Evaluación de satisfacción del usuario externo

The early post war debates about the nature and role of welfare work were strongly reflective of the altruistic tone of ‘reconstruction’ movement, which (inter alia) advocated the building co-operative relationships with trade unions through joint industrial councils, a shift away from the traditional ‘laissez faire’ approach to labour, a continued role for government intervention in industry and the organisation of industry as ‘public trusts’ run for the benefit of the community. Thus, for example, Adelaide Anderson, a senior and pioneering figure in the women’s branch of the Factory Inspectorate and long time supporter of the welfare movement, argued that welfare work lay at the centre of a radical new vision about industrial relationships. In a speech given at an international congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health, an early edition of Welfare Work in June 1920 reported her view that the welfare movement was central to “a demand for a wholly new conception in industry, new human relationships and a socialised aim of production, rather than efficiency and quantity of output.598 At a Home Office conference on ‘Welfare Training and Welfare Work’, held in July 1920, some radical proposals about the future of welfare work were put forward by a trade union speaker and reported approvingly in Welfare Work. A theme which had emerged towards the end of the war and after it was that welfare work might rightly belong in the trade union domain and this was reiterated by a trade union speaker, Mr Button. Instead of outright rejection of these ideas, the editorial of Welfare Work described this radical proposal as “a very interesting line of thought” and concluded with the hope that “he will not let it rest in an embryo state, but will develop it at some future occasion”.599 In fact, the journal never reported the development of such ideas on any future occasion, reflecting in all probability the post-war change in climate: the arrival of a Conservative administration opposed to intervention, recession, rising unemployment and employer hostility to the notions of industrial democracy proposed by the Reconstructionists. Nevertheless, the opening articles in the journal indicated that the leadership was open to fairly

598

Welfare Work, 1, 6, June 1920, p83.

599

radical ideas in the immediate post-war period amid the debate about reconstruction, probably allied with a degree of uncertainty about the future direction of welfare work following the removal of wartime controls.

Against a background in decline in the employment of welfare workers, the movement set off in search of ideas for rectifying this decline and one set of ideas which it considered was the emergent American model of Personnel Administration in the period from the early to mid 1920s.

The influence of the American model of personnel administration

It is clear from the earliest editions of Welfare Work that readers were well informed about developments in the United States, with a number of articles being devoted to this subject. In addition, leading figures who were shaping the policies of the British welfare movement were exposed to American ideas at various international conferences which they attended. The first article on American practice appeared in the first year of the journal’s publication when FJ Marquis reported on a visit to see personnel administration in action in US firms. He reported that there was “an absolute abhorrence amongst the more enlightened firms of the phrase ‘welfare worker’“600 because of its earlier associations with paternalist philanthropy. The ‘Supervisor of Personnel’, he reported, was clearly part of management, well remunerated and ranking in position equal to the Production Manager or Head of Finance and the writer

600

Marquis, FJ (1920), Some observations on welfare work, Welfare Work, 1, 9, September, p133. James Marquis was a sociology graduate, former schoolmaster, one-time member of the Fabian Society and strongly committed to the reduction of poverty (DJ Jeremy and C Shaw (1986), eds, Dictionary of Business Biography, v 4, p147). He was later elected to the peerage as the Earl of Woolton. After war service in the War Office, followed by a business tour of the United States in 1920, he joined the department store Lewis’s of Liverpool (which also had stores in Manchester and Birmingham) in 1920 as a Director where, according to his

autobiography and in accordance with the views expressed in his article, he initiated changes in the Company’s traditional approach to staff management by taking responsibility for

engagement, discipline and dismissal away from line managers and placing them in the hands of a specialist Staff Manager appointed at each store. He later became joint managing director of the company in 1928 and chairman in 1934 (ibid, 146-151; Lord Woolton (1959), The Memoirs of the Rt Hon The Earl of Woolton, London, Cassell & Co, p70).

commended the approach to the reader as “the nearest approach to the ideal which I have seen”.601

In April 1922 Daniel Bloomfield, a leading US consultant and author in the field of employment management,602 reiterated the American approach. He confirmed the American retreat from welfare work on the grounds that it was a “superficial way of dealing with fundamental problems” and defined the current thrust of the work as being “concerned with the development of management of personnel in business and industrial establishments”.603 Accordingly, its chief function was to "strengthen the work of management so that all problems arising out of relations of employers with employees receive the same close expert attention that other phases of management are receiving”604. The approach was founded upon a clear statement of employment policies as the basis for conducting employer and employee relationships and for guiding consistent action by management. The field covered was broad, encompassing employment (including job analysis, wage scales, terms and conditions, recruitment and selection, promotion and dismissal), training, health and safety and employees’ services (benefits and recreational facilities). Moreover, he concluded significantly, “the real difference between personnel work in Great Britain and the United States is in the manner of organisation of the work within individual establishments”.605 In the United States, the work was tied “very closely with the chief administrative officials of the establishment”606 and was represented at board level by a vice-president giving exclusive attention to personnel and labour matters.

