HAPPY MEAN MORE PROFITS

'Jumping for the Jelly Beans.' Produced by Peter Riding. BBC 1. Laurie Lee's 'Cider with Rosie'. Screenplay by Hugh Whitemore. Producer Ann Kirch. Director Claude Whatham. BBC 1.

The ways and means for keeping the workers in their place grow ever more ingenious. One of the latest concepts goes under the heading job enrichment'-and this is a notion full of great potential for those wiser employers who now discern that fatter profits and higher productivity levels cannot be achieved by the whip, or even the bribe, alone.

BBC 1, gave us the edifying spectacle of one of America's popular industrial and social psychologists, Professor Fred Herzberg, playing up to an audience managers in 'Jumping for the Jelly Beans' and giving them the inside story on how to keep their workers' happy in the new 'enlightened' way.

Herzberg, leering and cavorting, displayed the sort of geniality that a gorilla might do before embarking on its dinner and came up with one tidy little theory after another, covering up tired old exploitative notions with bright new names.

Between jokes, he explained that 'people can be made to do almost anything it you bribe them or threaten them enough' and that the 'quickest and easiest way to make someone do something' was 'kick them in the arse' or the KITA method, as he quaintly pronounced it.

By treating people well, on the other hand, he went on, you can get a fair day's work -that is to say 'about half of what the worker can really do'.

Rewards of course, he nudged his audience, are crude and ineffectual since a reward, once given, becomes a right - so it the bonuses don't keep coming, then you are going to get lower and lower rates of performance.' Then he got on . to what he called the 'motivators': the things which really count when it comes to extracting the best performance out of a man or woman: that is 'a sense of achievement, meaningful and interesting work and increased responsibility. This is the stuff that does the trick from the management point of view.

Then there were all sorts of tips he handed out to his enraptured audience.

What he called 'hygiene'work conditions, status, pay etc.-were all important things. 'Employers seem to think I've got no time for money, he said plaintively and stressed how wrong they were and how all-embracing on such aspects his theories 'Communication' is also important i.e. allowing the worker to actually speak to the man above, below or at his side. And a built-in feedback to keep patting the worker on the back in all sorts of subtle ways, to make him feel this sense of achievement he needs to keep him functioning at top pace.

Finally 'to deny people fair treatment with • the declaration that you will make it up to them later' brings the worst possible results as it induces a 'revenge psychology' in the man. "This is seen so often in labour relations' says Herzberg. 'The workers who will say, years later, "look what those bastards did to us years ago"!' To cap a perfect evening and a perfect performance, Herzberg earnestly stated that 'when the employer says the worker hasn't been treated well and it's because we don't respect him enough and its all our fault' •.. when that day comes then a new understanding will be with us all.

Naturally he didn't give a date for this idyll to commence, but implied it as some sort of mystical state workers and management will enter into at the appropriate point in man's history.

This kind of monstrous psychological research and application technique underlies most industrial practice today throughout the capitalist world, although the US has always inclined to a more naked style-in the end Herzberg's jokes and his puny theorizing can only be exposed as the obscene techniques of a desperate employing class bent on squeezing out the last drop of productivity from their employees on all levels.

The fact that the ruling class must resort to such WOrK and class, with such convoluted measures, is an indication in itself of the scale of the trade war and currency crises that pressurize management at this time.

There seems to be all sorts of sugar around to coat the various pills — Laurie Lee's 'Cider With Rosie', a Monday night play on BBC I was another dollop of nothing so much as syrup to take our minds off more or less any reality that might have dangerlives of hundreds of working-class soldiers were sacrificed as cannon-fodder to the whim of an incompetent, megalomaniac aristocrat, Lord Cardigan. ously crept in to disturb us.

Hugh Whitemore gave a cleverly restrained adaptation of the West Country poet's heavily sentimental portrait of his childhood in a country village during the World War I period.

Rosemary Leach, Catherine Lacey, Freda Dowie and many others in a fine cast did what they could to liven this awesome fable of romance and 'goodness' , where the air was always full of honeysuckle and roses, tables were laden with food, the sun shone and Mother, in her most idealized fulsome and objectionable form, dominated the proceedings with persistent cheer and nothing so dirty or mean as conflict or despair crept in to mar the whole ludicrous fantasy.

As the BBC smiles more determinedly into the eyes of its viewers, the • world outside is convulsed with crisis and scandal and makes a mockery of every programme.