Referring, then, to the failure to prevent the strike of the slaughterers against the law in 1907, or to punish them after they had forced their employers to terms, Mr. Russell gives the Socialist opinion of the legislation of 1908, passed to remedy this situation:—
"At the next session of Parliament it amended the law to meet these unexpected emergencies and find a way to compel men to work.
"To strike after a case had been referred to the court was now made a crime, punishable by a fine, and if the fine were not paid, the strikers' goods could be distrained and he could be imprisoned. Any labor union that ordered a strike or allowed its members to strike was made subject to a fine of $500. Outside persons or organizations that aided or abetted a strike were made subject to severe penalties.
"Fine, again. But suppose the labor unions should try to evade the law by withdrawing from registry under the act? Government thought once more, and produced another amendment by which the penalties for striking were extended to all trades engaged in supplying a utility or a necessity, whether such trades were organized or not.
"You could hardly surpass this for ingenuity. 'Supplying a necessity' would seem to cover about everything under the sun and to make striking impossible. There must be no more strikes.
"Sounds like home, doesn't it? To do away with strikes. You see the employing class, which all around the world gets what it wants and controls every government, had put itself back of the arbitration law. It had discovered that the law could be made to be a good thing, so it was at the dictation of this class that the amendments were passed. What the injunction judges do in America, or try to do, the law was to do in New Zealand.
"Except that not Judge Goff nor Judge Guy, nor any other injunction judge of our own happy clime, has dared to go quite so far as to declare that all striking everywhere is a crime to be punished with imprisonment.
"How are you going to compel men to work? Why, thus, said the government of New Zealand. Put them in jail if they do not like the terms of their employment."
Mr. Russell then gives an account of the miners' strike, above referred to, which he points out was ended by the labor department paying the miners' fines. He concludes:—
"Mr. Edward Tregear, a scholar and thinker, had filled for many years the place of chief secretary for labor. It is not a cabinet office, but comes next thereto. He is a wise person and a sincere friend of the worker, as he has shown on many occasions. As soon as he heard that the ministry actually purposed to imprison the miners because they did not like the terms of their employment, he went to the minister of labor and earnestly protested, protested with tears in his eyes, as the minister himself subsequently testified, begged, argued, and pleaded. No possible good could come from such rigor, and almost certainly it would precipitate grave disaster.
"To all this the minister was obdurate. Then Mr. Tregear said that he would resign; he would not retain his office and see men imprisoned for exercising their inalienable right of choice, whether they would or would not work under given conditions.
"Now Mr. Tregear was one of the most popular men in New Zealand, and his resignation under such conditions would raise a storm that no ministry would care to face. Hence the government was in a worse situation than ever. On one side it fronted a dangerous venture with the certainty of a tremendous handicap in the resignation of the chief secretary, and on the other hand was an acknowledgment that the arbitration law was a failure and could be violated with impunity.
"In this emergency decision was halted for a few hours while the government people consulted. Meantime, by quick and desperate efforts, the strike was ended, and the men went back to work.
"This left the fines unpaid. The labor department solved that difficulty and allowed the defeated government to make its escape from a hopeless situation by paying the miners' fines.
"To all intents and purposes it was the end of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand. Not nominally, for nominally the thing goes on as before; but actually. It is only by breaking our shins upon a fact that most of us ever learn anything; and the exalted ministry of New Zealand had broken its shins aplenty on a fact that might have been discerned from the start.
"If you are to have compulsory arbitration, you must compel one side as much as the other.
"But in the existing system of society, when you come to compelling the workers to accept arbitration's awards, you are doing nothing in the world except to compel them to work, and, however the thing may be disguised, compulsory work is chattel slavery, against which the civilized world revolts.
"This is the way the thing works out, and the only way it ever can work out. There can be no such thing as compulsory arbitration without this ultimate situation.
"If, therefore, any one in America believes in such a plan for the settlement of labor troubles, I invite the attention of such a one to this plain record.
"For my own part, years ago I was wont to blame the labor leaders of America because they steadfastly rejected compulsory arbitration, and I now perceive them to have been perfectly right. The thing is impossible."[75]
A somewhat similar act to the Australasian ones, though less stringent, has been introduced in Canada. The Canadian law, which is a compromise between compulsory arbitration and compulsory investigation, applies to mines, railways, and other public utilities. Strikes have been prevented, but let us see what benefits the employees have received. Whatever its effect on wages and hours, the law has the tendency to weaken the unions, which hitherto have been the only reliable means by which employees were able to advance their condition. Not only does it make organization seem less necessary, but it takes the most powerful weapon of the union, the ability to call a sudden strike. If we add to this the unfavorable influence on public opinion in case the unions are not contented with the rewards, and the fact that the law works against the union shop, which is the basis of some unions, we can understand the ground of their hostility.
"The Canadian Labour Disputes Investigation Act" is especially interesting and important because it is serving as a model for a campaign to introduce legislation along similar lines into the United States. Already Mr. Victor S. Clark, the author of the study of the Australian Labour Movement, to which I have referred at the beginning of the chapter, has been sent by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft to investigate into the working of the act. Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard has also advocated strenuously and at some length a similar statute, and it has been made the basis for the campaign in Massachusetts and other states. Mr. Clark reported: "Under the conditions for which it was devised, the Canadian law, in spite of some setbacks, is useful legislation, and it promises more for the future than most measures—perhaps more than any other measure—for promoting industrial peace by government intervention."
Here is the very keynote to compulsory arbitration, according to its opponents, whose whole attack is based on the fact that its primary purpose is not to improve the condition of the working people, but to promote "industrial peace by government intervention."
Mr. Clark concedes that "possibly workers do sacrifice something of influence in giving up sudden strikes," though he claims that they gain in other ways. "After such a law is once on the statute books, however, it usually remains, and in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada it has created a new public attitude toward industrial disputes. This attitude is the result of the idea—readily grasped and generally accepted when once clearly presented—that the public have an interest in industrial conflicts quite as immediate and important in its way as that of the conflicting parties. If the American people have this truth vividly brought to their attention by a great strike, the hopeful example of the Canadian act seems likely, so far as the present experience shows, to prove a guiding star in their difficulties." (Italics mine.)
In the agitation that was made in behalf of a similar law in Massachusetts, just exactly what is meant by the word "public" began to appear. It refers not only to the consumers of the article produced by the industry in which the strike occurs, but also to other dependent industries, to the merchants of the locality where the workmen live, and to the real estate interests. Here, then, are definite economic interests which are concerned primarily in the prevention of strikes and in the uninterrupted operation of the industry, and only in a secondary way in rates of wages. It is not a disinterested and non-partisan public; it is not on the side of the employers nor on the side of the employees, but it is opposed to the most effective weapons the working people have yet found to advance their interests, namely, the strike and the boycott.
It is said that if the workers lose the right to strike, the employers lose the right to lockout. It has been customary to set the lockout over against the strike as being of equal importance, but this is not the truth. Employers can discharge their workingmen one at a time when they are dissatisfied with a limited number; and they can often find a business protest for temporarily shutting down or restricting their output. To abolish strikes, then, is to take away the employees' chief means of offense or defense; while to pretend to abolish strikes and lockouts is to leave in the hands of the employers the ability to discharge or punish in other ways the men with whom they are dissatisfied.