The job-holder has been taught that he must "get ahead" in the world; that if he practices the economic virtues,—thrift, honesty, earnestness, persistence, efficiency—he will necessarily receive great economic reward; that he must support his family on the standard set by the community, and that to do all of these essential things, he must take a job and hold on to it. Having taken the job, he finds that in order to hold it, he must be faithful to the job-owner, even if that involves faithlessness to his own ideas and ideals, to his health, his manhood, and the lives of his wife and children.
The driving power in slavery was the lash. Under serfdom it was the fear of hunger. The modern system of job-ownership owes its effectiveness to the fact that it has been built upon two of the most potent driving forces in all the world—hunger and ambition—the driving force that comes from the empty stomach and the driving force that comes from the desire for betterment. Thus job-owning, based upon an automatic self-drive principle, enables the job-owner to exact a return in faithful service that neither slavery nor serfdom ever made possible. Job-owning is thus the most thorough-going form of mastery yet devised by the ingenuity of man.
Unlike the slave owner and the Feudal lord the modern job-owner has no responsibility to the job-holder. The slave owner must feed, clothe and house his slave—otherwise he lost his property. The Feudal lord must protect and assist his tenant. That was a part of his bargain with his overlord. The modern job-owner is at liberty, at any time, to "discharge" the job-holder, and by throwing him out of work take away his chance of earning a living. While he keeps the job-holder on his payroll, he may pay him impossibly low wages and overwork him under conditions that are unfit for the maintenance of decent human life. Barring the factory laws and the health laws, he is at liberty to impose on the job-holder any form of treatment that the job-holder will tolerate.
There is no limit to the amount of industrial property that one man may own. Therefore, there is no limit to the number of jobs he may control. It is possible (not immediately likely) that one coterie of men might secure possession of enough industrial property to control the jobs of all of the gainfully occupied people in American industry. If this result could be achieved, these tens of millions would be able to earn a living only in case the small coterie in control permitted them to do so.
Job ownership is built, of necessity, on the ownership of land, resources, capital, credit, franchises, and other special privileges. But its power of control goes far beyond this mere physical ownership into the realms of social psychology.
The early colonists, who fled from the economic, political, social and religious tyranny of feudalism, believed that liberty and freedom from unjust mastery lay in the private ownership of the job. They had no thought of the modern industrial machine.
The abolitionists who fought slavery believed that freedom and liberty could be obtained by unshackling the body. They did not foresee the shackled mind.
The modern world, seeking freedom; yearning for liberty and justice; aiming at the overthrow of the mastery that goes with irresponsible power, finds to its dismay that the ownership of the job carries with it, not only economic mastery, but political, social and even religious mastery, as well.