LABOR.
Laboring men--this is their own title for themselves--do not work any
harder than the remainder of their fellow-beings. But those who come
under this title as it is generally understood have some grievances that
must be removed before several million men can transverse the long
distance between dissatisfaction and comfort.
The Labor party, so-called, has made an ass of itself a great many
times, but its blunders cannot change the fact that many of its
complaints have a great deal of ground to stand on. The farmer who
shoots the man that stole his horses may be a murderer, but that does
not alter the fact that his horses, upon whose work depend his crops,
his family’s fate, and the ownership of his farm, have been stolen. So,
when a railroad strike prevents thousands of travellers not owning any
railway stock, not having any part or influence in railway management,
from reaching their destination, the strikers may be absolute scoundrels
in their disregard of the rights of their fellow-men; nevertheless it
is entirely true that their own wages may have been ground down to
starvation basis, and consequently the men have a right to complain.
Labor is sure to be imposed upon just as much as the laboring class will
endure the imposition. The poorer the man the more necessary is it that
he shall work in order to live. This being so, he is sure sooner or
later to encounter somebody who will take advantage of him. No man need
be a scoundrel in order to drive a sharp bargain if he gets the chance.
To drive a sharp bargain is something that all of us rather pride
ourselves upon. Probably the laboring man would do it himself if he got
the opportunity. Nevertheless, the purpose and aim of the laboring man
should be to be so “fixed” that no one can catch him at a disadvantage.
Labor--that is, organized labor, must be in ceaseless conflict with the
spirit of competition that prevails among employers. In every
manufacturing industry that admits of competition, all the way from
making door-mats to building houses and railroads, men try by
underbidding one another to get business. The energy of a new country is
always in excess of its capital and also of its demand. This is very
encouraging so far as the outlook for energy goes, but it does work a
great many wrongs and unpleasantnesses. In business it does not take
long to reach bedrock as to cost of raw material. After that, the
strain of competition must come entirely upon labor, and, if labor does
not resist, it must starve.
Consequently the workingman must fight, and fight continually, to keep
from being reduced to slavery in one form or other. The word slavery has
a dreadful sound, but there are ways of muffling it so that the slave
himself does not always see himself in a true light.
It is only a short time ago that New England was thrown into a fervor of
patriotic indignation by the spectacle presented in one town of a native
bringing a laborer in chains to the market-place to be sold. The owner
regarded himself as entirely in the right, and explained his position
very distinctly. He had obtained his vassal on a contract that a certain
amount of labor would be given for a specified sum of money. The sum was
small; nevertheless it was paid and accepted, and the man afterward
imagined that he could escape from the terms of his contract.
Consequently the employer, or purchaser, as he seemed to consider
himself, put chains upon the fellow, and as literally brought him for
sale as any slave was ever offered in any slave-mart in the world. The
beholders rose in their wrath, dragged both men before the court, the
slave was freed and the owner was fined.
But the point is here: this was simply a case
[Illustration: U. S. MAN-OF-WAR.]
in which the slave-dealer, taking advantage of an ignorant, unthinking
man, was found out. How many thousands of similar cases exist in the
United States at the present time of which the public know nothing? All
newspaper men at the principal sea-ports know that people come to this
country by the thousand on contracts to do a certain amount of labor for
specified prices. The prices may be below the cost of living,
nevertheless the contracts hold good in all courts of law, and the men
are obliged to do their duty. We are sorry for them, but, according to
the practice of all countries, man seems to be made for the law and not
the law for man.
Do I really mean to say that slavery is possible in the United States?
Why, such a question is behind the times, for slavery practically
exists. What else but slavery can you call the condition of some of the
coal-miners, tanners and factory hands of the United States? Men with
their wives and families go to a small town which practically belongs to
their employer. They live in houses owned by their employer, buy their
household supplies at stores owned by their employer, take their pay in
checks, tickets or orders signed by their employer, and get the
remainder of their pay when their employer is ready. Suppose they wish
to improve their condition and go away; how can they move at all unless
they have saved some money, the saving of which, by a peculiarity well
understood in all such localities, is simply impossible?
The method is practically that of South America. In some of our sister
republics the laboring men who are on a plantation are called a
_consistado_. Men are obtained, in the first place, by a small advance
of money, and are told that they can obtain additional sums at such
times as they may need them, provided the money is already due them for
work done. But these laborers are improvident. When they wish to spend
money, the employer good-naturedly--so it is supposed--allows them to
draw slightly in advance, and by the laws of the country the laborer can
never leave until his indebtedness to the employer is paid.
