Mr. Churchill claims that employers who are trying to pursue such trades with modern machinery and modern methods are more seriously hampered by the competition of the "sweaters" than they are by that of foreign employers. "I cannot believe," he concludes, "that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase in the price of the ultimate product. It may even sensibly diminish it through better methods."[62] Mr. Churchill is able to point out, as with most of the other reforms, that in one country or another they are already being put into effect, the legislation against "sweating" being already in force in Bavaria and Baden, as well as in Australia, under a somewhat different form.
But the most striking of the British labor reforms has yet to be mentioned. Not only were the present old age pensions established by the common consent of all the political parties, but a law has now been enacted—also with the approval of all parties (and only twenty-one negative votes in Parliament)—to apply the same methods of state insurance of workingmen to sickness, accidents, and even to unemployment. The old age pensions were already more radical than those of Prussia in that the workingmen do not have to contribute under the British law, while the National Insurance Bill as now enacted surpasses both the former British measure and the German precedent in everything, except that it demands a lesser total sum from the government. In the insurance against accidents, sickness, and unemployment the government, instead of contributing the whole amount, gives from two ninths to one third, one third to one half being assessed against employers and one sixth to four ninths against employees. At first this reform, it is expected, will cost only about $12,500,000, and it will be several years before the maximum expenditure of $25,000,000 is reached. But the measure is radical in several particulars: it applies to clerks, domestic servants, and many other classes usually not reached by measures of the kind,—a total of some 14,000,000 persons; it provides $5,000,000 a year for the maintenance of sanatoria for tuberculosis and creates new health boards to improve sanitation and educate the people in hygiene; and it furnishes physicians and medicines for the insured, thus organizing practically the whole medical force and drug supply as far as the masses are concerned.
In fact, the whole scheme may be looked on not so much as a measure to aid the sick and wounded of industry financially, as to set at work an automatic pressure working towards the preservation of the health, strength, and productive capacity of the people, and incidentally to the increase of profits. As Mr. Lloyd George said in an interview printed in the Daily Mail: "I want to make the nation more healthy than it is. The great mass of illness which afflicts us weighs us down and is easily preventable. It is a better thing to make a man healthy than to pay him so much a week when he is ill."
Mr. Lloyd George points out that the German employers have found that the governmental insurance against accidents has proved a good investment:—
"When Bismarck was strengthening the foundation of the new German Empire, one of the very first tasks he undertook was the organization of a scheme which insured the German workmen and their families against the worst evils arising from these common accidents of life. And a superb scheme it was. It has saved an incalculable amount of human misery to hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people.
"Wherever I went in Germany, north or south, and whomever I met, whether it was an employer or a workman, a Conservative or a Liberal, a Socialist or a Trade-union Leader—men of all ranks, sections and creeds, with one accord joined in lauding the benefits which have been conferred upon Germany by this beneficent policy. Several wanted extensions, but there was not one who wanted to go back. The employers admitted that at first they did not quite like the new burdens it cast upon them, but they now fully realized the advantages which even they derived from the expenditure, for it had raised the standard of the workman throughout Germany." (My italics.)[63]
It is not only worry and anxiety that were removed, but definite and irregular sums that workers or their employers had formerly set aside for insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were now calculated and regulated on a business basis more profitable to both parties to the labor contract. It is true that in Germany the employers only pay part of the cost, the rest being borne almost entirely by employees, while in Great Britain—as far as the old age pensions go—the government pays all, and is likely to pay a considerable part, perhaps a third, in the other insurance schemes. But the plan by which the government pays all may prove even less costly to the employing class, since landlords and inactive capitalists on the one hand and the working people on the other, pay the larger part of the taxes—so that state insurance in this thoroughgoing form is perhaps destined to be even more popular than the German kind.
The most radical provision of the new bill is that which deals with unemployment. Though applying only to the engineering and building trades, it reaches 2,400,000 people. It proposes to give a weekly allowance to every insured person who loses employment through no fault of his own, though nothing is given in strikes and lockouts. And it is intended to extend this measure to other employments. This is only the first installment.
It is probable that Mr. Churchill's project that the State should undertake to abolish unemployment altogether is the most radical of all the proposed policies, excepting only that to gradually expropriate all the future unearned increment of land.
"An industrial disturbance in the manufacturing districts and the great cities of this country," says Mr. Churchill, "presents itself to the ordinary artisan in exactly the same way as the failure of crops in a large province in India presents itself to the Hindoo cultivator. The means by which he lives are suddenly removed, and ruin in a form more or less swift and terrible stares him instantly in the face. That is a contingency which seems to fall within the most primary and fundamental obligations of any organization of government. I do not know whether in all countries or in all ages that responsibility could be maintained, but I do say that here and now, in this wealthy country and in this scientific age, it does in my opinion exist, is not discharged, and will have to be discharged."[64]