A subsequent article was published on this subject in September 1922 by Louise C Odencratz, an employment manager with Smith and Keufmann in

601

ibid.

602

See D Bloomfield, The Problem of Labour, Selected Articles on Employment Management, Employment Management, Labour Maintenance: A Practical Handbook of Employees’ Service Work, all published in 1920.

603

Bloomfield, D (1922), Employees’ service work from an American point of view, Welfare Work, 3, 28, April, p63. 604 ibid. 605 ibid, p64. 606 ibid.

New York and provided the perspective of the American practitioner.607 Given a brief by the journal to discuss welfare work in America, she opened by pointedly explaining that she has substituted the term ‘personnel’ for ‘welfare’, reiterating the retreat from the latter term and the reasons for it. In providing her summary of the current position in the USA, she argued as follows:608

“The tendency is for personnel workers more and more to get into the production end, or at least to work closely with the production manager. So we find personnel workers all through the country concerning themselves with questions of training, promotions, job analysis, time studies and rate setting, methods of wage payments, standards of wages and cost of living, wages and production standards, working hours and regularity of production”.

The leadership of the welfare workers’ movement were also made aware of the American perspective at international exchanges from 1922 when the International Welfare (Personnel) Congress was established and which had provided the source of the papers on American practice published in the journal. The next international conference under the auspices of the International Congress in 1925 again provided exposure to practice in United States, notably a paper delivered by Dr W J Donald, Managing Director of the American Management Association, which had become the representative body for welfare or personnel work. His report reiterated a shift in the United States from "old fashioned welfare work" towards a professional management function based upon centralised policy-making employment departments.609 "The tendency of the time", he argued, "is in the direction of subjecting all American personnel work to the tests of economic results ... (and) the recognition that it is an integral and inseparable part of management".610 Contrasts also became apparent in the two countries’ approaches to training for work in this field. In the United States, training for the work was bound up with university business departments, whilst in

607

Odencratz, C (1922), Personnel work in America, Welfare Work, 3, 33, September, pp166-168.

608

ibid, p166.

609

International Industrial Welfare (Personnel) Congress (1925), Report of Proceedings, Zurich, the Congress, p93.

610

Britain it was associated with social work.611 American speakers talked in terms of a "profession", British speakers in terms of a 'movement'.612

The affinities between scientific management and the development of ‘personnel administration’ in the United States were clear, with its emergence as a centralised policy-making function and its involvement in such activities as job analysis, time study, rate setting and wage payment systems. American developments were not, however, published in Welfare Work after 1922 for reasons which will shortly become apparent.

Rejection of the American model and a continuing search for a philosophy of the welfare movement: 1920-1927

The response of British practitioners to the American approach, which had already adopted the term ‘personnel administration’ to cover this field of activity by this time,613 was almost universally hostile.

Amid the interest in the American approach in the early 1920s, a British practitioner by the name of A Rowland-Entwistle offered his thoughts on the American approach, based on a visit he had made to enquire into practice there in the columns of Welfare Work on April 1921. In his view, practice in the United States was too tied up with scientific management from which “for the past ten years” Britain had suffered ”as a result of an influx of transatlantic Apostles of a so-called new gospel of efficiency”.614 All it has achieved, he argued, was "an Americanisation of British industrial practice, not only futile in result but probably one of the greatest factors contributing to the growth in friction and misunderstanding between employers and workers”.615 The American approach to functional management, he argued, concentrated too much power in the hands of managers, such as the Employment Manager who 611 ibid, pp406 & 440. 612 ibid, pp93, 146 & 149. 613

For example, the leading US text book by Ordway Teade and HC Metcalf, Personnel Administration: Its Principles and Practice, New York, McGraw Hill (1920).

614

Rowland-Entwistle, A (1921), Principles of employment management: 1, Welfare Work, 2, 16, April, p54.

615

had executive authority over employment policies. Such an approach would rob the employer of his right to determine policies in relation to the human side of the business and rob managers of executive authority in their own departments. Welfare in the UK needed to provide a link in the chain of communication between the personal wishes of employers and employees, with a focus on welfare, employment, education and recreation.616 Any attempt to “slavishly copy” American methods, he concluded, “must be repudiated”.617 Since so much emphasis was placed on the personal desires and preferences of employers, Rowland-Entwistle’s approach appears to amount to an advocacy of paternalism, with the welfare worker as its communication medium.

Any approach to welfare work based on scientific management was also attacked by another welfare worker, Annie E Owen, in the columns of Welfare Work. In her view, “as soon as our interest in scientific management becomes greater than our interest in the individual, then it seems to me that we lose ground as Welfare Workers...real Welfare is a spirit, a principle in industry”.618 The search for this ‘spirit’ and ‘principle’ would, as we shall see, occupy much of the time of welfare workers as they debated their future direction in the early to mid 1920s.

