WILL BIRTH CONTROL HELP THE CAUSE OF LABOR?
Labor seems instinctively to have recognized the fact that its
servitude springs from numbers. Seldom, however, has it applied its
knowledge logically and thoroughly. The basic principle of craft
unionism is limitation of the number of workers in a given trade. This
has been labor's most frequent expedient for righting its wrongs.
Every unionist knows, as a matter of course, that if that number is
kept small enough, his organization can compel increases of wages,
steady employment and decent working conditions. Craft unionism has
succeeded in attaining these insofar as it has been able to apply this
principle. It has failed insofar as it has been unable to apply it.
The weakness of craft unionism is that it does not carry its principle
far enough. It applies its policy of limitation of numbers only to the
trade. In his home, the worker, whether he is a unionist or
non-unionist, goes on producing large numbers of children to compete
with him eventually in the labor market.
"The history of labor," says Teresa Billington-Greig in the _Common
Sense of The Population Question_, "is the history of an ever
unsuccessful effort upon the part of man to bring his productive
ability as a worker up to his reproductive ability. It has been a
losing battle all the way."
The small percentage of highly skilled, organized workers lead in the
struggle for better conditions. Craft unions, by limiting the number
of men available for any one trade, manage to procure better pay,
shorter hours and other advantages for their members.
Disaster, in the form of famine, pestilence, tidal waves, earthquakes
or war, sometimes limits the number of available workers. Then those
who live in parts of the world that are not affected, or who stay at
home during wars, reap a temporary advantage. These advantages,
however, are quickly offset by increased prices, or by competition for
jobs when soldiers return from war. This form of limitation of numbers
works to the advantage of labor as long as it is available, but great
disasters are not constantly in operation while the worker's
reproductive ability is. So in a few years they have lost what
nature's destructiveness won for them.
The great mass of the workers--including children and women--are
unskilled and unorganized. Not only that, they are for some
considerable part of the time seeking employment. They are, of course,
poorly paid. Thus, through their low wages and their seeking of
employment, they always come into direct competition with one another
and with the skilled and organized workmen. As their families live in
want and are often diseased, they create the chief social problems of
the day. They bring children into the world as fast as women can bear
them. With each child they increase their own misery and provide
another worker to force down wages and prolong hours, through
competition for employment.
This has been the way of labor from the beginning. It is labor's way
in every country.
Having discovered that there is no relief in legislation, labor
organizes to limit its numbers in certain trades. Meanwhile the women
of the working class go on breeding more workers to wipe out in the
future the advantages gained for the present. In Paris, for instance,
the proletarian quarters of the city show a birth rate more than three
times as high as the birth rate in the well-to-do sections.
"Dr. Jacques Bartillon furnishes us with statistics which prove that
the birth rate in any quarter of Paris is in inverse ratio to its
degree of affluence," says G. Hardy in _How to Prevent Pregnancy_.
"The rich Champs-Elysees has a birth rate a third of that Bellerville
or of the Buttes-Chaumont. From 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
fifty, Menimontant gives 116 births; the Champs-Elysees thirty-four
births.
"It is the same in Berlin. For 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
that of fifty, a very poor quarter gives 157 births; a rich quarter
gives 47 births."
And so it is the world over. The very word "proletarian," as Hardy
points out, means "producer of children."
The children thus carelessly produced undermine the health of the
mother, deepen the family's poverty, destroy the happiness of the
home, and dishearten the father; all this in addition to being future
competitors in the labor market. Too often their increasing number
drives the mother herself into industry, where her beggarly wages tend
to lower the level of those of her husband.
The first sickening feature of this general situation is the high
infant mortality among the children of the workers. Many children come
merely to sap the strength of the mother, suffer and die, leaving to
show for their coming and going only an increased burden of sorrow and
debt. The lower the family income, the more of these babies die before
they are a year old.
A survey of infant mortality in Johnstown, Pa., by the federal
Children's Bureau, gave these typical results for the year 1911:
Infant Mortality
Father's Earnings Rate
Under $521.................. 197.3
$521 to $624................ 193.1
$625 to $779................ 163.1
$780 to $899................ 168.4
$900 to $1,199.............. 142.3
$1,200 or over.............. 102.
Ample........................ 88.
These figures do not represent the total income of all families.
Neither will money buy as much in 1920 as it did in 1911. Seventy per
cent of the people of the United States have incomes of less than
$1,000. This means that from 142 to 197 children born into such
families die before they are one year old. The births and deaths of
these children represent just so much useless burden of anguish and
sorrow to the workers.
Despite this high infant death rate, the workers of the United States
still have more children than they can care for. There are enough of
them left over to provide 3,000,000 child laborers, who by working for
a pittance crowd their parents out of employment and force the
families deeper into poverty.
When all is said and done, the workers who produce large families have
themselves to blame for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed
grasping for jobs, for the strike breakers, for the policemen who beat
up and arrest strikers and for the soldiers who shoot strikers down.
All these come from the families of workingmen. Their fathers and
mothers are workers for wages. Out of the loins of labor they come
into the world and compel surplus labor to betray labor that is
employed.
