That the right to strike, or refuse to work, under certain conditions, does not involve the right to prevent others from working, if the conditions are satisfactory to them, and involves responsibility for all the damage that may arise.
That the standard of wage cannot be measured by the standard of time employed, or energy expended, but by the results attained.
These, and many other differences which might be enumerated, are the causes which make for strife and dissent, and prevent the harmony which should exist for the mutual benefit of both classes. These differences can only be removed or harmonized by honest and intelligent conferences between the employer and employee, and to bring about such conferences is the purpose and aim of the National Civic Federation. The success of the effort promises, for the employer, the markets of the world; for the employee, continued and increasing profits; for the country, industrial peace and better citizens.
HARMONIZING LABOR AND CAPITAL BY MEANS OF INDUSTRIAL PARTNERSHIP
By Alexander Purves
Treasurer, Hampton Institute, Virginia
In this age of business supremacy, when trade has become the leading science and merchandising an art; when sentiment is being pushed aside by the forward rush of commercialism, and expediency seems to be successfully competing with morality; when one is almost persuaded that the Church itself, to survive, must be conducted with business sagacity, one is compelled to acknowledge the futility of urging any plan for the reformation of the existing relations between capital and labor with serious hopes for its present consideration and possible adoption, except the same shall be able to prove its principles to be in accord with good business policy.
There are those who believe the danger to vested interests is increasing proportionately with the ever growing average of intelligence on the part of the wage-earners and that the former will eventually be overwhelmed by the latter to the demoralization of both unless capital anticipates and averts the danger by securing end maintaining a hearty co-operation of the working classes through a substantial acknowledgment of the just claims of enlightened labor to an enlarged share in the product of the two.
It seems reasonable to assume that with the advance of civilization and general intelligence, some means must be found for the treatment of the whole matter of the return for services rendered, that shall be more progressive and more humane in character than the present basis of supply and demand. As Prof. Gilman says—“We must acknowledge that the wages system, viewed in its simplest form of time wages, does not supply the necessary motives for the workman to do his best.” To which we may add, that neither does it appeal to his sense of right nor to his theory of justice.
The first advance towards a change must be made by the masters, and any movement for a revision of the existing system must take form in an apparent concession on the part of vested interests. The apparent indifference and complacency with which the dominant class regards the whole matter is most regrettable. The leaders in reform should adopt some plan whose successful operation would commend itself—from a business point of view—to the many masters. That is to say, whatever is done in that direction, let it be done primarily because it is just and right. Then if it can be shown to be profitable to capital, so much the better. Such a demonstration would be invaluable, not so much by reason of the resulting increase in the incomes of the leaders in the movement, as that such a fact would make probable the extension of the system into other enterprises where such an incentive would have the stronger influence.