get it
for them.

Finding out what people want and getting it for them is what may be
called, controlling business.

The question not unnaturally arises with all these business men and
their twenty or thirty thousand people working with them, eight or nine
hours a day, five or six days a week, in controlling business, why
should the members of the House of Commons expect, by taking a few
afternoons or evenings off for it, to control business for them?

If I were an employee and if what I wanted to do was to improve the
conditions of labour in my own calling, I do not think I would want to
take the time to wait several months, probably, to convince my member of
Parliament, and then wait a few months more for him to convince the
other members of Parliament, and then vote his one vote. I would rather
deal directly with my employer.

If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my
employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting
what I am doing for him--if I once get his attention and once get him to
notice my back, he can get down. No one else can get down for him and no
one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get
down. Why should a man bother with T.P.'s _Weekly_ or with Horatio
Bottomley or with the _Daily Mail_ or the _Times_, with a score of other
people's by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his
back?

There is a very simple rule for it.

The way to lift one's employer off one's back is to make one's back so
efficient that he cannot afford to be on it.

The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my
employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself.
And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my
trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try
to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my
employer's hiring engineers to make me efficient. I would try to get my
trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like
Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much
work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his
employer and three times as fit and strong for himself.

This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good. I would be
so good that he could not afford not being good too.

If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood human