Intelligent unionists realize that they can secure the various objects for which they strive only by substituting collective bargaining for contracts between employers and individual laborers. Where this plan is accepted by employers, representatives of the two sides agree upon wage scales, usually for a year; during this period the chief task of union officials is to see that the agreement is lived up to, and if possible to add to their membership and strengthen the union. In the United States relatively few trades have adopted this method as a general practice, the employers still being able to dictate wages and conditions of employment in most of them, while the unions are still struggling for recognition, if not for existence. Employers insist, in refusing to make collective bargains with the unions, that, as they run all the risks, they must be permitted to manage their business as they see fit and without interference
from the business agent of the union. In reply the unions insist that hours, wages, and conditions of employment are as much their business as that of the employer. The latter also urges that the trade unions as at present organized are too irresponsible and before they ask for collective bargaining should be incorporated, so that they could be sued for breach of contract if guilty of such. As yet, however, the unions have preferred their present position of irresponsibility and immunity and have almost invariably refused to be incorporated.
“In the minds of a large section of the public,” writes President Hadley,[19] “labor unions are chiefly associated with strikes. It is believed by many who ought to know better, that such organizations exist for the purpose of striking, and that if the organizations were suppressed, industrial peace would be secured. The first of these ideas is a distorted one; the second is wholly unfounded.” Strikes are, however, a necessary concomitant of collective bargaining. If the representatives of a union cannot come to terms with an employer, they may compel their members to refuse to sell their commodity, labor; such a concerted refusal to work is a strike. The “right to quit work” has been regarded as a sacred one by trade unionists, but it involves social consequences of great importance. For the workingman, it means loss of wages and demoralizing idleness; to the employer, idle capital, loss of profits, and depreciation of plant; and to the consuming public, inconvenience and annoyance together with curtailed production. Quite aside from all acts of violence and lawlessness, by which they are too often accompanied, there is involved an enormous money waste. According to a report of the Department of Labor, losses from strikes and lockouts in the United States from 1881 to 1900 amounted to $449,342,000 or an average loss per establishment involved of about $3,500.
The public is awakening to the realization that it suffers the greatest injury as the innocent third party to every industrial dispute, and is insisting that the industrial peace be kept or more reasonable methods of settling differences be found than a strike or lockout. Such a method is found in conciliation and arbitration. In the older and more strongly organized unions strikes are infrequent and methods of joint discussion and agreement are increasingly resorted to. Boards of conciliation are often provided for, which endeavor by means of conference and concession to prevent a dispute from arising; they succeed best where both employers and employes are organized. Should the dispute come to a head, however, provision is usually made for its reference to a board of arbitration, which may be selected by the disputants themselves or may be created by the state; in the latter case the acceptance of the award may be voluntary or compulsory. In the United States most of the successful boards have been those selected by the parties to the dispute; the state boards have usually the power only of investigating the causes of the trouble, but this in itself has proved of considerable value in more than one instance, notably in the case of the Anthracite Coal Commission. Compulsory arbitration is being given a thorough trial in Australasia and seems to be meeting with success there. In this country, however, the trade unions are strongly opposed to compulsory or enforced governmental arbitration. Writing of Great Britain, Mr. and Mrs. Webb assert that the principle of arbitration, having been found inconsistent with collective bargaining, is fast going out of favor. It would seem from the experience of both England and the United States that the chief virtue in these methods lies in the habit of joint conference and conciliation between the representatives of labor and capital.
IX. WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT WORK.
While women and children have always assisted in the work of the home, it was not until the development of the factory system that they began to work for wages outside of the family. From the earliest days the preparation of food, spinning and weaving and making up of garments, and other branches of domestic economy had been the peculiar tasks of the housewife. With the removal of the textile industries from the home to the factory and the invention of light-running machinery, many women followed them and employment was found also for young children. Thus with the inception of the modern factory system and machine production there arose the problem of woman and child labor. In England the evils of the early factory system were incredibly bad. “The beginning of the present century,” wrote President Walker,[20] “found children of five, and even of three years of age, in England, working in factories and brickyards; women working underground in mines, harnessed with mules to carts, drawing heavy loads; found the hours of labor whatever the avarice of individual mill owners might exact, were it thirteen, or fourteen, or fifteen; found no guards about machinery to protect life and limb; found the air of the factory fouler than language can describe, even could human ears bear to hear the story.” Conditions were never so bad in this country as in England owing to the later development of the system and prompter legislation against its evils, and especially to the scarcity of labor which compelled employers to make the conditions of labor more attractive.
The field of employment for women has been a constantly expanding one. When Miss Harriet Martineau visited the United States in 1840 she found only seven occupations open to women, namely, teaching, needle-work,
keeping boarders, work in the cotton mills, type-setting, book-binding, and domestic service. Since that time the area has widened until there is scarcely an occupation in which women are not found except those closed to her by law or by physical inability. The number of females 10 years of age and over engaged in gainful occupations was 2,647,000 in 1880 or 14.7 per cent of the total female population; this number more than doubled in the next twenty years, being 5,319,000 in 1900 or 18.8 per cent of all. The largest number employed was in domestic and personal service, and next to that in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, though even in that branch they were most numerous in the traditional branches of woman’s work, as dressmakers, seamstresses, etc. It is nevertheless in the manufacturing industries that the most serious evils connected with woman and child labor are found. The problems differ greatly in different sections of the United States: in the Atlantic states the greatest proportion of women as compared with men find employment and give rise to special problems of women’s work; in the South child labor is more conspicuous; while in the West both woman and child labor are of relatively small importance.
An interesting question suggests itself at this point: Is the increase in the employment of women at the expense of men? Are the women crowding the men out of their occupations and taking their places? At first inspection the statistics of occupations would seem to lead to an affirmative answer, for the percentage of women breadwinners increased from 13.5 per cent of all such in 1880 to 16.6 per cent in 1900, while that of the men fell from 80 to 77.3 per cent, and that of the children remained about the same. The cause of the change in the proportion of the sexes was not due, however, to any falling off in the number of men, but to the great influx of women into the ranks of wage-workers. In some lines of employment, like those of bookkeepers, stenographers, typewriters,
clerks, etc., there has undoubtedly been an encroachment and men have been displaced. But on the other hand, many occupations have been opened to men during the last fifty years that were unknown before. Such have been the expanding fields of railroad construction and operation, the steel industry, the utilization of electricity, and other similar lines. In most of these the muscular effort involved or the character of the work have kept women out, but in other lines where special rapidity or lightness of touch are required the women outnumber the men, as in the manufacture of cotton goods, hosiery, hats and caps, etc. The development and improvement of machinery has of course favored the employment of women. Mr. John A. Hobson[21] asserts that “in modern machinery a larger and larger amount of inventive skill is engaged in adjusting machine-tending to the physical and mental capacity of women and children.” He concludes that if the exploitation of these forms of cheap labor had not been prevented by factory legislation and by public disapproval, “the great mass of the textile factories of this country [England] would have been almost entirely worked by women and children.” As a matter of fact one of the reasons for the great expansion of woman labor in the United States as well as England is because it has been found cheaper than man’s labor. We are thus brought face to face with a fundamental question in the discussion of the problem—why are women paid lower wages than men?