A given number of workers in the group which makes A´´´ when the wages are three dollars a day becomes an excessive number when the wages are five, and even if the high wages do not attract men from without and make the absolute number of workers greater than before, employment is not constant. The ca'-canny policy is a transient remedy for this. It is an effort to avoid the necessity for partial idleness and for the transferring of laborers to other occupations. All the labor may, for a time, remain in its present field if it will afflict itself with a partial paralysis. For a while the demand for the product of the labor will be sufficient to give more constant employment. Time is required for the full effect of the product-limiting policy to show itself in a falling off of the consumption of the goods whose cost is thus increased. When it comes the evil effect of the policy will appear. If a union were strong enough to keep a monopoly of its field, in spite of the greater efficiency of laborers that are free to work in a normal way, it would be strong enough to maintain much higher pay for its own members if it limited the number of them and encouraged them to work efficiently. The strongest conceivable union must lose by substituting the plan of paralyzing labor for that of restricting the number of laborers. The union may choose to take the benefit of its monopolistic power by keeping an unnecessarily large number of men in constant employment, rather than by getting high wages for efficient work; but in that case any union but one the strength of which is maintained in some unnatural way is likely to come to grief by the great preference it creates for non-union labor. The independent shop will get the better men at the lower rate of wages, and its products will occupy the market. The popularity of the plan of work making is the effect of looking for benefits which are transient rather than permanent. If it were carried in many trades as far as it already is in some, it would probably neutralize, even for those who resort to it, much of the benefit of organization, and work still greater injury to others.[1]
The Eight-hour Movement as a Work-making Policy.—The effort to reduce the hours of labor to eight per day has in it so much that is altogether beneficent that it is not to be put in the same category with the ca'-canny plan of working. And yet one leading argument in favor of this reducing of the number of hours of work is identical with that by which a reduction of the amount accomplished in an hour is defended. The purpose is to make work and secure the employment of more workers. What has been said of the other mode of work making applies here. Reducing the length of the working day cuts down the product that workers create and the amount that they get. In the main the loss of product is probably offset by the gain in rest and enjoyment; but the loss of product, taken by itself alone, is an evil, and nothing can make it otherwise. If the hours were further reduced, the loss would be more apparent and the gain from rest and leisure would be less.
One Sound Argument in Favor of the Greater Productivity of the Eight-hour Day.—There is one reason why the eight-hour day may in a series of generations prove more permanently productive than a longer one. It may preserve the laborers' physical vigor and enable them to keep their employment to a later period in life. The dead line of sixty might be obliterated.
If what we wanted were to get the utmost we could out of a man in a single day, we should do it by making him work for twenty-four hours; after that, for another twenty-four hours, he would be worth very little. If we expected to make him work for a week, we should probably shorten the day to eighteen hours. If we expected to employ him for a month and then to throw him aside, we might possibly get a maximum product by making him work fourteen hours. If we wanted him for a year only, possibly a day of twelve hours would insure the utmost he could do. In a decade he could do more in a ten-hour day, and in a working lifetime he could probably do more in eight. Forty or fifty years of continuous work would tell less on his powers and on the amount and quality of his product.
The Connection between the Restriction of Products and the Trade-label Movement.—Very important is the bearing of these facts concerning the restriction of laborers' products and the trade-label movement. If that movement should become more general and effective, it would bring home to all who should take part in it the effects of the labor-paralyzing policy. The faithful trade unionist would find himself paying a full share of the bill which that policy entails on the public. Ordinary customers can avoid the product whose cost is enhanced by the trade-union rules; but the unionist must take it and must make himself and his class the chief subjects of the tax which enhanced prices impose. It may well be that the pernicious quality of the general work-making policy will become so evident in any case that it will be abandoned; and this would be made sure by a rule that should actually make union labor the chief purchaser of union goods. Ca'-canny would then mean self-taxation on a scale that no arguments could make popular.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It will be seen that whether the policy is successful in giving employment to the partially idle or fails to do so depends on the amount of reduction in the sale of the goods which the increased cost of making them entails; and if the market is highly sensitive to increased cost, the policy may fail in securing even a transient increase of employment.