Mr. Churchill proposes not only to guard against periods of unemployment which extend to all industries in the case of industrial crises, but also to provide more steady employment for those who are unoccupied during the slack seasons of the year or while passing from one employer to another. Above all he plans that the youth of the nation shall not waste their strength entirely in unremunerative employment or in idleness, but that every boy or girl under eighteen years of age should be learning a trade as well as making a living. Few will deny that the program of Mr. Churchill and his associates in this direction marks a great step towards that "more complete or elaborate social organization" which he advocates.
One of the most significant of all the measures by which Mr. Churchill plans to lend the aid of the State to the raising of the level of the working classes is his "Development" Act. The object of this bill, in the language of Mr. Churchill, is "to provide a fund for the economic development of our country, for the encouragement of agriculture, for afforestation, for the colonization of England (the settlement of agricultural land), and for the making of roads, harbors, and other public works." Stated in these terms, the Development Act is a measure of "State Socialism" for the general industrial advance of the country, but the main argument in its behalf lies in that clause of the bill which provides, to quote from Mr. Churchill again: "that the prosecution of these works shall be regulated, as far as possible, by the conditions of the labor market, so that in a very bad year of unemployment they can be expanded, so as to increase the demand for labor at times of exceptional slackness, and thus correct and counterbalance the cruel fluctuations of the labor market."[65]
We have seen that Mr. Churchill has justified these measures, not as increasing the relative share of the working classes, but as adding to the total product. They are to add to the industrial efficiency of the nation as a whole, and so incidentally to bring a greater income to all,—but in much the same proportions as wealth now distributes itself.
In this country Mr. Roosevelt has advocated a typical "State Socialist" program of labor reforms including:—
"A workday of not more than eight hours."
"The abolition of the sweat-shop system."
"Sanitary inspection of factory, workshop, mine, and home."
"Liability of employers for injury to body and loss of life" and "an automatically fixed compensation."
"The passage and enforcement of rigid anti-child-labor laws which will cover every portion of this country."
"Laws limiting woman's labor."
All these measures except the first were adopted long ago, in considerable part at least, by the reactionary government of Prussia and are being introduced generally in monarchical and aristocratic Europe, and I have shown that the eight-hour day has been instituted for miners in Great Britain and that Mr. Winston Churchill proposed to extend it. Mr. Roosevelt himself concedes that "we are far behind the older and poorer countries" in such matters. But an examination of the action of State legislatures during the year just past will show that we are making rapid progress in the same direction.
"Social" or "industrial" efficiency, promoted by the government, is already the central idea in American labor reform. Government insurance against old age, accident, sickness, and unemployment is regarded, not as the "workingmen's compensation" for injuries done them by society, but as an automatic means of forcing backward employers to economize the community's limited supply of labor power—not to wear it out too soon, not to overstrain it, not to damage it irreparably or lay it up unnecessarily for repairs, and not to leave it idle. Mr. Louis Brandeis points out that mutual fire insurance has appealed to certain manufacturers because in twenty years it has resulted in measures that have prevented more than two thirds of the expected losses by fire. Similarly, he says, "if society and industry and the individual were made to pay from day to day the actual cost of sickness, accident, invalidity, premature death, or premature old age consequent upon excessive hours of labor, of unhygienic conditions of work, of unnecessary risk, and of irregularity in employment, those evils would be rapidly reduced."[66]
This, as Mr. Brandeis says, is undoubtedly on the "road to social efficiency" and its practical application will convince employers better than "mere statements of cost, however clear and forceful." It will remove a vast sea of human misery, and the process will immensely enrich society. But like the other State Capitalist reforms (until they are supplemented by some more radical policy) it will at the same time automatically bring about an increase of existing inequalities of income and an intensification of social injustice.
Mr. William Hard in a study of workingmen's compensation for Everybody's Magazine has reached a similar conclusion to that of Mr. Brandeis: "Far from attacking the present relationship between employer and employee, automatic compensation specifically recognizes it. The backbone of the present so-called 'capitalism'; namely, the hiring of the unpropertied class by the propertied class to do work for wages, is not caused by automatic compensation to lose a single vertebra, and automatic compensation has nothing whatever to do with Socialism except that it is accomplished under the supervision of the State." If compulsory insurance against accidents "has nothing whatever to do with Socialism," neither have compulsory insurance against sickness, against old age, against certain phases of unemployment.
The social reformers propose a labor policy that is for the people whether they like it or not; the only "rights" it gives them are "the right to live" and "the right to work." Its first object is to produce more efficient and profitable laborers, its second to have the government take control of organized charity, to which aspect I must now turn. Most of the labor reforms, enacted to secure for the laborer "what for the Nation's sake even the poorest of its subjects should have," have been urged more strongly by philanthropists and political economists than by representatives of the workers. In America "the minimum wage," for example, is being worked up by a special committee consisting almost exclusively of this class, while workmen's compensation has been indorsed by the most varied political and social elements, from the chief organ of American philanthropists, and Theodore Roosevelt, to the Hearst newspapers.