Bob Taylor's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 1, April 1905

by Various

While the slow growth of the union in the South is no doubt a discouragement to labor organizations, it is a benefit to labor in the long run. It is also at the same time an advantage to capital that labor is being slowly organized. Looking to the future it is an advantage both to capital and labor that the growth of the labor organization does not go too far in advance of the education of the laboring classes and that the employer class may, if it has an eye to its own interest, organize in order successfully and intelligently to treat with organized labor when it has become a force to be dealt with in the South.

Experience proves that even the most thoroughly organized labor unions are not all-powerful when the employers stand together, and the paramount importance of organization among the employers has been repeatedly demonstrated. When this organization of the employers shall have been effected, inquiry into cause and effect, careful study of the labor problem, will quickly show the great advantage and profitableness of dealing fairly with labor. It will show that, if the employers are loyal to each other, and if they have an organization in which all of its members have confidence, they, whether dealing with organized or unorganized labor, are certain to obtain their approximate rights. The many labor tangles in which the country has at times been involved were due far more to the disorganized condition of the employer class than to the cohesiveness and power of the labor class. Whenever the labor class has become needlessly strong and where it practices tyranny and oppression, there the employer class will be found to have neglected its duty to itself.

Another result of the study of conditions will be that the employer class will decide to be fair in dealing with labor, because in the long run it will bring the largest dividends. This cannot be accomplished by dealing with unorganized labor, where the employers have the whole matter practically under their own control, and thinking only of immediate returns, will, consciously or unconsciously, take advantage of the worker. Dealing with organized labor is not only more satisfactory, but it is more profitable in its ultimate results.

The question of individual rights has had a large part in Southern labor troubles. It was a question of the employer’s right to manage his property for himself in his own way that defeated an almost universal strike of the Nashville Street Railway employes two or three years ago. The union was formed and made its demands. The management declined to recognize the union or to grant the demands, and successfully resisted the resulting strike. But the management, I am informed, gave careful examination to the facts thus brought to their attention and has voluntarily advanced wages and improved conditions to a point far beyond what was formulated in the union’s demands. There is no union of the street railway’s employes now at Nashville, and so long as the present intelligent and progressive policy is pursued there will be none and there will be none needed. Indeed, the only excuse for labor to organize is that the policy of the employer has too often been unintelligent, unprogressive and not in sympathy with the reasonable rights and needs of labor.

But the organization of labor and the advancement of wages will do more than any other one thing to lend confidence to those who are looking to the South as a field for investment. The Northern capitalist and investor cannot be made to believe that labor as good and efficient as Northern labor will remain unorganized and render its service for one-third or one-half of what the Northern workman receives. Nor does the Southern worker have the same incentive to the high efficiency reached by the Northern workman. One of the most serious mistakes made by many Southern communities in presenting to the Northern investor the advantages at the South is that they put emphasis on the fact that skilled and unskilled labor is “cheap.” Cheap labor that is at the same time efficient is an unknown thing in the North, and Northern men who are familiar with the labor question will not believe that it exists in the South. “If it were as efficient, it would be as well paid,” they say. The proffer of “cheap” labor has done much to retard the industrial development of the Southern states. It is now the universal cry among the employers of the North, particularly among those who oppose organized labor, that they are willing to pay and do pay the highest wages anywhere obtainable and that they are willing to afford and do afford to their employees the most favorable working conditions.

The question of child labor is one which must be determined by humane principles, and yet it is a question on which much fanaticism has been expended and much maudlin sentiment indulged. The child develops earlier in the South, where the average boy of fourteen is as mature as the average boy of sixteen in the North. It is a cause for gratification, a fact to the credit of the South, that recent child labor laws have removed from mills and mines and factories a vast army of child laborers who properly belonged in the nursery or at school. It was the South’s shame that they were ever permitted there under conditions once existing, and still existing to a degree.

But, while believing that the question of child labor should be closely studied and the interest of the child guarded, I know that this is not always accomplished in the case of boys by making it an offense punishable by fine and imprisonment to keep boys of thirteen and fourteen years at work, particularly since in certain classes of society they have no idea of continuing at school after they reach that age. Anything is better than idleness. It is a thousand to one better for a boy of twelve to be at work in mine, factory or mill than to be allowed to remain unemployed and unoccupied. If he is to be forced out of employment, then provision must be made to force him into school. The attention that has been drawn to child labor in the South comes about not so much by the efforts of philanthropists, not so much by the work of earnest students, as by that class of employers in New England who formerly employed children of tender years, but who were forced to desist as the result of legislation, and who for this reason, and not from any high motives, directed attention to child labor in the cotton mills of the South. I do not mean to justify what is injurious to the children, but in considering this whole question trade or competitive conditions cannot be wholly ignored. We know that the advocates of child labor laws are often selfishly influenced and that they aim to reduce the army of workers in the hope thereby to monopolize labor as far as possible. It is often for the same selfish reason that the hours of labor are restricted.

Much of the opposition to child labor has undoubtedly been removed by the course of mill owners in the South, such as the Eagle and Phœnix mills at Columbus, Ga., the Unity Cotton Mills at Lagrange, Ga., and mills in Guilford County, N. C., and Pelzer, S. C. In these the children are required to spend a certain portion of their time in schools ranging from kindergartens to industrial training schools, which are supported mainly,—and in many cases altogether,—by the cotton mills themselves. The press and pulpit unite in saying that in those mills many of the children have much better facilities for improvement than they had before their parents left the farms and brought them to the mills.

The South suffers from poorly paid labor, and continues to suffer despite the fact that conditions are such as make it possible for her to pay higher prices without injuriously affecting any of her industries. As the wealth of the world increases the individual wants more and greater conveniences, and more and more grows the demand for excellence rather than cheapness to be the chief consideration. The era of cheapness is on the decline; the product of mill and factory, of shop and lathe and hand, must be better to-day to be satisfying than at any time in the world’s history. While excellence is sought the more, cheapness is laughed at and passed by.

The Southern states are in an enviable position to-day. The South ought to produce nearly all it consumes, and those things it can economically produce for its own consumption it should certainly be able to sell in Mexican and South American markets in successful competition with the rest of the world. How successfully this can be done will depend upon the ability of the South to produce the best goods for the least money, and it can only do this provided its labor is the best. But its labor cannot be the best unless it is paid the highest wages and is afforded the most satisfactory conditions under which the workmen can perform their services, and under which they and their families can live.