In some of the South American republics there are _consistados_, from
which no man can escape to work elsewhere without being claimed and
returned by forms very similar to those which prevailed in the United
States under the old fugitive slave law in slavery times. If a workman
on the plantation of Don Tomas recovers from a feast-day celebration in
a state of mind which leads him to run away and go to the plantation of
Don Jorge, he is missed at roll-call, his absence is reported to his
employer, and straightway a lot of notes are sent out to the owners of
surrounding estates notifying them of the runaway and requesting them to
return him to his employer, who will pay the expenses incurred by the
return. The request is always honored, because what neighbor knows when
some member of his own _consistado_ may disappear in the same manner,
and be, of course, slightly in debt to his employer?
The same state of affairs prevails practically in a number of our mining
and manufacturing regions. Men who are paid only once a month or once in
two months get advances from their employers in the shape of orders for
family supplies upon stores in the vicinity, stores probably owned by
the employer. So long as the purchaser is in debt he may be stopped if
he attempts to leave the country, and if he goes alone, as usually he
must, his family is unable to follow him, and, still more, unable to
retain a home and get food, for the roof which shelters them belongs
also to the employer, as does the only store which gives credit. Only a
few years ago I met in the State of New York a tanner, who was said to
be one of the ablest men in his business, who told me that he had been
seven years in the town and house in which I found him, trying to work
out his indebtedness to his employer, so as to take his family somewhere
else where they could have better society and where his children could
have better facilities for education, but in spite of all efforts at
economy he was still in debt to his employer. As the said employer
fixed the rate of wages, the tanner could not possibly see how his
condition would ever be otherwise.
This apparently anomalous feature of our civilization may appear to the
reader to be accidental and exceptional, but it is not. In the larger
cities the same conditions prevail under different forms. There are a
great many shops in New York and other cities where men and women,
principally the latter, work at starvation wages, and are so assisted by
the pretended kindness of their employers that they always are in debt
and cannot possibly leave without fear of suit and possibly arrest. The
so-called slave marts of certain districts of the city of New York on
Sundays are not overdrawn pictures, as the reading public may imagine
them. There are hundreds of thousands of people so absolutely bound to
their present employers that their only method of escape seems to be
death.
Public sentiment does not countenance slavery, though, and public
sentiment is all-powerful? The will of the people is the law of the
land? Yes, yes; that sounds very well. There is a good deal of truth in
it, too, but the truth is all on one side. Public sentiment does not
concern itself with anything which is not brought closely to its
attention. Public sentiment in the United States did not countenance
African slavery long after the Constitution was adopted, nevertheless
the institution grew and flourished until it almost destroyed the
nation. Public sentiment did not approve of any of the abuses of the
colored race which individual overseers and owners might be mean enough
to indulge in. Nevertheless, as in everything else, the public acted
upon the old-fashioned principle of not interfering in other people’s
business. The general public does not handle the slaves, still less does
the general public manage the employers. It hears once in a while of
abuses and cruelties, and thinks these are outrageous, but they are not
its affair. Each man must look out for himself, Heaven helps those who
help themselves, _etcetera, etcetera_. There are a good many ways of
getting rid of moral responsibility in this world, and nearly everybody
is mean enough to take advantage of them when the moral responsibility
does not affect any one of his own family, much less his own
pocket-book.
But can the condition of labor be improved? Yes, if labor is entirely in
earnest about it. Labor’s principal need is brains. I don’t mean they
must increase their own brains; but in their conflicts with employers
the laboring men should be led, or their interests should be managed, by
men who know both sides of the question. Are there such men in the ranks
of the laborers? It appears not; if there were, such men would not be
laborers at all. How many men there are whose hearts have been strongly
stirred up by the wrongs endured by labor in the United States, who have
longed for an opportunity to assist the working classes with their
sympathy and counsel, but who have been repelled again and again by the
utterly unbusinesslike and senseless methods of the very men whom they
desired to help! During the strikes in the cotton mills of New England,
a few years ago, it was remarked by a millionaire, a man of leisure, who
desired to assist the operatives with his time, his money and his legal
ability, that could he have such a faculty of working as the laboring
class had of blundering he would be the greatest man who ever lived.
