Men and Rubber: The Story of Business by Firestone Harvey S

Author:Firestone, Harvey S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781778063848
Publisher: Latticework Publishing
Published: 2023-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

“ There is no preliminary test by means of which the quality of a man’s judgment may be gauged.”

Chapter X

The Human Relation

In the old days, I used to pick my own men. We all knew one another. We did not need any rules, and had any one spoken to me about labour management, I might have been interested, but not as far as our place was concerned. We just worked together.

We had only 12 employees in 1902. By 1904, we had an average of 35, and then, in the next year, we took a big jump to 130, but not until 1910 did we reach 1,000. Seven years later, we passed 10,000, and in 1920 reached a peak of 19,800. That, it will be remembered, was the year in which one was fortunate if one got one half war production. In 1902, we did a business of $150,000. In 1920, we did a business of $115,000,000, but I can say with great earnestness that financing this tremendous growth was not nearly as difficult as solving the human equation, or, to be more accurate, getting something in the nature of a comprehension of the human equation. No one ever solves the labour problem. In the beginning, all of our employees were Americans—country folk from the farms of Ohio—the kind of people we knew and had been brought up with. We had tastes in common. For instance, when we tore down the old tile building and put up a three-story brick building, we held a dance, and I sent my new seven-passenger car around to get the girls. Once, on a Washington’s Birthday, I took the whole office force to Cleveland to see the automobile show and have dinner. We annually had a picnic of the whole factory and office force to some nearby lake or to the old homestead at Columbiana. We gave every employee a dollar at Christmas, and when I first went to Europe, I brought back presents for the office force. Whenever the circus came to town, we quit work long enough to see the parade, and everyone had a half day off for the county fair.

We really were a big family. There were no floaters. When we could not give a man work, he went back to the farm.

Now that condition has been modified. Our company has grown so rapidly that it has been necessary to draw native labour from wide areas, making it impossible for our labour forces to remain in contact with agriculture. About one sixth of our labour is foreign born. This element has required a great deal of consideration. It has to be trained to adjust itself to our ways. At the present time, we have succeeded in getting 45 percent of our foreign born to become full-fledged American citizens and 43 percent of the balance have taken out their first naturalization papers. We have found the Negro particularly adapted to handling our raw materials. As our organization has grown, it has become

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