The laborer and his hire

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I — Wages 7

II— Land and Wages 35

Chapter I. Wages

Justice of wages has no fixed standard in money payment. So long as wage payment in dollars and cents is to be regulated in amount by wage competition justice will remain unpracticed, for machines multiply with the multiplication of their human competitors and each new man competes as one, each new machine as thousands. Perhaps exact justice by the money payment system can be arrived at never. Wages, to be fair to producers, must correspond to production. The varying volume of production, one year with another, makes a fixed rate impossible, gauged by the unyielding standard of justice. A fixed rate is a slave rate, — food and clothes sufficient to make the slave profitable being both minimum and maximum. A fixed rate, such as this, not varying with the varying volume and value of products, has, since man has been hired by man, worked the industrial disaster of the class that receives wages.

In an industrial society where labor seeks employment a basis for wage rates must be found in the values of production or labor will be the victim of competing captains of industry. When men and machines multiply they who employ both reap profits. In such a state the advantage is clearly with the hirer, while the hired are content to let one man in a thousand declare the ultimate liberality of wage-paying capital. This one in a thousand handles the products and the proceeds, and in a world of competition he serves himself first and chiefly. In a business order where survival is to the shrewdest the one who controls will survive. This is the order under which we live, and wages in money on the plan universal leaves of the labor product to labor enough to live on, and the employer, whatever his office may be, gets the rest. Employers, in an industrial order where survival is a question of destruction, being destroyed or destroying, look to their own interests. A surety for present profits they find in paying the lowest wages for which workers will consent to do the work. Year in and year out this plan no more results in the gains of employers than it does in the crippling of labor. It is the plan of selfishness that looks to individual gains only, shutting out the more general and more permanent prosperity a rational profit-sharing scheme would insure. Constantly it has been found to work the steady lowering of the wage rate in virtual disability of wage receivers to keep pace with the progress all about them. Constantly it more and more disadvantages wage receivers by the fact of human and machine competition.

Wages in dollars and cents are but a part of the consideration; — as such merely they may be fair or unfair. Their efficiency is limited by the degree of material comfort their possession will command. Their efficiency and fairness cannot in any sense be estimated by the yearly amount devoted to wages. Price conditions may more than nullify the good of a wage scale that appears high ; the volume of production may make an apparently high wage rate greatly disproportionate to the profits of capital. As a vast total of wages we are informed nothing worth considering as regards the condition of those receiving them. The world's social organizations, conditions of commerce in the regulations of prices, perform regulations of expenditures that leave no reliable basis for calculations. Totals do not show the degree in which labor shares the increased values impossible of creation without labor. Totals do not argue the worth of labor — they merely assert the power of capital.

It is the condition of those receiving wages that establishes the justice or injustice of the wage rate. Not their condition as a world of workers, separate and apart as a class peculiar and incomparable; not their condition in comparison with the workers of other nations where the circumstances governing production must be wholly or in part dissimilar. Their relative advance in material prosperity with the increased and increasing aggregate of wealth is the essence of wage justice.

A comparison of worker with worker in any field is profitless for wages in any occupation will grade always from the amount paid experts in responsible positions down to the stipend received by the machine-like operative or the mere drudge. Comparing field with field is likewise barren. In all industrial systems based on competition wages will vary from the rate prevailing in industries where there is comparative competition for workers to the rate paid by those industries where labor competes for opportunity to work. The balance will be quite evenly maintained, and all fields grow to the state where it is labor only that competes ; there are occupations somewhat more sought than are others, but the crowding of one industry will never cause a permanent discrepancy to appear in the wage feature of that industry. There are sectional features as of population, that render some occupations less remunerative in crowded districts than are the same lines of work in regions where fewer people live per square mile. A seamstress in a thriving rural town can easily command three times the amount her sister in the sweat-shop of a metropolitan district will receive, and all occupations open to fullest competition as well as those subject to monopolization work to a wage decrease and an increase to those who control the product in that particular line considered. In a purely competitive system wealth will flow to those who have by nature or accident an advantage over those competitors not strong enough, not skillful enough to grasp the opportunity. For the same reason wages will not be measured by how much a man can do so much as by how much another man whose needs may be more pressing will do the same work. This is the essence of competition. The same spirit moves competition between those who control labor's products, and while it continues, in a manner lessens the evils of wage competition. But in this land controllers no longer compete for the markets ; they combine against the markets and the evils of double competition fall upon the wage world. Wages in this way become minimum, prices maximum, keeping, of course, within the limits of possibilities in both vital features.

