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Updated: June 13, 2025
A number of years ago the writer made a careful study of the proportion of producers to non-producers in three of the largest and most successful companies in the world, who were engaged in doing the same work in a general way. One of these companies was in France, one in Germany, and one in the United States.
According to the definitions of economic science, on the contrary, definitions which harmonize with the reality of things, power is the series of non-producers which social organization must tend to indefinitely reduce. How, then, with the principle of authority so dear to democrats, shall the aspiration of political economy, an aspiration which is also that of the people, be realized?
The writer found that in the case of another works, doing the same kind of business and whose management was notoriously bad, the proportion of non-producers to producers was one non-producer to about eleven producers. These companies all had large forges, foundries, rolling mills and machine shops turning out a miscellaneous product, much of which was machined.
No manager need feel alarmed then when he sees the number of non-producers increasing in proportion to producers, providing the non-producers are busy all of their time, and providing, of course, that in each case they are doing efficient work.
After the planning room with functional foremanship has accomplished its most difficult task, of teaching the men how to do a full day's work themselves, and also how to get it out of their machines steadily, then, if desired, the number of non-producers can be diminished, preferably, by giving each type of functional foreman more to do in his specialty; or in the case of a very small shop, by combining two different functions in the same man.
Still, the Transvaal was disturbed throughout its whole extent by the expectation of some pending change a change coming from the outside, which had been invited by an active, discontented party, chiefly foreigners, dwellers in towns, non-producers, place-hunters, deserters, refugees, land-speculators, 'development-men, and pests of Transvaal society generally, who openly preached resistance to the law, refusal to pay taxes, and contempt of the natural and guaranteed owners of the country in which they lived, in the distinctly expressed hope that foreign intervention would fill the country with British gold, and conduce to their own material prosperity.
By non-producers the writer means such employees as all of the general officers, the clerks, foremen, gang bosses, watchmen, messenger boys, draftsmen, salesmen, etc.; and by "producers," only those who actually work with their hands.
As a rule, priests proper, frowned upon as non-producers, were recruited from the lower classes, were celibate, unintellectual, idle, and immoral. There was nothing, even in the elaborate ceremonies on special occasions in the Buddhist temples, which could be likened to what is known as 'public worship' and 'common prayer' in the West.
But this retrenchment represents only partially the prodigious economy. Beyond the annual outlay is the loss to the nation by the change of producers into non-producers.
The directors should be convinced that an increase m the proportion of non-producers to producers means increased economy and not red tape, providing the non-producers are kept busy at their respective functions.
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