(2) To some slight extent, but only to a slight extent, they have effected amelioration in other matters have freed labor from the tyranny of company stores, decreased child labor, secured the installation of safety appliances, sanitary conditions, and other needed improvements.
(3) Their social effect has been greatest. They have amalgamated our stream of heterogeneous immigrants and fired them with common understanding and purpose; they have taught the ignorant to cooperate, made them think, frowned to some degree upon vice, insured their members to. some extent against illness and death, and promoted general friendliness among the laboring classes.
On the other hand, their methods have been productive of much harm:
(1) The economic loss due to strikes has been enormous; the employers have suffered heavily, the public has suffered heavily; the laborers have suffered most of all. Social amelioration certainly ought not to have to come about through such wasteful methods and such bitter privation.
(2) The inconvenience caused the public by strikes has often been very great, especially where the coalmines or railways have been affected. Only a few years ago a veritable tragedy was barely averted, when President Roosevelt succeeded, after the most strenuous efforts, in ending the general coal strike in the winter season. A strike of locomotive engineers means obviously a great peril to the traveling public.
(3) The antagonisms and class hatreds engendered by this sort of industrial warfare do infinite moral harm, and retard heavily the peaceful solution of the problems. The class organs always denounce in bitterest terms the opposing class, and lawlessness always lurks in the background.
(4) Apart from their conduct of strikes, the labor unions must answer to many serious indictments. They have endeavored to restrict output, in order to raise prices. They have sought to restrict the number of apprentices in a trade, and have opposed trade schools, in order to keep down the competition for positions. They have insisted on a uniform wage without regard to efficiency. They have opposed scientific management and the increase of efficiency in various industries, in order to retain more workers therein. They have insisted upon the retention of incompetent employees, thereby directly causing railway accidents and other evils. They have often antagonized such other ameliorative methods as profit sharing and government regulation, and have rejected overtures from employers, because these-to quote from a union pamphlet-"remove the scope and field of trade-unionism." They have at times been run in the interests of selfish leaders and seemed chiefly a moneymaking scheme of a few grafters.
There can be no question, on a dispassionate consideration, that the militant methods of the trade unions are an unfortunate and temporary expedient. The grievances which they have sought to remedy are very real and very bitter; and perhaps, on the whole, the unions have done more good than harm, and accomplished results that would not so soon have been effected in any other way. But they have been rather strikingly unsuccessful. After fifty years of propaganda, seventy per cent of all industrial workers remain non-unionized; and there has been a relative loss in their numbers during the past decade. They have never succeeded in cornering the labor market, and there seems to be no prospect of their succeeding. In all events, for a permanent and thoroughgoing solution of labor troubles we must turn to some other method.
II. PROFIT SHARING, COOPERATION, AND CONSUMERS' LEAGUES?
(1) The usual method of profit-sharing is for the employer to set aside voluntarily a certain proportion of the profits of successful years, to be distributed among the employees in addition to their regular wages, the distribution being made proportionate to the amount of each man's wages. It is thus properly called a dividend to wages, and is equivalent to a small ownership of the stock of the business by each worker. The advantage lies not only in the fairer distribution of the profits of a business, but in the interest, contentment, and increased efficiency of the employees. The self-interest of the laborers is enlisted to prevent strikes, and a feeling of good will tends to prevail. Not a few employers are giving a degree of profit sharing as a mere business proposition; and the results have been generally successful. But the method is only a sop. It touches only one of the evils above mentioned, that of underpayment of workers. And, for that matter, it is oftenest introduced where the workers are already well paid. It is possible only in successful and firmly established industries; and even in them, bad years may necessitate a temporary cessation of dividends to wages, and generate resentment in the minds of the laborers, who do not know the precise status of the business. Moreover, since the workers cannot be expected to reverse the procedure in lean years and contribute to the maintenance of the business, it is necessary, in most industries, to reserve a considerable sum from the profits of fat years to tide over possible periods of lean years. It might be possible to enforce by law the accumulation of such a reserve fund, and then the distribution of a fixed percentage of the net profits of the business to labor-instead of permitting all the profits to go into the pockets of owners or stockholders. But such a plan will probably be superseded by or incorporated into some more comprehensive solution for industrial evils, a scheme that can remedy other wrongs besides that of inadequate wages.