Human Relations in Industry

Abstract

EIGHT HOURS TO WORK, eight hours to sleep, eight hours to be a human being (Mensch sein), was the slogan under which Ernst Abbe introduced the eight-hour-day in the Zeiss Optical Factory in Jena, Germany in 1900.1 Abbe, the founder of the Carl Zeiss Stiftung (Foundation), was a social reformer and philanthropist. He recognized early the fact that, even under very favorable social and working conditions like those established at his factory, the working man was still mostly a worker, very little a man, a human being. Even highly qualified work of mechanical precision had to undergo more and more the specialization process of division of labor and mechanization. To be a human being was considered by Ernst Abbe as a rightful demand of the industrial worker; but, at his time, he believed its realization possible only outside working hours. Human relations in industry have undergone three important changes in the last hundred years: (1) No separation between being a worker and being a human being in the workshop where co-operation between master, journeyman and apprentice was the rule; (2) Purposive separation between being a worker and being a man under the conditions of mechanization and bureaucratization of industry; (3) Recognition of the worker as being a whole human personality whose rights and desires during working hours and outside have to be taken into consideration. Ernst Abbe, standing on the threshold between the first and second stages of this development, made an attempt at an individual solution of human relations in his own factory. Karl Mannheim designed a scheme for the purposive transition from the second to the third stage within the framework of planning social changes in our contemporary society. In the original optical workshop, founded in 1846, the relationship between Carl Zeiss and his fellow-workers had been the one: he had worked and lived with them; no separation between being a worker and being a man. What Max Weber calls the traditional domination was based on the everyday belief in the sacredness of traditions that have 1 See Ernst Abbe, Sozielpolitiscbe Sc/riften, Jena, 1906, p. 231; 1Hilda Weiss, Abbe d Ford, Berlin 1927, p. 13.