To compare national wage rates is to compare degrees of civilizations. Governments, in the ideas they represent, are as indicative of wages as they are of other ideas vital in importance in the lives of the people. The condition of English workers, in average, compared with slave labor in the heart of Africa, the condition of American laborers contrasted with native labor in China, presents differences easily accounted for. To assume from this that English and American workers share to the highest they should in wealth possession is to eliminate all educational superiorities from the consideration. To assert that inasmuch as the condition of American and English workers is in advance of those in these other two typical districts, and, therefore, does not call for betterment is the non-recognition of all worth as a factor in a nation's greatness and progress.

The only sure test of a wage rate is the economic status of wage earners as reflected by their social life. This stamps a wage rate as just and honorable or beggarly and unfair. If this rate has kept pace with profit rates the former is just. If the homes of workers show an increase in comfort comparative to increase of luxuries in homes of those on the other side of the dividing line, the wage rate is fairer than we know. If of the total wealth increase wage earners' increase keeps pace with wage payers', the wage rate is on a basis fair to all. If the lives of toilers show the same advancement in educational, moral and artistic opportunities the wealthy classes enjoy, the state of society is a right one.

The world, roughly divided, is made up of two economic classes. These two classes are the employers and employes. There are harsher terms sometimes used to designate divisions of the first class, the division that consumes without in any way, direct, contributing to production. But sufficient for the purpose of the present consideration is it to make the general division of the total of humanity.

The man of ease whose income is an inheritance may in no direct way contribute to the production or the wage fund of the world. Yet in the office of consumer he is indirectly both producer and employer. The demands of his life for productions stimulate to the extent of the demands, work in those industries preparing the diverse articles he consumes. This production all believe to be good and while such a consumer may be of no direct value to the industrial world, he is not the altogether useless character he is sometimes pictured. While the industrial scheme rests upon its present basis he cannot be, but is, with his class, a qualified blessing, as are wars, conflagrations and destructive storms whose works are likewise to consume production without increasing it in return. This destruction, as we say, makes work and wages, and work and wages are the hope of workers. Theoretically and ethically he and his class are not only useless but positively detrimental to industrial society, absolute drones, consuming only. In an ideal industrial state where reward went to workers in the degree of production the class would be an unqualified injury, because as non-producers they would fail of an income and so be forced to express thievery, beggary or starvation. By some they have been assigned to the class of thieves and beggars in consideration of their comparative failure as producers and their relative destructiveness as consumers who do not also produce. This classification is true on the moral grounds that the right to material goods is the recompense of labor in some field. While products continue to be divided by any other standard of apportionment, the non-producer who holds wealth in any form is free to command the products of others' labors without being charged with mendicancy or thievishness. Wealth is exchanged for wealth the world over. The manner of accumulation in the cases of nearly all great possessions is usually flagrantly unjust, as no man can in an allotted life span accumulate a great fortune by honest methods as great fortunes are estimated in this day. But while the division of wealth creations continues as we experience it, inheritors and innocent sharers in the accumulations common on one side have no greater share in the wrong than those on the other side who suffer from the unequal division.

