Within certain limits the first of these propositions is incontestable. The self education, self reliance, and other experiences obtained by the workers through an organised struggle for improvements of any kind, are too valuable to be lightly passed over for the sake of the easier method of State assistance. Indeed, it would be better to accept somewhat less, or to wait somewhat longer, in order that the advantages might be secured through organisation. However, these hypotheses are not verified as regards the minimum wage problem. The legal method promises with a high degree of probability to bring about universal living wages within ten or fifteen years. The champions of organisation can point to no solid reasons for indulging the hope that their method would achieve the same result within a half a century. Therefore, the advantages of the device of organisation are much more than neutralised by its disadvantages.
The fear that the devotion of the workers to the union would decline as soon as living wages had been secured by law, seems to have no adequate basis either in experience or in probability. Speaking of the establishment of minimum wages in the tailoring industry of Great Britain, Mr. Tawney declares that it "has given an impetus to trade unionism among both men and women. The membership of the societies connected with the tailoring trade has increased, and in several districts the trade unions have secured agreements fixing the standard rate considerably above the minimum contained in the Trade Board's determination."[272] Similar testimony comes from Australasia. Indeed, this is precisely what we should be inclined to expect; for the workers whose wages had been raised would for the first time possess the money and the courage to support unions; and would have sufficient incentives thereto in the natural desire to obtain something more than the legal minimum, and in the realisation that organisation was necessary to give them a voice in the determination of the minimum, and to enable them to co-operate in compelling its enforcement. Indeed, general experience shows that organisation becomes normally efficient and produces its best results only among workers who have already approximated the level of living wages.
To be sure, the State could set up maximum instead of minimum wages,—if the employing classes were sufficiently powerful. But all indications point to a decline rather than an increase in their political influence, and to a corresponding expansion in the governmental influence of the labouring classes and their sympathisers. Moreover, the labour leaders who urge this objection are inconsistent, inasmuch as they advocate other beneficial labour legislation. The distinction which they profess to find between laws that merely remove unfair legal and judicial disabilities and laws that reduce the length of the working day or fix minimum wages, has no importance in practical politics or in the mind of the average legislature. If the political influence of labour should ever become so weak and that of capital so strong as to make restrictive labour legislation generally feasible, legislators would not confine their unfriendly action to the field of positive measures. They would be quite as ready to pass a law prohibiting strikes as to enact a statute fixing maximum wages. The formal legalisation of strikes, picketing, and the primary boycott which is contained in the Clayton Act, and for which the labour unions worked long and patiently, could conceivably be seized upon by some future unfriendly Congress as a precedent and provocation for legislation which would not only repeal all the favourable provisions of the Clayton Act, but subject labour to entirely new and far more odious restraints and interferences. The fact that governments passed maximum wage laws in the past is utterly irrelevant to the question of wage legislation to-day. A legal minimum wage, and a multitude of other protective labour laws are desirable and wise in the twentieth century for the simple reason that labour and the friends of labour are sufficiently powerful to utilise this method, and because their influence seems destined to increase rather than decrease. The contrary hypothesis is too improbable for serious consideration.
The conclusions that seem justified by a comprehensive and critical view of all the facts of the situation, are that organisation is not of itself an adequate means of bringing about living wages for the underpaid, but that it ought nevertheless to be promoted and extended among these classes, not only for its direct effect upon wages, but for its bearing upon legislation. The method of organisation and the method of legislation are not only not mutually opposed, but are in a very natural and practical manner complementary.
Participation in Capital Ownership
While those workers whose remuneration is below the level of decent maintenance are not ordinarily in a position to become owners of any kind of capital, many of them, especially among the unmarried men, can accumulate savings by making large sacrifices. As a matter of fact, hundreds of thousands of the underpaid have become interest receivers through the medium of savings banks, real estate possessions, and insurance policies. Every effort in this direction is distinctly worth while, and deserving of encouragement. Labourers who are above the minimum wage level can, of course, save much larger amounts, and with less sacrifices than the underpaid classes. In all cases the main desideratum is that the workers should derive some income from capital; but it is almost equally important that their capital ownership should wherever possible take the form of shares in the industry in which they are employed, or the store at which they buy their goods. This means co-operative production and co-operative distribution. The general benefits of the co-operative enterprise have already been described in chapter xiv. For the wage earner proprietorship in a co-operative concern is preferable to any other kind of capital ownership because of the training that it affords in business management and responsibility, in industrial democracy, and in the capacity to subordinate his immediate and selfish interests to his more remote and larger welfare.
Co-operative ownership of the tools with which men work has advantages of its own over co-operative ownership of the stores from which they made their purchases, inasmuch as it increases their control over the conditions of employment, and gives them incentives to efficiency which results in a larger social product and a larger share thereof for themselves. As already pointed out in chapter xiv, the ideal type of productive co-operation is that known as the "perfect" form, in which the workers are the exclusive owners of the concern where they exercise their labour. Nevertheless, the "federal" type, in which the productive concern is directly owned by a wholesale co-operative, indirectly by the retail co-operative store, and ultimately by the co-operative consumers,—presents one important advantage. It could be so modified as to enable the employés of the productive enterprise to share the ownership of the latter with the wholesale establishment. Such an arrangement would at once give the workers the benefits of productive co-operation mentioned above, and render probable a satisfactory adjustment of the conflicting claims of producers and consumers. As intimated in chapter xxiv, such a conflict is inherent in every system of industrial organisation, and will become more evident and more acute in proportion to the strengthening of the position of labour.
A final reason for ownership of capital by labour deserves mention here, even though it has no immediate bearing upon the question of remuneration. Were all labourers receiving the full measure of wages to which they are entitled by the canons of distributive justice, it would still be highly desirable that the majority if not all of them should possess some capital, preferably in the productive and distributive concerns in which they were immediately interested. It does not seem probable that our economic system as now constituted, with the capital owners and the capital operators for the most part in two distinct classes, will be the final form of industrial organisation. Particularly does this arrangement seem undesirable, incongruous, and unstable in a society whose political form is that of democracy. Ultimately the workers must become not merely wage earners but capitalists. Any other system will always contain and develop the seeds of social discontent and social disorder.
REFERENCES ON SECTION IV
Adams and Sumner: Labour Problems. Macmillan; 1905.
Commons and Andrews: Principles of Labour Legislation. Harpers; 1916.
Walker: The Wages Question. New York; 1876.
Ryan: A Living Wage. Macmillan; 1906.
Snowden: The Living Wage. London; Hodder & Stoughton.
O'Grady: A Legal Minimum Wage. Washington; 1915.
Broda: La Fixation Légale des Salaires. Paris; 1912.
N. Y. Factory Investigating Commission. Appendix to Vol. III.
Tawney: Minimum Rates in the Chain-Making Industry. London; 1914.
Minimum Rates in the Tailoring Industry. London; 1915.
Turman: Le Catholicisme Social. Paris; 1900.
Pottier: De Jure et Justitia. Liege; 1900.
Polier: L'Idée du Juste Salaire. Paris; 1903.
Menger: The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour. London; 1899.
Garriguet: Régime du Travail. Paris; 1908.
Nearing: Reducing the Cost of Living. Philadelphia; 1914.
Chapin: The Standard of Living in New York City. New York; 1909.
Also the works on co-operation cited in connection with Section II, and those of Hobson, Carver, Nearing and Streightoff.