Politics & Power Quote by Charles E. Merrill

There is a hard, almost managerial neatness to Merrill's line: work is framed as a clean, neutral substance that can be extracted without the mess of ideology. In a single sentence, he tries to turn politics from a set of lived stakes into a kind of avoidable inconvenience, like bad weather on a shipping day. The phrasing "If he wants their labor" is especially telling. Labor isn't described as collaboration, vocation, or even employment; it's a resource someone "wants", implying a one-way demand rather than a negotiated relationship. The workers are "them", a collective mass to be deployed, not citizens with opinions.

The specific intent is practical and disciplinary. Merrill is effectively advising a manager or public official: stop filtering workers through partisan loyalty tests, and just get the job done. But the subtext isn't neutral. "Without regard to politics" sounds like tolerance, yet it also functions as containment. It asks workers to compartmentalize the part of themselves that might question wages, conditions, unions, or the power that decides who gets hired. In American business culture, calls to keep "politics" out of work have often doubled as calls to keep labor power out of management decisions.

Contextually, Merrill comes out of a world where large-scale finance and modern corporate organization were consolidating authority in the early 20th century. In that setting, depoliticizing the workplace is a strategy: keep production steady, keep conflict individualized, keep the factory floor from becoming a forum. The line works because it masquerades as fairness while preserving control.