The community of individuals is responsible for the state of society in any given sphere. In the distribution of wealth as prevailing practices accomplish it, workers as well as hirers are responsible. For so much as the charge of moral wrong is worth when entered against those who succeed in getting control of production, the robbers are but a degree more culpable than the robbed. The man who would without objection hand over his valuables to a highwayman and, who knowing the highwayman's haunts, persistently travels by that road every time he would transport treasures, would soon cease to hold the sympathy and confidence of friends. Our distribution of products is no less than robbery in a material as well as a moral sense, but if the robbed would come to understand that they are parties to the robbery they would cease to call names, cease importuning a just division and proceed to accomplish what they desire. If I hold a purse common to a community and in which the funds of that community are deposited, I am responsible for the funds so entrusted to me. If I negligently leave this purse where a thief can come at it, or entrust it to other hands and it is stolen and its contents confiscated, I would by any court of justice in the land and in the judgment of all sane people be called a party to the theft, even though my own money should be in the purse, and I should forever be deprived of its use, or the use of an equivalent of its use. I would have assisted in the robbery of others, even if by that robbery I myself had been despoiled of wealth. Any other member of the community who had been selected as guardian of the purse and who had permitted its theft by insecure guarding would be likewise responsible and equally guilty. If the community took all responsibility for the safety of the common fund and then by common consent agreed to deposit the purse holding it in a public and unguarded place, and thieves made way with it, the community would be a party to the steal, and each individual member of the community having suffered himself to be stolen from would also have helped in the defraudment of every other member of the community. The thief who carried away the purse would have been guilty of direct robbery, every member of the community would have been guilty of indirect robbery. If the community had suffered in this way year after year, and the only measures of safety resorted to were those of protest, name-calling and an endeavor to get the thief to at least employ labor that wages might be forthcoming for the purse the following years, its members would by other communities have names applied to them expressing mental states as weak and irresponsible as the moral tone. A beneficent government would build a secure wall around that community, appoint medical experts and attendants to save the confusion of transferring the whole population to established retreats for the insane.

When the community, grown tired of such a lackwisdom policy, causes the treasure to be securely guarded for the use and enjoyment of its members, the thief will cease to steal.

The class of employes embraces all of a population not included with the employers. It is true many men comprise within the scope of their individual activities the purposes and rewards of many groups in minute classifications. But all workers whose reward is daily sustenance are in this sense employes, and many more may be classed as such when their earnings, carefully husbanded, furnish a little beyond daily needs, and that little is added to the savings bank account of those fortunate enough to be able to provide against future inability to produce. In the correct phrase of the scientific classifications, a farmer who does all the work on his land may be both capitalist and laborer, his proceeds named profits and wages, and if desirable interest and many other terms may be added to express his relation to himself and his returns for labor he performs. But all hair-splitting technicalities aside, he occupies as much the position of employe to the man who pays him inherited money for potatoes as the farmer himself may be employer to his shoemaker or to the lad he may find it necessary to hire in the busy season of the year. Not that the consumer covenants with him at the period of spring planting for so many bushels of potatoes at so much per bushel, or that even if he did would it constitute the accepted relation of employer and employe, but that in the matter of return for labor the farmer occupies the place of wage receiver. In the world field of profits and pay he cannot be called an employer.

The most explicit division that can be made in an effort to classify the participants of the industrial world into a class of employers and employes will be found in the line that separates the occupations favored by nature and legislation, singly and combined, from those less aided by the first, unassisted and sometimes hampered by the last. Some industries, by their nature and the controlling industrial orders, are less competitive and possess advantages over others which are competitive to the lowest point and are stripped of the little natural strength inhering by the conditions that favor the first. Persons engaged in these disadvantaged industries and the wage-receiving numbers of the land comprise the army of employes in the classifications made. All outside this, who are self-supporting, are in the other class, or class of employers. The division is made in consideration of the growing inequalities of wealth distribution.

The tastes and inclinations, the degree of education the laborer possesses, affects the justice of the wage rate.

