Essentials of Economic Theory / As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy

by John Bates Clark

In connection with the actual dealings of workmen with their employers the following are the principal facts:—

1. When labor makes its bargain with employers without organization on its own side, the parties in the transaction are not on equal terms and wages are unduly depressed. The individual laborer offers what he is forced to sell, and the employer is not forced to buy. Delay may mean privation for the one party and no great inconvenience or loss for the other. If there are within reach a body of necessitous men out of employment and available for filling the positions for which individual laborers are applying, the applicants are at a fatal disadvantage.

2. Collective bargaining is a partial remedy for this disability and brings the pay of labor closer to its normal standard than, under individual bargaining, it could possibly be, but does not, of itself, enable one class of laborers to raise themselves to a position which is very much above that of a majority of the others. It gives to no class of workers any monopoly of their field or any power to tax the public or oppress men who are unorganized. It is a normal and democratic measure.

3. Many actual trade unions do not depend upon mere collective bargaining, but aim to secure a special gain through a partial monopoly of their several fields of labor. Their policy is exclusive in that it tries to limit the number of men who are admitted to the unions and to prevent non-union men from working at the craft.

4. In the establishing of such control of fields of labor some force is employed in order to bar from the fields men who would gladly enter them. "Slugging" is a frequent part of the strategy used when strikes are pending, and this elastic term covers a wide range of deterrent arguments. Whatever goes beyond a verbal demand or insult to the man or his family and involves any use of physical force is included in the meaning of the term, and the action ranges from small injuries to the clubbings which maim and kill. Moreover, social ostracism is to be rated as tantamount to force as a means of preventing a free movement of labor.

5. When the resort to force is defended, it is on the ground that the organized laborers have a right of tenure of their positions and that they may vacate them and still hold them as quasi-property. One man should not "take another man's job" even after the other man has left it. Acting on this claim, union laborers treat men who attempt to occupy the vacated places much as a man would treat intruders on his land or in his house. It is, as is claimed, a case in which a man must be his own policeman and protect his property.

6. The public sympathizes with the worker's dread of the competition which he encounters when unemployed men are gathered from near and far and set working in strikers' positions. It even tolerates, in a way, his claim of quasi-ownership of his position, and though it condemns the violence with which he enforces the claim, it does not summarily repress the violence. It is without a well-defined policy and often weakly permits disorders to grow into anarchy which only troops can quell. Local governments are often reluctant to lay vigorous hands on "sluggers," even when to do so would forestall the necessity for severer measures. This is due to an instinctive feeling that hardship and injustice may result from allowing employers to utilize a reserve of idle labor as a means of depressing their employees' wages and defeating strikes.

7. It is realized, on the other hand, that giving to violence a free rein means an amount of anarchy which no state can tolerate, that non-union laborers have, under the law, a claim to protection, and that allowing strikers to drive them from the field is permitting a monopoly to be established by crime.

8. The reluctance promptly to repress violence, on the one hand, or to leave it unopposed, on the other, expresses a mental wavering, since the state perceives and follows no clear principle in this connection. It has neither defined the nature and extent of laborers' rights nor provided for any orderly process for securing them.

9. The only escape from this situation is by arbitration. It is necessary to adjudicate the laborer's demand for wages and to legalize his tenure of place on condition that he shall accept a just rate of pay. The state is bound to ascertain and declare what rate is just, to confirm the workers in their positions when they accept it, and to cause them to forfeit their right of tenure if they refuse it. If the workers thus forfeit their claim, their positions are clearly open to whoever will take them, and the state is bound to protect the men who do this. Such appears to be the present situation, and an essential feature of it is the need of ascertaining on what principle a court of arbitration should proceed in determining what rate of pay is just.