen ? .
But what chiefly disturbs me in Dr. Myers' letter is an apparent acceptance of present industrial conditions, an attempt to pretend that things are not as they are (in what sense is it not true that the majority of boys and girls leaving school are left to find a job as best they can ?) and the satis- faction with the efforts which are being made to make the best of what appears to me to be a very bad job.—I am, -Sir, &c., •
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