Jobs for Negroes: Some North-South Plant Studies

Abstract

may be taken for illustrative purposes, that article dealing with faith in a free competitive market. In a word, says the National Association of Manufacturers, the point of view of the public welfare, competition serves as a regulator and reducer of prices, as an incentive to improved efficiency, as a guarantor that we shall get what we want, as a protector of the freedom of opportunity.20 The role of government regulation, therefore, or at least should be, nothing more than an effort to strengthen and make more effective the regulation of competition.'2' This article of faith is not easily embraced by those bureaucrats involved in the subsidy of shipping, the conservation of resources, the management of social security or other governmental activities only remotely associated with strengthening competition, and as a consequence any overtures from them for membership in the businessmen's reference group must fail. The third stigmata significant for business reference groups are their common associations in organized bodies of businessmen: Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, Druggists Associations, and a variety of carefully graded luncheon clubs. Propinquity under these circumstances wherein, almost by definition, the bureaucracy is excluded, serves to weld together the business community and to magnify the similarities within the group and the differences of others engaged in a different way of life. Finally, it appears that common subscription to selected periodicals, common audition of certified radio commentators, and mutual stimulation in occasional speech-making tend to reinforce the limits of the business reference group. As one scion of a family industry said, We read what we write. Channels of communication beyond this charmed circle often are available only through interpreters, that is, lawyers who are paid to expose themselves to governmental offices, influences, and personnel. The bureaucrat and the businessman, then, face each other in unfriendly postures, divided by real grievances, but also divided by the incidental alienation of different occupational traits, different languages, different systems of evaluation, and different reference groups. The division is understandable but unfortunate. The tensions which it creates may yet yield to the common knowledge of the ways of men which we slowly accumulate in our varied disciplines. 20 National Association of Manufacturers, Economic Principles Commission, The American Individual Enterprise Systems (New York, 1946), Vol. I, 59. 21 Ibid., p. 57; also see Eric Johnston, op. cit., pp. 10-11.