II. To assist them to attain to higher standards of living.
I. Measures to protect prevailing standards of living.
The principal contingencies which threaten standards of living already acquired are: (1) industrial accidents; (2) illness; (3) invalidity and old age; (4) premature death; (5) unemployment. These contingencies are not in practice adequately provided against by wage-earners themselves. In consequence the losses they entail, in the absence of any social provision against them, fall with crushing force on the families which suffer from them, and only too often reduce such families from a position of independence and self-respect to one of humiliating and efficiency-destroying social dependency. The following remedies for the evils resulting from this situation are suggested.
(1) Employers' liability laws fail to provide adequate indemnity to the victims of industrial accidents because in a large proportion of cases no legal blame attaches to the employer and because litigation under them is costly and uncertain in its outcome. Adequate indemnification must be sought along the line of workmen's compensation for all industrial accidents at the expense of the employer (the British system) or of compulsory accident insurance (the German system). The former seems to accord better with American ideas and traditions.
(2) The principle of workmen's compensation may be extended to include indemnity for loss of wages due to trade diseases. Provision against illness not directly traceable to the employment must be sought either in compulsory illness insurance or in subsidized and state-directed sick-insurance clubs. Trade unions may assume the functions of such clubs in organized trades. The latter plan seems better suited to present American conditions than compulsory illness insurance.
(3) Provision against invalidity and old age may be through compulsory old age insurance, or through state old age pensions. The latter, though more costly, are believed to be better suited to American conditions, when hedged about by proper restrictions, than compulsory old age insurance with the elaborate administrative machinery which it entails.
(4) Premature death may be provided against by an extension of the machinery for caring for the victims of industrial accident and of illness to provide for their families when accident or illness results fatally.
(5) Provision against losses due to unemployment is attended with great difficulties because unemployment is so frequently the consequence of incapacity or of disinclination for continuous labor. The most promising plan for providing against this evil appears to be through subsidizing and supervising trade unions which pay out-of-work benefits to stimulate this side of their activity. Public employment bureaus and industrial colonies for the unemployed may also help to alleviate the evil of unemployment.
Adequate social provision against these five contingencies along the lines suggested, would, it is believed, go a long way towards solving the problem of social dependency. If these concessions were made to the demands of social justice, a more drastic policy towards social dependents than public opinion will now sanction might be inaugurated with good prospect of confining social dependency to the physically, mentally, and morally defective.