Obstacles to fair understanding.—The necessary ills connected with advancing civilization, in the laying aside of old methods for new, in the adoption of extensive machinery, and in the more perfect competition with the world, fall upon both profit-maker and wage-earner. The wage-earner feels the immediate loss of his usual opportunities. The profit-maker feels the weight of providing new machinery, devising new methods and taking the longer range of chances. All these ills are [pg 259] met in time by intelligent and hopeful struggles for the best. In the worst conditions ever brought by improved machinery, a very few years have brought relief and improvement to the very class of laborers injured.
The danger is that wholesome competition upon a clear basis of fair understanding and free range of enterprise may be checked by legislation or organization for class purposes. Against the interests of the mass of the people are all extended franchises, giving arbitrary control for long periods of years over any industry; monopolies sustained by patent rights or protective duties; trusts, so far as they imply a combination of men to resist the law of supply and demand; and laws which in any way favor one class of people engaged in one kind of industry as opposed to any or every other.
Quite as prominent are those hindrances which come from every kind of fraud, including adulteration and misrepresentation of products, deception as to market conditions, false credit, and violence of every kind. The more perfect the light thrown upon all the conditions of production, the better the understanding which all men may have of a neighbor's welfare, and the easier it is to put ourselves in our neighbor's place.
Strikes.—The methods of warfare between wage-earners and profit-makers are quite generally understood under the names of strikes, boycotts and lockouts. The occasion for a strike, which means a sudden stopping of work by the employés of an establishment, is usually some question of immediate advantage to the workmen. A desire for increased wages, fewer or different hours of labor, or the removal of some restriction upon habits or [pg 260] associations, gradually becomes general, and through some permanent or temporary organization united action is taken. Quite frequently a strike is occasioned by a sudden and apparently arbitrary reduction of wages, affecting a large body of men. Many strikes are inaugurated in the interests of discharged workmen, when the organization to which they belong is supposed to be interested.
Thus a strike is always a form of warfare, and should be entered upon only after the same careful consideration that makes war sometimes a necessity. Under ordinary circumstances and upon general principles, no body of workmen has any more right to suddenly stop work without notice than railway managers have to stop a daily milk train. The end to be secured must be important enough to humanity to overbalance the injury of the strike itself.
Since a strike is an effort to produce a corner in the labor market, it will succeed in the end sought only when conditions for cornering the market are favorable. Even then the loss to the entire community is considerable. The injury to property, while directly borne by the profit-makers, is widely distributed. First, all wages stop and wage-earners suffer. Second, ability to pay debts ceases and capital owners suffer. Third, insurance companies have their risks increased and all insurers suffer. Fourth, the market for the products is demoralized and all consumers suffer. Fifth, almost always social disorder results, police expenses are greatly increased, and all taxpayers suffer. Sixth, in the end the relation between employers and employed is more [pg 261] strained and less free than before, so that all humanity suffers.
The chances of success, as indicated by the record of many years, are small, and apparent successes are often temporary. And yet the world recognizes the right of a body of laborers to strike, just as it recognizes the right of revolution to secure the general welfare. Formerly a combination of workmen in a strike was treated as a conspiracy and punished as such. Now the general rule is absolute freedom of combination with rigorous repression of fraud and violence. This enables any body of men to make a serious test of the conditions of a labor market, at the risk, primarily, of their own welfare, but with serious strain upon the general good. It leaves room for the possible breaking down of old customs, which are stronger than law, and it sometimes proves, like a war for liberty, a means of great enlightenment to those who take part in it. It is properly held as the last resort in the struggle for fair recognition of the rights and necessities of wage-earners.
It is noticeable that the tendency to strikes among the more skilled workmen is diminishing, and that the mass of communities are weighing their own interests more carefully as they see the general destructiveness of the method. At present strikes are expected among laborers of least skill, where they are, from usual conditions, least effective. Strikes are frequent among coal miners, where wages are liable to reach the lowest possible mark because of the ease of competition from all parts of the world, though the effect of such strikes [pg 262] in bettering the condition of miners has scarcely been felt. The fact that destruction of property and the natural waste from strikes is so widely distributed among workmen and consumers retards popular sympathy, and the fact that strikes increase the risk of capital employed, and actually reduce the amount of capital in use, diminishes the chance of increasing wages or comfort in those employments where they are likely to occur. It seems evident that some better remedy for oppressive conditions of wage-earners must take the place of strikes.
The boycott.—The boycott is a comparatively recent device for enlarging the field of combat to include not only the employés of an establishment but the consumers of its products. This is especially applicable to those industries the products of which are largely consumed by wage-earners, whose sympathies can be depended upon to carry it out. It asks all sympathizers to refuse to purchase products from the employer or firm attacked. A great bakery, for instance, can easily be ruined by a boycott, if its customers are chiefly wage-earners. It is easily applied in cases where custom has allowed the use of a label from some organization of workers. It has been attempted with some success against a railroad so related to other roads as to require the services of sympathizers with its striking employés to carry its freight to final destination. An instance of its widest application is in an effort to persuade the people of a city to refuse to patronize the street-car system.
The warlike nature of this method is apparent in [pg 263] the effort to use terror as one means of persuasion. In this case it uniformly overreaches itself in destroying public sympathy with the strikers. That it has a possible place in the struggle of wage-earners for their rights cannot be disputed, since it corresponds with the nature of a blockade or a siege in other warfare. But its nature as a method of warfare is equally clear, and its use in the interests of humanity belongs, with all war, as a last resort.