This may appear a hard standard on the part of employers, whereby to regulate wages ; it is certainly hard enough for all, under existing conditions. But it is the true standard, the only one that admits of progress on the part of the people. It is true the law of recompense here outlined provides for a constant growth in wage proportions until absolute justice between the producer and the controller has been reached; it would not be just otherwise. The higher the wage scale the higher will be raised the standard of personal worth in the ranks of employes; a rise in either virtue or wages calls for a rise in the other. It is a necessity which must be met. Depraved labor accepts low wages, lowers wages, .dragging down with the wage rate the moral tone of the wage-receiving world. The general moral and intellectual status of any class will be advanced with increased opportunities for cultivation, will fall as necessity compels the utmost strain in the winning of bread. It is no cruelty to deprive the voluptuary of his accustomed rose-scent in the bath; his delicately educated sense misses it and he suffers in his weak way. But to deprive an intelligent man of his daily paper or scientific or thought educative book or magazine is an actual injury to him, for in the failure of his highest development intellectually, he loses, and society loses with him. He suffers and the world suffers with him.

The preservation of the worth of the worker is an essential in the consideration of wage rates. The idea is not Quixotic, visionary, Utopian. It is very reasonable and practicable, — it is imperative. Selfishness, diligently applying the muck rake cannot grasp its beauty for he is looking in the wrong place. Truth, looking to the future, wisdom, avoiding the mistakes of the past, unite in the demand. It is justice of wages we must consider and not what at present exists as the common

I wage scale — pay as little as possible, no matter what man goes to the devil, no matter what nation goes with him. Plenty of laborers make cheap wages, as plenty of cattle make cheap beef, while laborers and cattle are subject to prevailing control. This has been the standard of the past wherein gold measured men; to-day when they are measured largely by promissory notes the wage rate determines that those who eat their daily bread between the same suns that saw it earned cannot be overparticular as to terms, a half loaf being so infinitely better than no bread. Let them be thankful for favors, however small, and not aspire to the luxury of brain and soul food. This age-accepted wage rate, this gold measure, promissory-note measure, is very much outgrown by the race, except that portion of the race known as hirers. By those classed as hired it has grown to the point of an entire repudiation, only lacking the final dismissal in practice.

In a question of economy to employers a trained South Sea Islander would do the work of an American laborer for victuals, a kennel to sleep in and enough money in wages or exchange for clothes and ornament, the former a breech-cloth, weather permitting, the latter abundantly supplied by beads and rings of iron and brass. If wage earners could be educated down to the primitive aspirations of the aborigine the wage question could be adjusted on the present basis of compensation — for a year, perhaps. By the end of that time or before, the wage-paying portion of the land would advise a reduction of the living expenses of the laborer, otherwise a lessening of the amount of cloth used in the model livery, and cast about for a cheaper class of beads and rings to place before him ; all in the interests of labor. If labor declined to be interested and stubbornly refused, a reduction of wages would call attention to the necessity for speedy 2 retrenchment. It is the method now used, and we boast of the highest priced and most intelligent labor in the world. How long this boast will remain good at the rate of retrogression we now pursue can only be predicted by the aid of a sure knowledge as to how rapidly a like backward movement is being made by the rest of the world. We know it to be what we claim for it only by comparison and not that the terms express justice in our employment of them.

Fortunately for the world and civilization, the progress that has been made along other lines and which is beginning to be felt in social relations, predicts a fairer adjustment of the cause and condition of the world's toilers. The cause is too much ignored, the condition now too unfair. In its broadest sense, the children of men must some day enter into the inheritance which is their due, — a broader, freer, higher state of life. We are moving away in thought from the bondage of South Sea Islanderism, and actuality in deed will follow the thought movement. Progress is not at a standstill in the higher life forms of civilization, although the energy embodied may be only that which engendered the cause of movement. The result will appear more fully later. Time is required, but the change is sure, whether near or far the direction given the movement must determine. Ultimate justice will result to all. All life and progress were in vain otherwise.

The best earth affords, or can be made to yield, should be shared by all in their deserts. Since there is sunshine it was never meant man should live in the shadow. Since there is solid earth and a carpet of grass over it, it was never meant he should live in the filth and poison of the slough. An equal share in the opportunities this life provides for expansion and development according to ability and application is the natural right and recompense of all. A considerable wage fund to draw from, but then, nature is not so scant of supplies that she entails sufferings for physical necessities on any, neither is she so devoid of kindness that her treasures are to be denied a single creature. There is fullness waiting for all. It is our perversion of natural laws that calls forth hardships in the family of man.

