ARBITRATION

The universal cry for industrial arbitration is either dishonest or

unwise. For every evil there are quack remedies galore—especially

for every evil that is irremediable. Of this order of remedies is

arbitration, for of this order of evils is the inadequate wage of

manual labor. Since the beginning of authentic history everything has

been tried in the hope of divorcing poverty and labor, but nothing has

parted them. It is not conceivable that anything ever will; success

of arbitration, antecedently improbable, is demonstrably impossible.

Most of the work of the world is hard, disagreeable, requiring little

intelligence. Most of the people of the world are unfit to do any

other work. If it were not done by them it would not be done, and it

is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure

would topple and fall. Yet there is so little of the work, and so many

incapable of doing anything else, that adequate return is out of the

question. For the laboring _class_ there is no hope of an existence

that is comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; the

hope of an individual laborer lies in the possibility of fitting

himself for higher employment—employment of the head; not manual but

cerebral labor. While selfishness remains the main ingredient of human

nature (and a survey of the centuries accessible to examination shows

but a slow and intermittent decrease) the cerebral workers, being the

wiser and not much better, will manage to take the greater profit. In

justice it must be said of them that they extend a warm and sincere

invitation to their ranks, and take “apprentices;” every opportunity

for education that the other class enjoys is proof of that.

Let us, then, look at arbitration more nearly; in our time it is, in

form at least, something new. It began as “international arbitration,”

which already, in settling a few disputes of no great importance,

has shown itself a dangerous remedy. In the necessary negotiation to

determine exactly what points to submit, to whom, and how, and where,

and when to submit them, scores of questions are raised, upon each of

which it is as easy to disagree and fight as upon the original issue.

International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many

burning questions for a smouldering one; for disputes that have reached

a really acute stage are not submitted. Nor, despite all “treaties,”

will a powerful nation arbitrate anything that it considers vital to

its honor or welfare.

Industrial arbitration is no better; it is manifestly worse, and any

law enforcing it, and enforcing compliance with its decisions, is

absurd and mischievous. “Compulsory arbitration” is not arbitration;

the essence of which is voluntary submission of differences and

voluntary submission to judgment. If reference or obedience is enforced

the arbitrators are simply a court with no powers to do anything but

apply the law. Proponents of the fad would do well to consider this:

If a party to a labor dispute is _compelled_ to invoke and obey a

decision of arbitrators, that decision must follow strictly the line

of law; the smallest invasion of any constitutional, statutory or

common-law right will enable him to upset the judgment. No legislative

body can establish a tribunal empowered to make and enforce illegal

or extra-legal decisions; for making and enforcing legal ones the

tribunals that we already have are sufficient. This talk of “compulsory

arbitration” is the maddest nonsense that the industrial situation has

yet evolved. Doubtless it is sent upon us for our sins; but had we not

already a plague of strikes?

Arbitration of labor disputes means compromise with the unions. It

can, in this country, mean nothing else, for the law would not survive

a half-dozen failures to concede some part of the workmen’s demands,

however reasonless. By repeated strikes they would eventually get all

their original demand and as much more as on second thought they might

choose to ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by

a new importunity and the first arbitrators might as well allow them

all that they demand and all that they mean to demand hereafter.

Would not employers be equally unscrupulous? They would not. They

could not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the

risk of unfair decisions in a country where it is “popular” to favor

and encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have

nothing to lose, not even their employment, for their work is labor

leading. Their dupes, by the way, would not be dupes forever, for with

enforced arbitration the game of “follow my leader” would pay only

until there should be nothing to follow him to but empty treasuries of

dead industries in an extinct civilization. If there must be compulsory

arbitration it should at least not apply to that sum of all impudent

rascalities, the “sympathy strike.”

As to the men who have set up the claim asserted by the “sympathy

strike,” I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was creditable in

them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in Illinois,

how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen in

California? When their employers, who they confessed were good to them,

were plundering the public, they did not strike, sympathetically nor

otherwise. Year after year the railway monopoly picked the pockets

of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid

its Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest;

filled the land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into

prisons and locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins;

by open defiance of the tax collector denied to children of the poor

the advantages of education—did all this and more; and these honest

working men stood loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains,

receivers, in one sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors

were nothing to them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and

their children did not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew,

a great chorus of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded.

Why did they not strike then? Where then were the fiery altruists and

storm-petrels of industrial disorder? The ingenious gods who have

invented the Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with

names that would make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold

selfish hearts to order out their followers to redress a public wrong,

but only to inflict one—to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an

appetite for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of

power, or punish the crime of prosperity.

