Business: America the Inefficient

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. . . The salespeople knew the stock and enjoyed showing it . . . Barbers came to the house if desired . . . Mail and milk were delivered along with newspapers in time for breakfast . . . Elevators were run by operators who said 'Good morning,' reported the weather, and took in messages and parcels." This, as Miss Bird notes, was clearly efficiency for the few based on the poverty and despair of many. In those days of unemployment rates ranging up to 25% of the work force, any job was a treasure to be treated with devotion. Several people were waiting to replace any sluggish or surly worker; if laid off, he could count on months or even years of idleness and penury.

No Longer Turned On

Today, quite a few businessmen tell each other between drinks at the country club that some more unemployment would be good for the economy's efficiency. But any politician who says that even 5% unemployment is tolerable flirts with disaster. The nation is committed to relatively full employment and, though the jobless rate inched up to 4.2% last month, employers still have trouble finding anyone who will deign to take a position considered boring or menial. Turnover of workers runs high in the Post Office, with disastrous effects upon efficiency, because few Americans will accept jobs that require work at night or on weekends. Some restaurateurs are hiring the mentally retarded because they are the only people willing to try—and even take some pride in—mopping floors and washing dishes. Hospitals often recruit the physically handicapped for service jobs —handling bedpans, doing kitchen and laundry work—that no one else will stick with.

Urbanization also subtly strikes efficiency of personalized services. The big-city plumber or repairman who botches a job rarely has to face the angry customer again. He can find plenty of other customers who do not know him but pick his name out of the Yellow Pages when they are desperate for his services. In earlier times, in a small town, people had to build up a clientele, so good will mattered. Even today, city dwellers who visit smaller towns are surprised to find smiling cab drivers and hustling waiters.

But the true spur to efficiency is not fear—either of unemployment or a customer's wrath; it is rather a positive ideal. And that ideal is failing in the affluent urban society of the present time. "People are no longer turned on by the Protestant Ethic," says Abraham Zaleznik, a professor at the Harvard Business School. To some, the Protestant Ethic—hard work is a virtue for its own sake—appears to have been replaced by an almost Mediterranean spirit, a spreading belief that men should work no more than they must to enjoy the good life and worldly pleasures. "There has been a steady and consistent reduction in the commitment of men to work as a way of life," says Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. "That movement has accelerated in recent times. The expansion of paid leisure time will continue, and there may well be a greater tendency to choose leisure over additions to income, where that choice can be made."

The choice is already being made. In auto plants, complains General Motors Chairman James Roche, absenteeism doubled during the 1960s, hurting production quality so badly that some G.M. output "is worse