Where the wages-receiving class feel themselves to be a special class, vis-a-vis of the purchasers of their labor, they have frequently endeavored, by the preconcerted suspension of labor upon a large scale, to force their masters to pay them higher wages, or grant them some other advantage.[176-1] It is hard to say whether such strikes have more frequently failed or succeeded.[176-2]
As a rule, a war over prices, carried on by such means, and without force on either side, must generally issue in the victory of the richer purchasers of labor.[176-3] The latter require the uninterrupted continuation of labor for their convenience and profit; but the workmen need it to live. It is but seldom that the workmen will be in a condition to stop work for more than a few months, without feeling the sting of hunger. The purchaser of labor can live longer on his capital; and the victory here belongs to the party who, in the struggle, holds out longest. Hence, a strike that lasts more than six weeks may, for that reason alone, be considered a failure. The employers of labor, on account of their smaller number and greater education, make their counter-coalition much more secret and effective. How many instances there are in which labor-saving machines have come into use more rapidly than they otherwise would have come but for the influence of these coalitions![176-4]
On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that a host of workmen, by means of an organization which provides them with a unity of will, such as the heads of great enterprises naturally possess, must become much better skilled in carrying on a struggle for higher wages. Where wages in general tend to rise, but by force of custom, which is specially powerful here (§ 170), are kept below their natural level, a strike may very soon attain its end. And workmen are all the more to be wished God-speed here in proportion as employers are slow to decide of their own motion upon raising wages, and where, under certain circumstances,[176-5] a single cold-hearted master might force all his competitors to keep wages down. If even the entire working class should follow the example of the strikers, so that all commodities, in so far as they are products of labor, should grow dearer to an extent corresponding to the rise in wages, there would still remain an improvement of the condition of the working class at the cost of the interest paid on capital and the profits of enterprise. It is, of course, otherwise with the struggle of workmen against the natural conditions which determine the rate of their wages (§§ 161-166) in which they might, in turbulent times, possibly succeed[176-6] temporarily, but would, in the long run, have to fail.[176-7]
The working class will be best fortified in such a struggle for higher wages when their organization is a permanent one, and when they have taken care, during good times, to collect a certain amount of capital to protect their members, during their cessation from work, against acute want. This is the object of the trades-unions as they have grown up in England, especially since the total decline of the guild system and of governmental provisions relating to apprentices, fixed rates of wages[176-8] etc. But it cannot be denied that these unions, although democratic in form, often exercise a very despotic sway over their members;[176-9] that they have, so far as the employers of labor are concerned, and the non-union laborers, gone back to a number of measures, outgrowths of the guild and embargo systems, which it was fondly hoped had been forever banished by the freedom of industry.[176-10] What many of the friends of this system hope it may accomplish in the future, viz.: regulate the whole relation between capital and labor, and thus, on the whole, control the entire public economy of a people,[176-11] is, fortunately, all the more certainly a chimera, as any national or universal approximation to this end would be the most efficacious way to compel employers of labor to the formation of corresponding and probably far superior opposing unions. Notwithstanding this, however, I do not doubt that the recent development of trades-unions in England is both a cause and an effect of the rise in wages in the branches of industry in question, as well as of the moral elevation of the condition of the working class which has simultaneously taken place.[176-12] The mere possibility of a strike is of itself calculated, in the determination of the rate of wages, to procure for the equitable purchaser of labor the desirable preponderance over the inequitable.[176-13]
[176-1] Even Boisguillebert, Traité des Grains, was acquainted with instances of this kind in which from 600 to 800 workmen simultaneously left their masters. There are much earlier instances in Italy. Thus, in Sienna, in 1381 and 1384, in which the nobility sided with the workmen. (Rerum Ital. Scriptores, XV, 224, 294.) Strikes of journeymen began to be much more frequent in Germany in the guilds, from the time of the prospect of their becoming masters themselves, and of their living in the family of the masters had decreased. On similar strikes at Spires,[TN 15] in 1351, at Hagenau in 1409, and Mainz in 1423, see Mone's, Zeitschrift, XVII, 56; XIII, 155, and Hegel, Strassb. Chr., II, 1025. A remarkable strike of the Parisian book printers under Francis I. (Hildebrand's Jahrb., 1873, II, 375 ff.) In so-called "home manufactures," where the "manufacturer" is both orderer, preparer and seller, but strikes are scarcely possible without much fixed capital. The strike of the factory spinners in Lancashire in 1810 caused 30,000 workmen to stop work for four months.
Among the next following coalitions of labor, those of the Glasgow weavers in 1812 and 1822 were very important. In the latter, two workmen who would not participate with the strikers were blinded with sulphuric acid. In 1818, great strike by the Scotch miners. The Preston strike of 1853 lasted 36 weeks. It is said that 6,200 male and 11,800 female working people took part in it. (Athenæum, 30 Sept., 1854.) Compare Morrison, Essay on the Relations between Labor and Capital, 1854. For a history of Swiss strikes, especially of the Zürich compositors' strike in 1873, see Böhmert, Arbeiterverhältnisse, II, 287 ff. Comic type of a strike of married women in Aristophanes, Lysistrata. A practical one in Rome at the departure of the plebeians for the holy mountains, 492 before Christ. (Livy, II, 32,) then, on a small scale, on the removal of the pipers after Tiberius, 311 before Christ. (Liv., IX, 30.)
[176-2] Instances of successful strikes: Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1865. Similarly in Germany, in 1865; but there, in truth, many strikes were only defensive and intended to restore the former thing-value of the declined money (Werke, XIII, 151). The English strikes, in 1866 and 1867, failed nearly all, so that wages again declined to their level in 1859, and in many places, to what they had been in the crisis-year 1857. (Ausland, 16 April, 1868.) As to how even in Victoria, strikes which opposed a decline of wages from 16 to from 8 to 10 shillings a day failed, after doing great injury, see Statist. Journ., 1861, 129 ff.
[176-3] The Preston strikers of 1853 got even from their non-striking colleagues, £30,000. Had their masters prevented this, the affair would have been terminated much sooner. (Quart. Rev., Oct. 1859.) But employers are much more frequently divided by rivalries than workmen, especially in strikes against new machines or when a manufacturer, who has too large a supply of goods on hand, desires a strike himself. On account of their smaller number, too, they are less in a condition to declare a recusant colleague in disgrace. Adam Smith's remark that coalitions of capitalists are much more frequent than those of workmen, only that much less is said of them, is hardly applicable to our time. (Wealth of Nat., I, ch. 8, p. 100, ed. Bas.) But, since the strike of the London builders in 1859, capitalists have begun to form more general opposing unions. On a very energetic one among the ship builders on the Clyde, see Count de Paris, Les Associations ouvrières en Angleterre, 1869, ch. 7. Examples on a smaller scale, Edinburg Review, LXXXIX, 327 ff. On the other hand, a "lock-out" on the part of capitalists is very difficult, from the fact that it is impossible to prevent idle workmen from being supported from the poor fund. Moreover, there can be no greater folly than for the workmen to add insult to their masters to their demand for higher wages, because then the limits within which the latter are willing to continue the business at all, are made much narrower, than they would be on a merely economic estimate.
[176-4] Thus the "iron man," by which a single person can put from 1,500 to 3,000 spindles in motion; also an improved plane-machine, by means of which several colors can be printed at once. (Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, 366 ff.) Machines for riveting cauldrons. (Dingler, Polytechnisches Journal, LXXV, 413.)
[176-5] Compare the statements in the Statist. Journal, 1867, 7.