t to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will
defend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not.
True and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled labor
cannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedly
skilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job and
lazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as to
reward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong to
capital.
In other words, the second function of the skilled consumers after
telling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is to
make arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capital
and labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing how
to help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as to
help in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealing
with themselves and one another and with the people.
I have summed up the three Rights to Be Waited On. All of these rights
turn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, the
science of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed by
the people to make their democracy work.
I would like to illustrate this in the next chapter.
X
III--THE RIGHT TO WHISPER
The employees in the stockyards in ---- have been trying to get the
attention of Mr. John Doe, the young man who inherited the business, to
the fact that the least a family can live on now is $1388 a year.
Mr. Doe, who has never tried being bitterly poor and whose attention can
not be got to what can be done in a year for a wife and five children
with $1388 until he tries it, is rather discouraging to deal with.
There is no known way of getting him to try it, and in the meantime he
thinks he knows without trying, and he thinks his attention is got when
it is not. He tells the workmen that two pairs of shoes ought to last a
child a year--and goes home in his limousine.
That is the end of it.
It ought not to be the end of it.
Who can get Mr. Doe's attention?
Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees do not succeed in getting Mr. Doe's
attention?
Why is it that Mr. Doe has so little difficulty in getting theirs? Why is
it that Mr. Doe's employees, when he speaks of the two pairs of shoes a
year, hang on his words?
Because Mr. John Doe is their employer.
Who are the people whose words Mr. Doe would hang on and would be obl
|