There is no objection, on the part of Americans, to workingmen enjoying
all proper rights and protection under the law; the only trouble is in
unwise methods of procedure. President Cleveland puts the whole matter
in a nutshell as follows:
“Under our form of government the value of labor as an element of
national prosperity should be distinctly recognized, and the welfare of
the laboring man should be regarded as especially entitled to
legislative care. In a country which offers to all its citizens the
highest attainment of social and political distinction, its workingmen
cannot justly or safely be considered as irrevocably consigned to the
limits of a class and entitled to no attention and allowed no protest
against neglect. The laboring man, bearing in his hand an indispensable
contribution to our growth and progress, may well insist, with manly
courage and as a right, upon the same recognition from those who make
our laws as is accorded to any other citizen having a valuable interest
in charge; and his reasonable demands should be met in such a spirit of
appreciation and fairness as to induce a contented and patriotic
co-operation in the achievement of a grand national destiny. While the
real interests of labor are not promoted by a resort to threats and
violent manifestations, and while those who, under the pretexts of an
advocacy of the claims of labor, wantonly attack the rights of capital,
and for selfish purposes or the love of disorder sow seeds of violence
and discontent, should neither be encouraged nor conciliated, all
legislation on the subject should be calmly and deliberately undertaken,
with no purpose of satisfying unreasonable demands or gaining partisan
advantage.”
The press of the United States, as a rule, is on the side of abused men
of any class, not excepting laboring men who strike against oppression
of any kind or against reduced compensation, but often and often within
a very few years, within the memory of men who are still young, the
press has been obliged by common-sense alone to condemn strikes of men
whose condition they regarded as deplorable, but whose immediate purpose
was absolutely indefensible. A business man in a position which he does
not entirely understand seeks the counsel of a lawyer or of some one who
fully comprehends the case in all its bearings. The laboring man seems
to think such a course unnecessary, and he suffers the consequences.
Will any unions, guilds, Knights of Labor, help the workingmen to
maintain such rights as they have and gain such as they need? Yes, if
there are brains behind them. “In union is strength,” but strength may
be just as effective in a bad sense as a good one, and the more of it
there is the worse will be the showing made if the cause is not just. If
workingmen were divine, all their past efforts would have done a great
deal of good, but they are only human, and there is no getting away from
the fact that when any lot of men first are brought together through
sense of wrong, their first thought is revenge, which never meets the
public’s views. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is an expression
from authority so high that we are obliged to treat it with respect, and
it is certain that during the present generation a desire for vengeance
by any one or for any reason whatever has never called forth the
sympathy of the public.
Human nature is a very weak article. No one knows this better than the
wise man who has a great deal of it himself; so in all quarrels he
assumes that there is a great deal of right on both sides and that
reconciliation or adjustment must be brought about by conciliation and
compromise. The laboring man on strike is not given to either
conciliation or compromise. Whatever his wrongs may be, he has first
endured them for a long time and when he has begun to complain of them
his complaints have never been made directly, but simply are voiced
among his fellows, then increased in volume. The argument on the other
side has never been brought to his attention, and consequently he
regards himself as the only person wronged and almost as the only person
who has any interest in the matter in any way. It never occurs to him
that his employer, like nineteen in twenty of all the employers of the
United States, is doing his business on the basis of general confidence
and borrowed capital, and that what might seem fair to the employer as
an individual may be utterly impossible when demanded of the employer as
a business man.
In all the manufacturing centres outside of large cities the majority of
employers do business with money borrowed from savings banks which have
obtained this money by deposits from the laboring men themselves. An
injury done to one is an injury to all. If labor goes back upon the
employer, the banks also must go back upon him, and after this nothing
but a very wise head can prevent injury to both. When upon such a
complication there comes the spirit of revenge nothing but a special
interposition of Providence can prevent injury for everybody.
One fact that should be constantly borne in mind is that trades unions,
no matter what their titular name may be, can never be sure of support
from men in the same trade who have most sense and influence. Protests,
whether with words or blows, are always made by the discontented, but
the better class of workingmen are not of that variety. They either have
better sense than their associates or make better use of the sense they
have, so they are in positions with which they are fairly contented. Men
who have been “inside” of a great many labor movements are no less
vigorous in their denunciation of the stupidity of labor than the most
earnest or most hypocritical employer that can be named. They say or
they have said to newspaper men whose business it has been to
interrogate them closely that “if” so-and-so had happened the results
would have been different, but A or B or C, each of whom had a number of
personal retainers, thought differently, and consequently the trouble
was prolonged. Had certain other men in the business belonged to the
unions or guilds, or whatever associations made the formal protest
against wages or hours, or whatever the grievances might have been,
there would have been a chance for compromise, or arbitration, or some
other method which would have brought the conflicting interests into
harmony. But these men “stayed out,” as the saying is. They were men who
saw opportunities for something better before them; consequently they
did not intend to compromise their own position and future prospects by
taking part in a fight.
