The President is nearly always right—particularly so in domestic affairs. But never, in my knowledge, has he expressed himself with greater vigor and strength than in this particular instance. Not that the principle is apt to be popular—quite the reverse is probable. There are employers of a certain type, also employees of a certain type, whose bitterness against any fair measure of arbitration is unyielding. The great railroad brotherhoods have never shown any enthusiasm over the idea, despite the fact that the two countries in which arbitration is strongest and most successful—Australia and New Zealand—are controlled by organized labor.
There are railroad executives also who have been opposed to arbitration save where they might manipulate it to serve their own selfish ends. But these are the types of railroad chiefs who are beginning to disappear under the new order of things in America. Theirs was another and somewhat less enlightened generation—particularly in regard to social economics. And even in the railroad the old order is rapidly giving way to the new.
There is a class in America which enthusiastically receives arbitration—compulsory arbitration—and demands that it be extended in full to the railroad, as well as to every other form of industrial enterprise. I am referring to the average citizen—the man who stands to lose, and to lose heavily, while a strike of any magnitude is in progress. He is an innocent party to the entire matter. And he must be protected—absolutely and finally.
That is why we must have arbitration—compulsory arbitration, for any arbitration which is not compulsory and practically final, is useless. We have had the other sort already and it has brought us nowhere. We had arbitration of the uncompulsory sort before the critical days at the end of last August. In the final course of events both the railroads and their brotherhood employees ignored it. And the average man, the man in the street, was ignorant of the fact that it had even been tried.
After that sort of arbitration comes compromise, and compromise of that sort is a thin veil for failure. And failure means that the whole thing must be gone over once again. The circle has been completed—in a remarkably short space of time.
It all is a merry-go-round, without merriment; a juggernaut which revolves upon a seemingly unending path. Yet he is a real juggernaut. For while the brotherhood man may seek and obtain relief upon the lines which I have just indicated—how about the salaried man outside the railroad? And how about the man inside the railroad whom no strong brotherhood organization, no gifted, diplomatic leader of men protects? It is this last class—the unorganized labor of the railroad, that I want you to consider for a little time. It is obviously unfair, from any broad economic standpoint, that these men, far outnumbering the organized labor of the railroad, should be ignored when it comes to any general readjustment of its wages. Yet, as a matter of fact, this is the very thing that has been coming to pass. And today it is one of the most pronounced symptoms of weakness in the great sick man of American business.
CHAPTER V
UNORGANIZED LABOR—THE MAN WITH THE SHOVEL