The politics of labor

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Introductory 5

II. The Upper and the Nether Millstone 21

Chapter I. Introductory

For what avail the plough or sail,

Or land or life, if freedom fail ?

Emerson.

<c The Labor question,” as it is called for want of a better name, is simply the question as to whether America shall in the future be a free democratic land, with equal rights and opportunities, as far as may be, for every citizen — or a country where the many are ruled, as in Europe, by the privileged few. It is no new question, but a new phase of a very old one. The rights of Labor are the rights of Man. Within the last generation a danger to American liberty has manifested itself in the power of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and the disposition to use that power oppressively and arbitrarily for the further aggrandizement of its possessors and the virtual enslavement of the mass. Apart from this conscious voluntary action on the part of the great money and railroad kings, the natural result of the increase of population under our existing social system is to intensify the pressure of competition, to make opportunities less equal, and to widen the chasm between rich and poor.

America is no longer the land of promise for the down-trodden of the Old World. The old-time boast that certain prosperity and success awaited every honest, industrious, and thrifty man who, dissatisfied with the cramping and

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hopeless conditions of European life, made his home upon our shores, has been sadly falsified by the experience of recent years. We have become habituated to the idea of a chronic pauperism — a permanently outcast class, once imagined to be an impossibility on the free soil of America. And, which is perhaps the most ominous sign of all, there has been a gradual degeneracy of public opinion, partly owing to European influences, partly to the social changes which are taking place ; so that these things are not regarded as utterly antagonistic to the spirit of democratic institutions and inconsistent with and in the end fatal to liberty itself.

Because this danger comes from a new direction, because it is closely associated with undertakings such as the great railway and telegraph enterprises and the development of our manufactures and commerce, which have built up the material prosperity of the country as a whole, the public have been blind to its real significance. Under the influence of democratic traditions and the memories of the revolutionary struggle, the vigilance of those who jealously sought to guard American liberty from assault was directed without rather than within. Monarchy, aristocracy, the influence of foreign gold, the intrigues of European statesmen, jealous of the phenomenal growth of the giant republic, have been not unnatural objects of suspicion, while the process of sapping free institutions by striking at their tap-root — the independence and self-hood of the citizen — was goingon rapidly without objection or protest save from an uninfluential few. Economic formulas and political rules of action inherited from an age the requirements of which w^ere widely different from those of our time, are largely responsible for this slowness to recognize industrial evils as coming within the sphere of legislative amelioration. The maxim that “ the best government is that which governs least ” was excellent when population was sparse and scattered, when land was to be had for the asking, and men’s wants were simple and for the most part supplied / by themselves or their immediate neighbors. It is a misleading anachronism in these days of steam and electricity, of complicated and clashing interests, of vast wealth and abject poverty, of giant corporations and swollen city populations, dependent for their very existence on the working of the social mechanism of exchange and transportation. The framers of the American constitution were wise in their day. It is no discredit to their memory to say that they were not omnis. cient, and that by no possible exercise of human sagacity could they have foreseen the revolution in industry and commerce which has since taken place, or provided against the social abuses and dangers accompanying it. Fidelity to their teaching and example demands not the blind perpetuation of an outgrown system because they adopted it as best suited to the needs of their time, but rather that the questions of to-day should be dealt with in their spirit — resolutely faced and grappled with as they would have faced and grappled with them.

When Oliver Cromwell was at the height of his power as Protector of the Commonwealth of England, an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title of “ Killing no Murder ” which struck terror even into that strong sagacious soul by its menacing invective. “ Shall we, ” asked the writer, “ who would not suffer the lion to invade us, tamely stand and be devoured by the wolf ? ”

That is the question which now confronts the people of the American continent. Will the nation that defied kingly tyranny and overthrew the slaveholding aristocracy, tamely submit to see their institutions perverted, their blood-bought freedom destroyed, and a system of the meanest and most hateful class-supremacy established upon its ruins ?

To all human appearance we are on the verge of a great crisis. Political freedom cannot long co-exist with industrial serfdom. The new wine of Democracy cannot be put into the old bottles of social inequality and caste privilege without disaster.

