Socialism As It Is Part 10

"The men grew restless under the adverse decisions of the court.

That raised a new question.

"How are you going to compel men to work when they do not wish to work under the conditions you provide?

"n.o.body had thought of that."

Referring, then, to the failure to prevent the strike of the slaughterers against the law in 1907, or to punish them after they had forced their employers to terms, Mr. Russell gives the Socialist opinion of the legislation of 1908, pa.s.sed to remedy this situation:--

"At the next session of Parliament it amended the law to meet these unexpected emergencies and find a way to compel men to work.

"To strike after a case had been referred to the court was now made a crime, punishable by a fine, and if the fine were not paid, the strikers' goods could be distrained and he could be imprisoned.

Any labor union that ordered a strike or allowed its members to strike was made subject to a fine of $500. Outside persons or organizations that aided or abetted a strike were made subject to severe penalties.

"Fine, again. But suppose the labor unions should try to evade the law by withdrawing from registry under the act? _Government thought once more, and produced another amendment by which the penalties for striking were extended to all trades engaged in supplying a utility or a necessity, whether such trades were organized or not._

"You could hardly surpa.s.s this for ingenuity. 'Supplying a necessity' would seem to cover about everything under the sun and to make striking impossible. There must be no more strikes.

"Sounds like home, doesn't it? To do away with strikes. You see the employing cla.s.s, which all around the world gets what it wants and controls every government, had put itself back of the arbitration law. It had discovered that the law could be made to be a good thing, so it was at the dictation of this cla.s.s that the amendments were pa.s.sed. What the injunction judges do in America, or try to do, the law was to do in New Zealand.

"Except that not Judge Goff nor Judge Guy, nor any other injunction judge of our own happy clime, has dared to go quite so far as to declare that all striking everywhere is a crime to be punished with imprisonment.

"How are you going to compel men to work? Why, thus, said the government of New Zealand. Put them in jail if they do not like the terms of their employment."

Mr. Russell then gives an account of the miners' strike, above referred to, which he points out was ended by the labor department paying the miners' fines. He concludes:--

"Mr. Edward Tregear, a scholar and thinker, had filled for many years the place of chief secretary for labor. It is not a cabinet office, but comes next thereto. He is a wise person and a sincere friend of the worker, as he has shown on many occasions. As soon as he heard that the ministry actually purposed to imprison the miners because they did not like the terms of their employment, he went to the minister of labor and earnestly protested, protested with tears in his eyes, as the minister himself subsequently testified, begged, argued, and pleaded. No possible good could come from such rigor, and almost certainly it would precipitate grave disaster.

"To all this the minister was obdurate. Then Mr. Tregear said that he would resign; he would not retain his office and see men imprisoned for exercising their inalienable right of choice, whether they would or would not work under given conditions.

"Now Mr. Tregear was one of the most popular men in New Zealand, and his resignation under such conditions would raise a storm that no ministry would care to face. Hence the government was in a worse situation than ever. On one side it fronted a dangerous venture with the certainty of a tremendous handicap in the resignation of the chief secretary, and on the other hand was an acknowledgment that the arbitration law was a failure and could be violated with impunity.

"In this emergency decision was halted for a few hours while the government people consulted. Meantime, by quick and desperate efforts, the strike was ended, and the men went back to work.

"This left the fines unpaid. The labor department solved that difficulty and allowed the defeated government to make its escape from a hopeless situation by paying the miners' fines.

"To all intents and purposes it was the end of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand. Not nominally, for nominally the thing goes on as before; but actually. It is only by breaking our shins upon a fact that most of us ever learn anything; and the exalted ministry of New Zealand had broken its shins aplenty on a fact that might have been discerned from the start.

"If you are to have compulsory arbitration, you must compel one side as much as the other.

"But in the existing system of society, when you come to compelling the workers to accept arbitration's awards, you are doing nothing in the world except to compel them to work, and, however the thing may be disguised, compulsory work is chattel slavery, against which the civilized world revolts.

"This is the way the thing works out, and the only way it ever can work out. There can be no such thing as compulsory arbitration without this ultimate situation.

"If, therefore, any one in America believes in such a plan for the settlement of labor troubles, I invite the attention of such a one to this plain record.

"For my own part, years ago I was wont to blame the labor leaders of America because they steadfastly rejected compulsory arbitration, and I now perceive them to have been perfectly right.