It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it always is.

The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ was

sweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly,

and logically died for it. Nero’s time was a time of turbulence, yet

Seneca’s mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Compare

their fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon the

names of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos—guides

and gods of the “fierce democracies” which rise with a sickening

periodicity to defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of

blood and fire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the

good of mankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and

endowed with its aims—that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the

Temple of Shame.

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without

the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and

usually murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally

suffer them can endure with considerable fortitude, but hypocritical

condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the

strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe

them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders

to assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead,

while openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin

arrested in spite of them—these are pretty hard to bear. A strike

means (for it includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness,

destruction of the property of others than the strikers, riot and, if

necessary, bloodshed. Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in

these crimes they are morally liable for the foreknown consequences of

their act. Nay, they are morally liable for _all_ the consequences—all

the inconveniences and losses to the community, all the sufferings

of the poor entailed by interruptions of trade, all the privations

of other workingmen whom a selfish attention to their own supposed

advantage throws out of the closed industries. They are liable in

morals and should be made so in law—only that strikes are needless.

It is not worth while to create a multitude of complex criminal

responsibilities for acts which can, possibly, be prevented by a single

and simple one. How?

First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too much

about a man’s inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereign

will. In so far as that means—and it is always used to mean—his

right to quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and

regardless of consequences to others, it is false; there is no such

moral right, and the law should have at least a speaking acquaintance

with morality. What is mischievous should be illegal. The various

interests of civilization are so complex, delicate, intertangled and

interdependent that no man, and no set of men, should have power to

throw the entire scheme into confusion and disorder for promotion of a

trumpery principle or a class advantage. In dealing with corporations

we recognize that. If for any selfish purpose a trade union of railway

managers had done what their sacred brakemen and divine firemen did—had

decreed that “no wheel should turn” until Mr. Pullman’s men should

return to work—they would have found themselves all in jail the second

day. _Their_ right to quit work was not conceded: they lacked that

authenticating credential of moral and legal irresponsibility, an

indurated palm. In a small lockout affecting a mill or two the offender

finds a half-hearted support in the law if he is willing to pay enough

deputy sheriffs; but even then he is mounted by the hobnailed populace,

at its back the daily newspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats.

But let the manager of a great railway discharge all its men without

warning and “kill” its own engines! Then see what you will see. To

commit a wrong so gigantic with impunity a man must wear overalls.

How prevent anybody from committing it? How break up this _régime_ of

strikes and boycotts and lockouts, more disastrous to others than to

those at whom the blows are aimed—than to those, even, who deliver

them? How make all those concerned in the management and operation of

great industries, about which have grown up tangles of related and

dependent interests, conduct them with some regard to the welfare of

others? Before committing ourselves to the dubious and irretraceable

course of “government ownership,” or to the infectious expedient of

“regulation,” is there anything of promise yet untried?—anything of

superior simplicity and easier application?

There are few simple remedies for social or political ills. It is a

familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not have unforeseen

results; but of these results, by far the greater number are never

recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any

“measure” is that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to

exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of

advantage. Yet the statesman or philosopher to whose understanding

“the whole matter lies in a nutshell”—who thinks he can formulate a

practical political or social policy within the four corners of an

epigram is constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose

causes are complex, constant and obscure.

Nevertheless, it would be wise to make a breach of labor contract by

either party to it a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment. “Fine

or imprisonment” will not do—the employee, unable to pay the fine,

would commonly go to jail, the employer seldom. That would not be fair.

The need of such a law is apparent: labor contracts would then be

drawn for a certain time, securing both employer and employee and

(which is more important) helpless persons in related and dependent

industries—the whole public, in fact—against sudden and disastrous

action by either “capital” or “labor” for accomplishment of a purely

selfish and frankly impudent end. A strike or lockout compelled to

announce itself thirty days in advance would be comparatively innocuous

to the public, whilst securing to the party of initiation all the

advantages that anybody professes to want—all but the advantage of

ruining others and successfully defying the laws.

Under the present _régime_ labor contracts are useless; either party

can violate them with impunity. They offer redress only through a civil

suit for damages, and the employee commonly has nothing with which

to conduct an action or satisfy a judgment. The consequence is seen

in the incessant and increasing industrial disturbances, with their

ever-attendant crimes against property, life and liberty—disturbances

which, by driving capital to investments in which it needs employ no

labor, do more than all the other causes so glibly enumerated by every

newspaper and politician, though by no two alike, to bring about the

“hard times”—which in their turn cause further and worse disturbances.