The aim of Labour Protection for the worker individually lies far beyond mere industrial protection. Protection of labour extends to the person of individual labourers and their freedom as regards religious education, instruction, learning, and teaching, social intercourse, morality and health, and especially does it afford to every man security of family life.
In this social and individual aim lies its justification, subject to certain conditions. These conditions we have already examined.
The first condition is, that special protection shall only be used to guard against distinct dangers arising out of employment in service. Next, Labour Protection is only justified in dealing with such dangers as cannot or can no longer be adequately guarded against by any or all of the old forms of protection, viz., self-help, family protection, private agencies and non-governmental corporate agencies, or the protection of the regular administrative and judicial authorities, and even with such dangers only so far as is absolutely necessary. And lastly, the extraordinary State protection contained in the several labour-protective enactments must be adapted to the suppression of such dangers altogether.
Bearing in mind these conditions, it will be found on examination of the several measures of Labour Protection, as they appear in the resolutions of the Berlin Conference and in the von Berlepsch Bill, that not one of them oversteps these limits. The labour protective code as already existing, and as projected by government, nowhere stretches its authority beyond the specified point, either in its scope, extension or organisation; at present it rather errs on the side of caution, and in many respects it does not go nearly so far as it might. This also I claim to have shown in the foregoing pages. This fact alone fully justifies the policy of Labour Protection as at present projected by the German government.
It is in nowise intended (as shown in Chaps. IV. to X.) by this protective policy to supplant and replace free self-protection and mutual protection, or the ordinary State protection of common law.
No addition to Labour Protection will be permitted except where special need exists.
In no case shall a larger measure of protection be afforded than necessary. There is no question of treating all and everywhere alike the various classes of industrial wage-labour needing protection. But rather that complete elasticity of treatment is accorded, which is required in view of the variety of needs for protection and of the different degrees of difficulty of applying it; it is this variety which necessitates extraordinary State intervention, extraordinary alike in scope, basis and organisation.
Labour Protection has not, it is true, by any means reached its full development either in aim and scope or in organisation. None of those further demands, however, from various quarters, which I have treated in this book as within the range of discussion overstep in any essential degree the limits imposed on Labour Protection, regarded as special and supplementary intervention of the State.
Even the Auer Motion when carefully examined—if we set aside the general eight hours day and certain special features of organisation, in particular its claim to include in its scope the whole of industry—is not really as extravagant as it appears at first sight; for although indeed it demands complete Labour Protection for all kinds of industrial work, it requires only the application of the same special measures as are also demanded in other quarters, and as I have shown to be justified, except in a few special cases where it calls for more drastic measures.
We have seen also that the policy of Labour Protection does not involve a kind of State intervention hitherto unknown. The State has long afforded regular administrative and judicial protection to the work of industrial wage-service, and has even interfered in a special manner in the case of children, young men, young women and adult women; and for still longer in the case of adult men, by affording protection in the way of limitation of employment, truck protection and protection in occupation, and by affording protection of contract through the Industrial Regulations, applied to non-factory as well as to factory labour. The application of protection by limitation of employment is thus far from being the first exercise of State interference with the hitherto unrestricted freedom of contract. Nothing will be found in the developments of protection here dealt with, that has not long ago been demanded and granted elsewhere, chiefly in England, Austria and Switzerland.