The thing is impossible."[75]

A somewhat similar act to the Australasian ones, though less stringent, has been introduced in Canada. The Canadian law, which is a compromise between compulsory arbitration and compulsory investigation, applies to mines, railways, and other public utilities. Strikes have been prevented, but let us see what benefits the employees have received.

Whatever its effect on wages and hours, the law has the tendency to weaken the unions, which hitherto have been the only reliable means by which employees were able to advance their condition. Not only does it make organization seem less necessary, but it takes the most powerful weapon of the union, the ability to call a sudden strike. If we add to this the unfavorable influence on public opinion in case the unions are not contented with the rewards, and the fact that the law works against the union shop, which is the basis of some unions, we can understand the ground of their hostility.

"The Canadian Labour Disputes Investigation Act" is especially interesting and important because it is serving as a model for a campaign to introduce legislation along similar lines into the United States. Already Mr. Victor S. Clark, the author of the study of the Australian Labour Movement, to which I have referred at the beginning of the chapter, has been sent by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft to investigate into the working of the act. Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard has also advocated strenuously and at some length a similar statute, and it has been made the basis for the campaign in Ma.s.sachusetts and other states. Mr. Clark reported: "Under the conditions for which it was devised, the Canadian law, in spite of some setbacks, is useful legislation, and it promises more for the future than most measures--perhaps more than any other measure--for _promoting industrial peace by government intervention_."

Here is the very keynote to compulsory arbitration, according to its opponents, whose whole attack is based on the fact that its primary purpose is not to improve the condition of the working people, but to promote "industrial peace by government intervention."

Mr. Clark concedes that "possibly workers do sacrifice something of influence in giving up sudden strikes," though he claims that they gain in other ways. "After such a law is once on the statute books, however, it usually remains, and in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada it has created a new public att.i.tude toward industrial disputes. This att.i.tude is the result of the idea--readily grasped and generally accepted when once clearly presented--that the _public_ have an interest in industrial conflicts quite as immediate and important in its way as that of the conflicting parties. _If the American people have this truth vividly brought to their attention by a great strike, the hopeful example of the Canadian act seems likely, so far as the present experience shows, to prove a guiding star in their difficulties._" (Italics mine.)

In the agitation that was made in behalf of a similar law in Ma.s.sachusetts, just exactly what is meant by the word "public" began to appear. It refers not only to the consumers of the article produced by the industry in which the strike occurs, but also to other dependent industries, to the merchants of the locality where the workmen live, and to the real estate interests. Here, then, are definite economic interests which are concerned primarily in the prevention of strikes and in the uninterrupted operation of the industry, and only in a secondary way in rates of wages. _It is not a disinterested and non-partisan public; it is not on the side of the employers nor on the side of the employees, but it is opposed to the most effective weapons the working people have yet found to advance their interests, namely, the strike and the boycott._

It is said that if the workers lose the right to strike, the employers lose the right to lockout. It has been customary to set the lockout over against the strike as being of equal importance, but this is not the truth. Employers can discharge their workingmen one at a time when they are dissatisfied with a limited number; and they can often find a business protest for temporarily shutting down or restricting their output. To abolish strikes, then, is to take away the employees' chief means of offense or defense; while to pretend to abolish strikes _and lockouts_ is to leave in the hands of the employers the ability to discharge or punish in other ways the men with whom they are dissatisfied.

When it was proposed to introduce the Canadian law in Ma.s.sachusetts, no unionists of prominence indorsed it, but it was favored by a very large number of employers, while those employers who objected did so for widely scattered reasons. Mr. Clark is probably right in suggesting that, while such a law will not be enacted in the United States as things are now, it is very probable that it can be secured after some industrial crisis--and there is little doubt that President Eliot and perhaps also Mr. Roosevelt, for whom Mr. Clark was investigating, and many other influential public men, are expecting this time to arrive soon.

