Other limitations put upon industry by unions
Further, the unions direct and control the employment of labor, often limit the number of apprentices in a trade, and assume to determine who shall enjoy the privilege of learning it. They limit the output, fix the maximum amount, and forbid the use of labor-saving machinery. Whenever the unions are charged with these acts, labor leaders either deny the facts or avoid giving a direct answer, but there is no doubt that the charge is true in many ways and in many cases. The requirement that each special kind of work shall be controlled by a special trade, and disputes between rival trades, for which their jealousies are responsible, give rise to great annoyance, expense, and loss to employers and to the entire public.
The strike and the boycott
4. The strike is a threat and a mode of attack to enforce the demands of the union. To most newly organized laborers the union appeals mainly as an instrument for striking, for threatening the employer or for making him suffer. When a new union is formed, it is nearly always dedicated by a strike, which is the simultaneous stopping of work by a number of workers. A strike is intended to force the employer to grant the wages and conditions demanded. Its effectiveness lies in the injury which it occasions or threatens in the stopping of machinery, the ruin of material, the loss of custom, and the failure to complete contracts undertaken. Its success being dependent on the inability of the employer to fill the places of the strikers, their energies are bent on persuading or coercing other workers from taking employment. There are many ways of coercing workers without personal violence. Public opinion does much, and probably the severest of all coercive measures is the social ostracism of the worker. What may be called the endless-chain boycott is an excommunication, without measure or limit, of the non-union worker and of every one in any way befriending him or the employer. So far as in their power lies, the enraged strikers dissolve the very bonds of society, brother casts off brother, and mother disowns son. The unhappy conditions in the coal regions in 1902 rivaled the tragedies of civil war. A reasonable use of the boycott, refusal to maintain social relations with the person who offends one, is doubtless a part of personal liberty; but the boycott, as experience shows, has moral limits, and it should have strict legal limits. Its use beyond the moderate limit of the first degree of personal relations is antisocial to the degree of criminality, whether it be used as the weapon of organized workers or of organized wealth.
Violence in strikes is mob law
When peaceable means fail, often there is a recourse to violence both against the employer and his property and against the non-union men. The evils of violence in strikes often are tardily recognized by the public, whose sympathy up to a certain point is with the striker as "the under dog." It is slow to realize that strike violence is mob-law. Whenever men of one group assume the right to coerce forcibly and to wreak their hatred against one of their fellow-workers, it is a blow at political liberty. No free society can safely go the first step in permitting one group of men to usurp control over others in this way.
Costliness of strikes
5. The great losses caused by strikes are the penalty of an unsolved industrial problem. The losses to workers in wages, to employers and to investors in income and property, and to the public in interruption of business, aggregate an enormous sum. It is, however, impossible to estimate it at all exactly, as the losses are in many cases indirect and intangible. The strikers are concerned not with the balance of total losses and total gains to society as a whole, but with the net gain that in the long run accrues to them. It is true that there are indirect gains not easily calculable, as the advance of wages made to avoid a strike while the lesson of the consequences is still fresh. Opinion among workingmen is not a unit as to the value of strikes. A few years ago it seemed safe to say that strikes were declining as compared with the period of the early eighties. It is probably true, as is often said, that as laborers become educated they put less faith in strikes. The epidemic of labor troubles, marking the years from 1899 to 1903, gave no evidence of a decrease in the use of strikes, yet many of these were due to the recent organization in various trades. The coal strike of 1902, though doubtless due to real grievances, was opposed by the officers of the union, an unusually capable set of men, but the more violent and discordant elements overruled the more pacific counsels. The public is perhaps as favorable as it has ever been to the cause of labor, but it appears to have less patience with strikes than it had fifteen years ago, and strikes usually fail if not backed by public opinion. The public has not as yet thought out consistent conclusions on the question of the rights of the union. It is just now much impressed with the value of arbitration. As experience destroys the unsound sentiments, and divides the wise from the unwise measures, a peaceable solution of industrial differences must and will be found.
§ III. COMBINATION AND WAGES
Wages are raised by a labor monopoly