Nor is this all. When a workman of superior strength and skill,
protected by his union, manages to maintain a large or moderate sized
family in a degree of comfort, there always comes a time when he must
strike to preserve what he has won. If he is not beaten by unorganized
workers who seek his job, he still has to face the possibility of
listening to the cries of several hungry children. If the strike is a
long one, these cries often down the promptings of loyalty and class
interest--often they defeat him when nothing else could.
Is it any wonder that under handicaps like these labor becomes
confused and flounders? It has been offered a multitude of
remedies--political reforms, wage legislation, statutory regulation of
hours, and so on. It has been invited to embrace craft and industrial
unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, socialism as panaceas for its
liberation. Except in a few countries, it has not attained to
aggressive power, but has been a tool for unscrupulous politicians.
Even with the temporary advantages gained by the wiping out of
millions of workers in the Great War, labor's problem remains
unsolved. It has now, as always, to contend with the crop of young
laborers coming into the market, and with the ever-present "labor-saving"
machine which, instead of relieving the worker's situation,
makes it all the harder for him to escape. Fewer laborers are needed
to-day for a given amount of production and distribution than before
the invention of these machines. Yet, owing to the increase in the
number of the workers, labor finds itself enslaved instead of
liberated by the machine.
"Hitherto," says John Stuart Mill, "it is questionable if all the
mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same
life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of
manufacturers and others to make fortunes."
That, in a few words, sums up the greater part of labor's progress. We
blame capitalism and its wasteful, brutal industrial system for all
our social problems, but our numbers were vast and our bondage
grievous before modern industry came into existence. We may curse the
trusts, but our subjection was accomplished before the trusts had
emerged from the brain of evolution. We may blame public officials and
individual employers, but our burdens were crushing before these were
born. We look now here, now there, for the cause of our
condition--everywhere but at the one to blame. We fight again and
again for our rights, only to be conquered by our own kind, our
own children, our brother's, our neighbor's.
Let us carry to its logical conclusion the principle of limitation
which has been partially applied by labor unions. The way to get rid
of labor problems, unemployment, low wages, the surplus, unwanted
population, is to stop breeding. They come from our own ranks--from
our own families. The way to get better wages, shorter hours, a new
system for the advancement of labor, is to make labor's numbers fewer.
Let us not wait for war, famine and plague to do it. Let us cease
bringing unwanted children into the world to suffer a while, add to
our burdens and die. Let us cease bringing others into the world to
compete with us for a living. Let the women workers practice birth
control.
What are the concrete things which the worker can gain at once through
birth control? First, a small family can live much better than a large
one upon the wages now received. Workers could be better fed, clothed
and educated. Again, fewer children in the families of the workers
would tend to check the rise in the prices of food, which are forced
up as the demand increases. Within a few years it would reduce the
number of workers competing for jobs. The worker could the more easily
force society to give him more of the product of his labor--or all of
it. And while these things are taking place, the slums, with their
disease, their moral degradation and all their sordid accompaniments,
would automatically disappear. No worker would need to live in such
tenements--hence they would be modernized or torn down. At the same
time, the few children that were being born to the workers would be
stronger, healthier, more courageous. They would be fit human
beings--not miserable victims of murderous conditions.
Birth control does not propose to replace any of the idealistic
movements and philosophies of the workers. It is not a substitute, it
precedes. It is of itself a principle that lifts the heaviest of the
burdens that afflict labor. It can and it must be the foundation upon
which any permanently successful improvement in conditions is
attained. It is, therefore, a necessary prelude in all effective
propaganda.
A few years of systematic agitation for birth control would put labor
in a position to solve all its problems. Labor, organized or
unorganized, must take heed of this fact. Groups and parties working
for a new social order must include it in their programmes. No social
system, no workers' democracy, no Socialist republic can operate
successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth
control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.
In Spain I saw a bull fight. It was in the great arena at Barcelona.
As bull after bull went down, his magnificent, defeated strength
bleeding away through wounds inflicted by his weak but skillful
assailant, I thought of the world of workers and their oppressors.
As each bull was sent into the arena, he was confronted by one
assailant and twenty _confusers_. There was but one enemy for him to
face, but there were twenty brilliant flags, each of a different
color, to distract his attention from the man who held the weapon. No
sooner was his real antagonist in danger, than one of the confusers
fluttered a flag before his anger-maddened eyes. With one toss of his
horns he could have ripped the life from the toreador, but his
confusers were always there with the flags. One after another he
charged them, only to spend the force of his lunges in the empty air.
He found that as he was about to toss one of his confusers into the
air, he was confronted by another flag, which he charged with equal
futility.
Finally, utterly bewildered and exhausted, too spiritless to meet the
attack, he falls under the sword thrust of the toreador. And the sun
shines in the deep blue overhead, the band plays, the ten thousand
gayly-clad spectators shout, while the victim is dragged out to make
room for another.
It is the drama of labor.
It will be the drama of labor until labor finds its real enemy. That
enemy is the reproductive ability of the working class which gluts the
channels of progress with the helpless and weak, and stimulates the
tyrants of the world in their oppression of mankind.