The att.i.tude of a large minority of British unions and of a considerable part of the British Socialists is similar to that of the Canadian and Australian majority. When in 1907 the railway employees of Great Britain were for the first time sufficiently aroused and organized, and on the point of a national strike, a settlement was entered into through the efforts of Mr. Lloyd George and the Board of Trade (and it is said with the a.s.sistance of King Edward) which involved an entirely new principle for that country. A board was const.i.tuted to settle this and future strikes of which the Master of Rolls and other British functionaries were the leading elements. Actually the workers consented for several years to leave in the hands of the judges over whose election and appointment they have only an indirect and partial, if indeed any, control, complete power over their industrial life. The executive of the Fabian Society issued a manifesto congratulating the government on this "progressive" settlement, though few prominent labor leaders were willing to give it their full indors.e.m.e.nt. The Fabian manifesto said that the advance in wages which could be secured by the settlement "will undoubtedly have been secured on the trade-union program, through the trade-union organization, by the trade union's representatives, and finally, in the argument before the arbitrator, by the ability of the trade union's secretary." But this settlement had nearly all the features of the Canadian law which I have just mentioned, and especially in failing to give any recognition to the unions, left the strongest possible weapon in the hands of their enemies. Nevertheless, more than a third of the members of the British Trade Union Congress voted since that time for a compulsory arbitration act, and British radicals like Percy Alden, M.P., to say nothing of conservatives, agitate for a law along New Zealand lines. The railway strike of 1911 has decreased the popularity of this proposal among unionists and Socialists, but has augmented it in still greater proportion among nearly all other cla.s.ses.

In the meanwhile, in spite of the employees' efforts, and external concessions by the employers, the power in the newest railway conciliation scheme lies also in the hands of the government (see Part III, Chapter V).

Statements by President Taft and other influential Americans lead us to believe it will be a very short period of years before similar legislation is applied to this country, in spite of the hostility of the unions, or perhaps with the consent of some of the weaker among them, which have little to gain by industrial warfare. While Secretary of War, Mr. Taft predicted a controversy between capital and labor which should decide once and for all how capital and labor should share the joint profits which they created. In this and many similar utterances there is foreshadowed the interference of the State. Indeed, the settlement of the Pennsylvania coal strike in 1903 was a clear example of such interference, and there is no question that the precedents established will be followed up on the next occasion of the kind by some arrangement even less advantageous to employees who now almost universally feel, as the present demands of the miner's union show, that they got the worst of the former decision.

The railway and mining situations in Great Britain, and the demand for the government to take some measure to protect employees against the "trusts" in this country (to say nothing of the menace of a great coal strike), promise to make compulsory arbitration an issue of the immediate future. Mr. Roosevelt, who now proposes that the government should interfere between monopolies and their employees, is the very man who is responsible for the coal strike tribunal of 1903, which not only denounced sympathetic strike and secondary boycott, but failed to protect the men against discrimination on account of their unionism.

Were he or any one like him President, the inst.i.tution of government wage boards would be dreaded like the plague.

Similarly Mr. Winston Churchill, in Great Britain, recognizes the extreme seriousness of the situation. His position is ably summed up by the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_:--

"Winston Churchill has propounded a capital-and-labor puzzle to his British const.i.tuents.

"To a modern state, he says in substance, railroad transportation is a necessity of life--and how literally true this is of England was shown in the general strike of last August, when the food supply in some localities ran down to only a few days'

requirements. So the government cannot permit railroad transportation to be paralyzed indefinitely by a strike. It cannot sit by and see communities starve. A point will soon be reached where it must intervene and force resumption of transportation.

"Strikes, however, form one of the modern means of collective bargaining between employer and employees. They are, in fact, the workmen's final and most effective resource in driving a bargain.

Denied the right to strike, labor unions would be so many wooden cannon at which employers could laugh. If the employer knew absolutely that the men could not strike, he might offer any terms he pleased. In wage bargaining the men would not stand on a level footing, but be bound and gagged.

"If, then, the government takes away, or seriously restricts, the right of the men to strike, isn't it bound to step into the breach and readjust the balance between them and the employer, by compelling the employer to pay them fair wages? There can be no free bargaining if it is known that at a certain point the government will intervene on one side. Must it not, then, also be known that at a certain point the government will intervene on the other side and compel payment of adequate wages?

"Mr. Churchill carries his puzzle only that far. On our own account we add, How far will that leave us from regulation of wages as well as of rates by the government, and how far will that leave us from government ownership?"[76]

In a word, Mr. Churchill's remedy for the evils of "State Socialism" is more "State Socialism"--and undoubtedly there is an inevitable trend in that direction. But the government railway strikes of France, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and other countries ought to show him that his remedy, advantageous as it may be from many standpoints, is scarcely to be considered even as a first step towards the solution of the labor problem. As long as capitalists continue to control government, "State Socialism," on the contrary, makes the strike more necessary, more decisive, and invaluable, not only to employees, but to every cla.s.s that suffers from the government or the economic system it supports.

The most representative of American Socialists, Eugene V. Debs, has given us an excellent characterization of this movement as it appears to most Socialists.

"Successful leaders are wise enough to follow the people. For instance, the following paragraph is to the point:--