The industrial revolution has already begun. Though the issues as yet are far from being clearly defined, or the lines which will finally divide the contestants in the coming struggle

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drawn with any degree of precision, Labor has had its Bleeding Kansas and its Harper’s Ferry many times over in the armed conflicts between the desperate and starving workingmen and the mercenary cohorts of capitalism, which are now of such frequent recurrence that they attract but little attention. It has its Lloyd Garrisons and Wendell Phillipses of the press and platform, whose pleading for justice and exposition of right, however forcibly and eloquently urged, are as contemptuously pooh-poohed by the sleek and shallow optimists, and the wealthy and well-to-do classes who create public opinion, as were the protests of their predecessors against chattel slavery. And latterly the question has taken on a new phase by the appearance, in the forum of public discussion, of a numerous and influential class of professed sympathizers with Labor, who preach compromise and conciliation — who propose palliatives, mutual concessions, and the alleviation of the symptoms of the social malady. Actuated no doubt by the best motives, but ludicrously ignorant of the real causes of poverty and suffering among the wage-workers, they propound such maxims as “ Labor and Capital allies, not enemies,” “ Property has its duties as well as its rights, ” and urge employers to treat their working-people justly, to refrain from taking advantage of the iron law of competition, to keep up the rate of wages and “ make work ” in slack times rather than discharge their employes — advice as utterly futile, even though it were followed, to permanently abate the evils of a bad system, as the kindly treatment of slaves by many of their masters was to justify negro slavery.

The very form in which these conciliatory teachings are epitomized shows how far we have unconsciously drifted from genuine Democracy. “ Capital ” — property is spoken of as a distinct force and factor in social organization — a sort of distinct estate of the realm as they would say in England, with a status of its own apart from the great body of the commonwealth. Dead, inert matter, supposed to endow its owner with other rights, duties, and prerogatives than those attaching to him as a man and a citizen !

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Change the phrase and the undemocratic character of the assumption that property or capital, as such, ought to be regarded as a distinct interest apart from, if not superior to, labor will be at once apparent. “ Rank has its duties as well as its rights.” “Aristocracy and labor allies, not enemies.” The complete incongruity of the idea with the fundamental principles of Democracy strikes one at the first glance. Such an utterance would excite the strongest opposition as a reactionary sentiment entirely at variance with the spirit of free institutions. Yet what is “ capital,” when the word is used in the sense above implied, but the aristocracy' of money ?

No ! Property has neither rights nor duties ! Labor and capital are not and ought not to be “ allies ” ; because capital is merely the thing created by labor ; the instrument which should be under its c'ontrol, not the force to direct iL

It is necessary, in order to have a clear understanding of the proper relations between labor and capital, to discriminate between capital as an instrument and capitalism as a force. Many of the arguments by which the existing industrial system is supported are simply a play upon words, “ capital ” being used in a double sense. Primarily it signifies those accu- 1 mulations of the product of labor used for further production. Factory buildings, machinery, iron ore, raw cotton, seed wheat, threshing machines, these are all forms of capital as well as the money in the bank which the employer draws to pay his workingmen their wages. No one doubts the value or, practically speaking, the necessity of capital, in these and like forms, to industrial progress. But “capital,” as the term is ordinarily used in politico-economical discussion, implies a great deal more than this. When men speak of the rights of capital, v the conflict between capital and labor, etc., they refer to the power which the possession or control of capital gives to a small minority of the community of regulating how much labor shall receive of what it produces — to the special interest of the accumulator of labor products in the result of further productive industry. They quibble on the word capital, ^ sometimes using it in the material and strictly correct sense

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when they wish to prove how helpless labor is without it, and on the admitted necessity of capital as an instrument and a creation, basing their argument for the necessity of capital as a controlling force and a creator.

Capital, properly so called, is a beneficent auxiliary to Labor in the work of production. Capitalism, or the control by means, firstly, of monopolizing resources and, secondly, of competition among workers, which the possessors of capital exercise over the distribution of products and the general regulation of industry, is a wrong, a usurpation, and a growing menace to popular freedom.

Labor is just as much interested in the maintenance of capitalism, that is to say, the supremacy of capital, as the slave was in the perpetuation of the slave power.

A large class of superficial observers, who, as long as it was possible, ignored the prevalent feeling of dissatisfaction among the working people, now seek to belittle it. They do not believe that any crisis is approaching — that the deep-seated unrest of those upon whom the competitive system presses hardly has any special significance. “ It has always been so,” they tell us. “ It is the old story — as old as human society itself. It is natural that as America takes on more and more the condition of older countries, the volume of poverty should increase and its cry be more loudly raised. But there is no reason to suppose that the labor movement will lead to any other result than the chronic agitations among the working classes of the Old World. All old countries have their periods of social disquietude and upheaval. We must expect these phenomena, but they do not necessarily imply an industrial revolution.”