It was noted earlier that welfare workers had attempted to occupy the ‘middle ground’ between management and workers during the First World War, based on Rowntree’s conception of the work, but this stance had been opposed both by employers and officials of the Ministry of Munitions who saw the role as firmly part of management. In consequence, the Welfare Workers’ Association had reluctantly accepted this principle in its definition of the work in June 1918. We saw, too, how in practice leading spokespeople of the welfare workers’ movement had experienced difficulties in accepting that their role was to work for the ends of scientific management, efficiency and maximum production. Their fundamental hostility to these objectives continued to characterise the

616

Rowland-Entwistle, A (1921), Principles of employment management: 2, Welfare Work, 2, 18, June, p85.

617

Rowland-Entwistle (1921), April, op cit, p54.

618

debate about their future role during the early to mid 1920s. Their leading spokesperson, Eleanor Kelly,619 had effectively laid down a manifesto for the development of welfare work in 1920. Whilst accepting the principle that “the welfare worker is the person to whom a firm entrusts certain functions of management”, she laid down a prerequisite for a firm adopting welfare work that it “must regard its business activities as, to some extent at least, a social service and not merely a means of making money”.620

It became evident too that Kelly was pursuing a radical agenda based on strongly held religious beliefs. “Capitalism must conform to the Christian ideal or pass away”, she later wrote in 1925.621 Welfare work was not simply about improving working conditions, but had missionary aspirations to bring about “the gradual re-adjustment of our relations with each other, with the physical world around us and with God”.622 Analogies to the work of missionaries were woven into her statements at this time of the roles of the welfare worker, for example, in the following exhortation to a conference of welfare workers in 1922:623

“As welfare workers, we can justify our existence only if we are

visionaries...welfare has to be seen as a vision and is needed in industry as a prophet...Above all things, if we are to accomplish anything we must have faith in God and our fellow men - a faith we can only hope to maintain if we are in right relation to both”

Kelly’s vision of welfare work in the early to mid 1920s remained hostile to its use in boosting production, enhancing efficiency and serving the cause of scientific management and is one of the main reasons why the American model of personnel administration remained anathema. Her opposition became explicit at the International Congress in 1925, referred to earlier, at which leading figures of the British welfare movement had been exposed to papers on

619

Former welfare worker at Boots, a founder member of the WWA in 1913, Honorary Secretary to the WWA 1917-1919 and currently a welfare worker at Debenhams.

620

Kelly, E (1920), Welfare work from the welfare worker’s point of view, Welfare Work, 1, 7, July, p101.

621

Kelly, E (1925) Welfare Work in Industry, London, Pitman, p2.

622

ibid, pv.

623

the American approach. Given that the conference was concerned to establish international agreement about the nature and remit of this work, fundamental differences had emerged between the British and American approaches and an important point of principle was at stake. At the end of the proceedings, she rose to complain that the papers had assumed that welfare work must increase production, arguing:624

"Was this necessity really axiomatic? It was necessary that Congress should come to a fundamental decision on this point ... with some exceptions, the rest of the papers assumed that the only way to get the world right was to increase production and that health and social amenities would follow in consequence ... the opposite was the truth".

So vexed was the issue that no agreement could be reached on the uneasy compromise of including both ‘Welfare’ and ‘Personnel’ in the title of the association that it was resolved that its membership should be open to both and also that controversy would be avoided by calling it ‘The International Association for the Study and Improvement of Human Relations and Conditions in Industry’.625

The debate about the principles and philosophy underlying welfare work in Britain continued at the WWA conference of 1926. To one speaker, ML Haskins of the London School of Economics, welfare work was about the search for social justice.626 Another speaker, Miss Borland of Munro and Co in Edinburgh, reviewed possible employers’ motives underpinning welfare work and firmly rejected both its potential role in increasing profit as “inconsistent with any true conception of welfare, having in it no element of altruism” and also its potential role in contributing to scientific management and enhanced efficiency as “inconsistent with welfare in so far as it depreciates human values”,627 yet

624

International Industrial Welfare (Personnel) Congress (1925), op cit, pp449-450.

625

ibid.

626

Haskins, ML (1926), The evolution of the welfare motive, Welfare Work, 7, 83, November, 205-207.

627

Borland, CR (1926), The evolution of the welfare motive, Welfare Work, 7, 83, November, p203.

paradoxically reached the following conclusion about the future direction of welfare work:628

"Efficiency today demands nothing less than the full application of science to industry, including the newer social sciences of psychology, sociology and social relations. Such an ideal of efficiency, so humanised, socialised and enlarged, or something like it, seems to me to lie behind some of the best effort called

‘welfare’ today and to be in the general direction in which we are heading”.

In conclusion, the ‘philosophy’ of welfare work as it emerged during the early to mid 1920s, was far from clear. On the one hand, it involved a religious crusade which was inconsistent both with profits and scientific management. On the other, it recognised some ‘socialised’ notion of efficiency and the potential contribution of science, including the social sciences, to industry. Clearly recognition of the latter was bound up with the welfare worker’s claims to professionalism, based upon newly established university training in a body of knowledge drawing mainly from the social sciences. Yet, somehow, the application of this knowledge must serve the moral and spiritual well-being of