CHAPTER X. TRANSACTIONS OF THE BERLIN LABOUR CONFERENCE, DEALING WITH MATTERS BEYOND THE RANGE OF LABOUR PROTECTION; DALE’S DEPOSITIONS ON COURTS OF ARBITRATION, AND THE SLIDING SCALE OF WAGES IN MINING.
The demand for a legal minimum wage, for wage tariffs, and the sliding scale of wages, form no part of Labour Protection. The State cannot, as we have seen, regulate wages directly, but only indirectly, by favouring an adjustment of wages that shall be fair to each side. But even in measures of that kind it does not interfere for the purpose of protecting the persons of the wage earners in their relations of dependence on the employer. Politico-social proposals for indirectly influencing the movement of wages, do not for this very reason, belong to Labour Protection, in the sense which I have assigned to the term in this book. Therefore, I shall content myself, on the one hand, with clearing up a misunderstanding concerning the minimum wage and the wage tariff; and on the other hand, with supplementing my former contribution to the subject (Jahrg., 1889, Die Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft) from the reports of the Berlin Conference, having special reference to the regulation of wage in the English mining industries.
These proposals, dealing with minimum wage and the wage tariff, which I shall now introduce into my treatise on Labour Protection, do not aim at enforcing a minimum rate of wage from above, regardless of the individual value of the labour, they merely aim at providing as far as possible a stable adjustment and classification of efforts and rewards between the whole body of employers and the whole body of workers in any branch of industry or industrial district, i.e. at substituting general for individual control, for the protection not of the worker alone, but also of the employer, i.e. against exploiting competitors. In Germany the printers have led the way; the number of their followers in other industries is increasing. But this is a matter that must be settled by the two classes, not by the State.
Questions of wage policy, however, even when unconnected with protective policy, are often drawn into discussions on protective policy; and even the Berlin Conference, which was officially designated[14] “an international conference on the regulation of labour in industrial establishments, and in mining industries,” frequently overstepped the limits of questions of purely protective policy. I feel myself fully justified, therefore, in touching upon a few of the further questions dealt with by the Conference.
In an earlier treatise, written before the proclamation of the Imperial Decree of February 4th, 1890, I pointed out the need for the special cultivation of Labour Protection in mining industry, particularly in coal mining, and I expressed an opinion as to the advisability of establishing government mines as a kind of politico-social model to the rest; while, on the other hand, I declared against the necessity for the nationalisation of coal mines.
Pamphlets of an opposing tendency, which circulated freely in the wake of the great coal strike of 1889, have, it is true, brought to light more and more reliable evidence; but hitherto I have found in them nothing to shake my confidence in the correctness of my fundamental contention: as far as I am concerned, I await without anxiety the issue of the latest Coal Trust.
As I pointed out in the same treatise, the special danger of the strike agitation, attacking as it does the very centres of activity and channels of healthy movement in the social body, has unfortunately been only too fully exemplified. The coal strike, and the railway and dock strikes, have become samples, and are triumphantly quoted as typical instances of the success of the method.
In the same treatise I raised the question whether the branches of industry under consideration should be constituted a department of the public service, involving special obligations and special safeguards against breach of contract, but also ensuring special security of work and a good standard of pay. This question has also risen to a high level of importance since that time; it does not, however, belong to the sphere of Labour Protection, and in this treatise I must therefore leave it on one side.