The study of history is frequently misleading. Those who attempt to “ unlock the future’s portal with the past’s bloodrusted key,” and to reason by analogies drawn from history, are apt to leave out of account the factors of the problem which are of later growth, to overlook the changed conditions which render the parallel incomplete and deceptive. The result of the present agitation cannot be inferred from the familiar ex-

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am pies of the uprisings headed by Jack Cade and Wat Tyler, the peasants’ war in Germany, the Jacquerie, or the French Revolution. The book-learned ignorance of those who have read a great deal more than they have thought, which assumes that, because in the past labor agitations and popular upheavals have not secured any permanent, satisfactory adjustment of the question, no such adjustment is possible, loses sight of three important respects in which modern and especially American social unrest is unlike all historical examples.

1. The discontent of our day is an educated discontent. Owing to universal free education, the American working-man has at all events the rudiments of a common-school education. He reads the newspaper even if he reads nothing else, and brings a shrewd, keen-witted intelligence to bear upon every fact or opinion which has any direct relation to his position and livelihood. The wonderful enterprise and ever-broadening scope of the modern press enlarge the circle of his ideas and sympathies. He learns something of the great truth of the mutual dependence on each other of the different forms of industry and the workings of the mechanism of exchange and transit. He begins to understand that the “ Labor question ” is not simply a difference between himself and his employer as to the amount which he ought to receive as wages, but that there are a hundred other considerations entering into the subject, apart from his employer’s ability or willingness to comply with his demands or his own power to enforce them by combination. If he be an intelligent, thoughtful man he is able to trace the various causes of social and industrial evils, to know the why and the wherefore of the growing inequalities which exist. He knows how he is robbed and by whom. The coal-miners of western Pennsylvania, for instance, receive wages according to a sliding-scale based upon the selling price of the coal at Pittsburg. Every miner consequently studies the market reports and watches intently the fluctuations of price, not only at the trade center, but at remoter points, as the barometer which indicates the rise or fall of his scanty wages. This is a training in itself more valuable than the theoretical teaching of half a

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dozen professors of political economy. He understands how his position is affected by the relation between demand and supply. He knows almost to a cent just what proportion of the price paid by the consumer comes to him as wages and what goes into the pockets of mine operators, railroad companies, and wholesale and retail dealers, and can trace the effect of rings and deals among these classes upon prices and wages. The cotton operative in Fall River or Lowell, who can hardly keep body and soul together on the miserable pittance received in that highly-protected, but most wretchedly paid, of American industries ; the street-railway conductor whose exhausting hours allow him barely time for the animal requirements of food and sleep ; though they are robbed are no longer robbed in the dark. The profits and the dividends of the wealthy corporations employing them are published in the newspapers. The wage-workers know that the reasoirwhy they are poor is because so large a share of their earnings goes to make others rich. The saving, industrious mechanic who has, by dint of hard toil and frugality, scraped together a few hundred dollars in the hope of becoming his own landlord, and finds that owing to the high price at which land is held the purchase is not within his means, sees the speculator grow prosperous by the system that keeps him poor. He reads year after year of the increase of rents, and is made familiar with the growth of what is really a landed aristocracy — a class of enormously wealthy idlers whose resources are wrung from industry in the shape of a continuously increasing burden on the occupants jof land. The American press gives a degree of publicity to the actions of prominent men, the doings of important corporations and syndicates, and the movements which influence legislation unknown in any other country. When a man becomes either sufficiently wealthy or sufficiently prominent in political or business affairs to attract general interest, his every movement is scrutinized by the watchful eye of the reporter or special correspondent, “ set in a notebook, learned and conned by rote,” and blazoned forth in the newspaper. If a millionaire makes a large investment, gives

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a banquet, puts up a new mansion, or takes a journey, the in. satiable public demand full particulars, and his purposes are everywhere canvassed and criticized. If a syndicate or capitalist enters the stock market, buys a mine or a cattle ranch, corners pork or petroleum, or makes a political deal at Washington or Albany, the remorseless interviewer discloses the whole transaction. No important move in political, financial, or social affairs can now be made without becoming known to a nation of newspaper readers. Matters which in Europe would be done in a corner and never become known beyond a select circle, are the common topics of the readers of our one-cent journals. The tendency of this publicity is to throw light on the methods by which industry is defrauded, to educate the mass in a knowledge of the causes of poverty, and to suggest to thinking minds the adequate remedies.