Neither can the unions depend upon support from mechanics and laborers
outside of the large cities and of villages and manufacturing centres
which are tributary to large cities. The carpenter, mason and blacksmith
in a country town feels insulted when asked to organize or join a trade
union. He does not feel the need of any protection. He, with good right,
considers himself as smart as any merchant or manufacturer or capitalist
in his vicinity, and he not only does not see the need of any protection
against such people, but he thinks himself smart enough to overcome them
all in matters pertaining to his own business. Experience proves that he
is right. Such a man slowly but surely becomes a proprietor, and thus an
employer himself. The idea that he is always to be a laborer is
extremely distasteful to him, and even if he were convinced that such
were to be the fact he would not admit it. He would feel that he would
be voluntarily taking a lower level by making any such admission. The
natural consequences may be seen by any man who has done business in a
number of small towns or villages. The journeyman workman in any trade
whom he knew ten or fifteen years ago, in his beginning, is probably now
an employer and a proprietor himself. Quite possibly he has “struck a
big thing,” as the saying goes, and has money of his own; his sons are
being as well educated, his daughters as well dressed, as those of any
of his neighbors, and his wife associates on terms of equality with the
families of the judge or Congressman or whosoever else the local magnate
may be.
So far as labor expects to be helped by public sympathy, which is always
on the side of the unfortunate and oppressed, it cuts its own throat by
denying the right of any laborer to work at cheaper rates than his
fellows. The abuses and indignities to which so-called scabs have been
subjected have alienated public “sympathy” from labor movements to a
most deplorable degree. No American, not even the millionaire, is free
from the influence of competition in business, and the richest are
sometimes those who suffer the most. Competition has been defined as the
soul of business, and no one yet has been skilful enough to deny or
modify the assertion. If employers may compete, if clerks, teachers,
salesmen, lawyers, physicians, even clergymen, may compete with one
another for wages or compensation for their services, why may not
workmen? Can any one imagine a body of clerks, or dry-goods salesmen, or
lawyers, forming a clique and standing at dark corners with clubs and
pistols to bully other men of their own profession into demanding
certain wages on penalty of refusing to do any business at all?
“What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” If one class of
labor is entitled to take as much wages as it may get for such services
as it can render, why should not another be entitled to the same
privilege? It is very true that the laboring man often sees in free
competition by a large number of men a possibility that he shall be
deprived of his daily occupation. But whose fault is it? That of the
competitor who will work for lower wages or of the man who has done so
little outside of his daily stint of labor as to be obliged to stand in
the position of a highwayman or bully toward any one who can do the same
work for less money than he?
Can law improve the condition of the workingman? Can you make a horse
drink by leading him to the water? The law has done a great deal for the
laborers in many States by giving workmen a first lien upon the results
of their work, but it cannot and will not compel the community to regard
the inefficient worker as the equal of the good one, which is the point
upon which some trade unions and other organizations seem inclined to
insist. Neither will it allow the employee to manage his employer’s
business. The employer may occasionally find himself “in a hole,” where
he must submit to any terms imposed by the only men who can help him
out, but if he gets in any such fix a second time his bankers and
customers will go back upon him, after which he will have no use for
labor at any price.
Then can law and public opinion do more for laboring men than they have
done? Not much. Why? Because law and public opinion are made by people
who themselves work--people who stand just as much of this world’s wear
and tear as any common dirt-shoveller, to say nothing of any skilled
mechanic. There are more farmers than mechanical laborers, and they work
longer hours, but how often do they demand help of the law or the
public? In every large city there are tens of thousands of clerks who
are driven to their utmost capacity at less compensation per day than
the common laborer receives. It has been ascertained that a bank-teller
who recently defaulted was getting a salary of only six dollars per
week, though he had long hours and great responsibility.
Does not underpaid labor, outside the mechanical arts, frequently
improve its own condition? Yes, frequently. Well, how? Why, by using its
brains. If it were to insist that its whole duty was done when its
daily work was over the public would laugh at it. The clerk, the
teacher, the salesman considers it his duty to continually improve
himself in order to be fit for such opportunities as may arise. A man in
any one of these positions who would spend his non-working hours in
indulgence, carelessness, or, worse still, at the nearest beer-shop,
would be considered by his employers as unfit for confidence and by his
associates as a man who never would rise. If such men are so badly paid,
so severely worked, yet are skilful enough to rise from the low
financial level upon which their work places them, why should not the
laboring class in general rise in the same manner? It is useless to say
they cannot, because thousands upon thousands have done it for years. It
has already been said that the mechanics of a few years ago are the
employers and managers of to-day. A great deal more might be said in the
same direction, for there are great mills, factories and industries of
the United States to-day controlled by men who were merely poor laborers
at day wages a few years ago. The question is not one of a class or of
an industry; it is entirely one of individual manhood, and the man
stands or falls by himself. The more he depends upon an association or
his fellow-men the less strength there is in himself to resist injury or
to make his way upward.