How different was the condition in this respect of the European artisan or peasant, whose blind and desperate struggles against oppression are referred to as prototypes of the modern labor movement! Ignorant and untutored, his knowledge of the world was narrowed to his immediate surroundings; whatever in the way of instruction he received inculcated content with his lot and submission to his superiors. Inequality of conditions he accepted as a matter of course — a feature of a divinely ordained system under which kings and lords, priests and landowners, were born to rule and to enjoy the good things of life, while he was born to toil and endure “in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call him,” as the Episcopal catechism has it. To him it seemed perfectly natural that society should be divided into classes and grades, and that the higher class should have a profusion of comforts and luxuries without anxiety or labor. He took his place uncomplainingly as an inferior. It was not inequality which he resented, but absolute privation. If the great truth that all men have equal rights dawned at intervals upon some bolder and more enlightened minds, it was but the dire physical necessities of the mag§ which gave their teachings a temporary acceptance.

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It was the cravings of hunger and the passion for revenge of men driven mad by oppression which steeled their hearts and nerved their arms ; not the clear, intelligent perception of the causes of their misery.

— > 2. The American working-class possess political power, and

are coming to the determination to use it in their own interests. The means of an ample and absolute redress of every wrong is within their own hands. That they have not hitherto availed themselves of it to any extent is due to a variety of causes. Among the principal may be enumerated the strength of old party associations and lines of cleavage based upon past issues, the force of the laissez faire tradition, difference of opinion as to the course to be pursued, dependence upon political nostrums, palliatives, and trivial concessions by politicians to “ capture the labor vote,” and bribery and intimidation exercised by employers. The old school of Democracy were apt to look upon the ballot as an end rather than a means, to imagine that all the social problems, if not solved, were placed in the way of solution by manhood suffrage. We are only just beginning to realize that the franchise is, after all, merely an instrument and not intrinsically a cure-all. Unless it be used honestly and intelligently its mere possession is not only no benefit but a positive detriment ; as it enables corrupt and self-seeking rulers to do in the name of the people actions which an irresponsible nonelective government might shrink from.

Labor is just awakening to a dim consciousness of its political strength. Hitherto, like a shorn and blinded Samson, it has ground in the prison-house of partyism, the mock and sport of its despoilers. The time approaches when the aroused giant will put forth his long wasted energies and level to the dust the strongholds of oppression.

— 3. Never before in the world’s history was there any parallel to the thoroughness of organization which now obtains among the laboring classes of America. The idea of the solidarity of Labor has taken firm root. The old trade unions, admirable in their way as a step in advance, and temporarily useful

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as a defence against acts of oppression on the part of individual employers, though powerless to deal with the deep-seated and widespread causes of social disquiet, are rapidly being superseded by or merged into more comprehensive organizations — the order of the Knights of Labor, trades federations, central labor unions, and similar bodies. Their design is to weld labor into a compact mass, and to confront capitalism with the locked shields and levelled lances of a Pyrrhic phalanx instead of leaving the isolated bodies to be beaten in detail.

Based on the principle that “ an injury to one is the concern of all,” this newer form of labor organization seeks to deal with the concentrated and organized power of capitalism by uniting those whose common interests and common rights are menaced by its encroachments. They are looking more and more to the ultimate causes of the subjection of labor, and| ^ less to the relations between the working-man and his im-jV mediate employer, which were all that the old trade unions took account of. The leaders and the more intelligent members' of these bodies see very clearly that reformatory measures, to be effective, must be co-extensive with the wide-reaching agencies and influences which operate adversely to Labor. Realizing that the great productive, commercial, financial, and transportation interests are firmly linked and interlaced together in a vast and complicated network closely allied with the controlling influences in politics, they understand that the struggles of small and isolated bands of workers against special local grievances are as futile as the resistance of a tribe of Indians to the advancing outposts of settlement. In either case a temporary victory may be won. But just as surely as the onward march of civilization, the immense slowly moving force behind the pioneer and the squatter, in the end drives out and exterminates the savage, so the capitalistic system, despite an occasional repulse at the immediate point of contact, ultimately hems round, outflanks, and by indirect and almost imperceptible advances weakens the power v of resistance of the worker, and finally crushes him down to a lower standard of living.

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The organization of labor on a large scale- foE protective purposes is the natural result of its more perfect organization industrially. When men of the same trade are massed together by the thousand ; when single establishments have an array of employes under a minute and thorough system of discipline and organization, the circumstances are obviously more favorable to combination among working-men for their own interests than when shops and factories were small and widely scattered. The common interest is much more apparent; the opportunities for intimate acquaintance, for interchange of opinions, for frequent gathering and discussion are far greater,. The whole matter is infinitely simplified. Combination among capitalists tends to abolish the last lingering belief that labor and capitalism have interests in common. When competition between employers had full swing there was a certain foundation for this idea. Whatever the points of disagreement between employers and men, each shop olfactory, considered as a unit, had an esprit de corps . When one was trying to undersell the other or turn out goods more quickly to meet the demand, the spirit of rivalry between one set of employes and the other naturally militated to some extent against union among laborers. There was of course the ever-present discontent with an arrangement under which capital drew the lion’s share of the product, but the community of interest, as against the competing establishments, was a powerful counteracting influence. The employer’s everready argument, “ How can I raise wages or shorten hours without placing myself at a disadvantage ? ” was much more plausible and effective than it is at present, when “ combination, not competition” is file watchword among employers. Manufacturers combine to fix selling prices and limit production. Mining operators secure themselves against competition by regulating the output and the price. The great railroad interests, by means of pooling arrangements, amalgamations, and leases, are continually being concentrated in fewer hands. Everywhere the working-man sees going on around him the same process not merely of accumulating wealth, but the weld-

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ing together, as with links of steel, of the forces of capital under the mastery of which the industrial system becomes an enormous machine. The organization and concentration of capitalism thus gives the impulse, sets the example, and removes the obstacles to organization and concentration of labor.

These considerations ought to convince every thoughtful student of the problem, that the labor question, as it now presents itself, has so little in common with past phases of popular discontent or outbreak, which may seem to present a superficial resemblance to it in some particulars, that history affords no clue to. the probable issue.

We are living in a transition period. The influences above enumerated as placing American working-men in a specially favorable position for securing their rights, have only begun to operate in the direction of social reconstruction — in some of their phases they have been distinctly antagonistic. “ Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.” Education, for instance, while immensely increasing the power of the working-class for effective combination, if perverted by the inculcation of the untruths and half-truths of bourgeois political economy, is a hindrance rather than a help. Political power, if misdirected to the furtherance of the ends of partisans who are the tools of capitalism, is worse than wasted; because, in the first place, it lends the authority of the popular vote to the usurpations of monopoly ; and secondly, because by raising false cries and rallying the people into opposing parties divided on trivial or extinct issues, it diverts their attention from questions of paramount importance. The comparison between the position of the American laborer as affected by education, the ballot, and organization, and that of the toilers elsewhere and in other times, refers to the possibilities suggested by the possession of these powers — not to the slight and temporary ameliorations of his condition hitherto secured by their means.

To direct these forces aright — to secure unity of aim and harmony in methods among all who realize the supreme urgency of the labor problem — to indoctrinate the masses with large and comprehensive views of the causes of industrial

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evils and their remedies — to substitute for a blind unreasoning sense of personal wrong and the desire for individual advancement the loftier conception of a system based on justice and equal rights to all — to arouse the deadened intellects and the torpid consciences of the comfortable class, drugged by the sophistries of a misleading political economy, appealing to their selfish interests — to regenerate the whole tone and temper of public opinion and bring it to bear upon the forces of capitalism in their thousandfold ramifications through every fiber of national life, to the end “ that government of the people, by the people, and for the people may not perish from the earth ” — such is the task which confronts the Labor Reformers of America — such the object towards which the present writer hopes, in however small a degree, to contribute.

Hitherto, from causes to which reference has been made, the labor struggle presents to the merely superficial observer a spectacle of wasted opportunities and unused powers — of heroism and endurance misdirected — of lavish expenditure for temporary and trivial objects — of energy and self-sacrifice squandered in attempts to gain insignificant ameliorations — of isolated advances at some few points, followed by gradual retreat all along the line before the power of concentrated and organized wealth. What has been gained thus far is almost altogether in the way of preparation. In so far as the efforts hitherto made have been educational in their result, so far as they have effected the disciplining of the hosts of labor, so far as they have had a tendency to dissipate the prejudices and antagonisms of party, creed, and nationality which have stood in the way of union, they have been invaluable as a preliminary training for the final encounter on a broader scale. Whatever of apparent failure and defeat has attended the agitation was inevitable in view of the very nature of the conflict, the obstacles to be encountered, and the forces ranged on the side of capitalism. If much has been learned, more lias to be unlearned. Old and deeply-rooted ideas of government and social organization are to be overthrown. Prejudices tenaciously adhered to roast be removed. False notions