Wages in all industrial systems depend upon distribution primarily. If the distribution of wealth is justly governed, trade, and in turn production, is stimulated and the rapid exchange of commodities beneficially affects all departments of industry and wages go up. Both forms of wages, as money and as wealth in the hands of his fashioners, appreciate, the former in amount, the latter in exchange or selling values. When distribution is unfairly made wages decline, for the wage-working world being discriminated against have less with which to command products, less in money wages, less in value-of-products wages, and the wage workers constituting the great mass of people, their suffering not only means the suffering of many but spreads to the most extended limits of the industrial world. The decline in value-of-products wages bears more heavily on the indirect wage workers than does the fall in money wages cripple direct wage workers. Of course there are classes of workers whoce money wages cannot be reduced and the workers live and labor; but consumers are many times and in many fields so limited in power of demand that those who work for indirect wages are stranded by decrease in values occasioned by the decline of prices. These declines in prices are brought about by decrease of demand and by competition in the line of wage rates. This uncertainty of results in the fields where wages are the products of application and where rewards are meager and opportunities limited owing to combinations of causes, produces crowdings toward the money-wage paying industries by the unfortunates pushed aside and out of the ranks of workers in these branches. The action and reaction of low money wages and low value wages operate to drag down constantly the wage rate universal.

One dollar a day, when the question of direct wages narrows down to one of financial equations, is better pay under some commercial conditions than would be two dollars under other conditions, just as one-dollar values are better for indirect wage workers in some states of the markets of the world than would be two-dollar values in other states. We have heard this idea expressed many times, and because it is so manifestly and emphatically true good will come of repeating it. In the light of the labor extremist or capital extremist, it is the recompense of the workers by decreasing that increases the profits of the hirers, or the increase of the recompense that decreases the profits of the hirers. Increase and decrease of wages and profits we are coming to believe are merely relative, but the terms are used to express the relation, the distribution of wealth and the creation of values. Experience and theory go to show that a more equitable distribution increases the general and individual prosperity of all engaged in production, but the adoption of profit-sharing schemes is so rare that their beneficial effects cannot at present enter into the situation as a whole. They have proven profitable as an illustration as to what can be done. They point the way as to what may be. In the consideration of our industrial scheme and its characteristic results they have no part.

If wage earners can command more of the necessities and comforts of life on a wage scale of one dollar a day than they can on a scale of two dollars, only the longeared, mock philosophers who make the most noise with the least music and who argue the most with least reason, will contend that the latter state is the better. The price of products is one-half the wage question in the point of effectiveness. Competition in the wage market is the other half in the point of proportional sharing in wealth creations. Both of these rest upon distribution, and in connection with them may be considered many features, some of which man cannot control, as climatic and racial peculiarities, others of which he in his socialized efforts is directly responsible for as impediments or encouragements by law, money supply, etc.

A nation is not better than its greatest class. The greatest class, in economic importance, reflects the justice or injustice of economic conditions. The standard of wages in our country is below the line of respectable living rates in many industries and is approaching that in many others. The effort then is, the elevation of the standard, not its lowering, not fixing it at what it now is.

The community is responsible for its own treasure. The nation is responsible for its own condition. There are enemies to justice and common rights in all societies. It rests with the particular society in which particular efforts are made to preserve individual and social rights as to whether those efforts succeed. Liberty, in its proper sense, is the blessing of those who acquire and maintain it.

The modifying and lessening effects of intemperance and other dissipations, bearing on the efficiency of wages after they have passed into the hands of the worker, the destruction of wage-earning ability by indulgences of these kinds, is of no real import in the consideration. While such practices are deplorable in effect on the qualifications of laborers they are the results of privations rather than the causes. The limitations to fullest developments entailing physical stuntings and moral diseases are produced by the economic misdirections from which the world has suffered always. The well-paid worker, secure in his place, has neither time nor inclination to the brutish indulgences. The underpaid worker, whose physical being is deprived of proper nutriment, craves the satisfaction of natural tastes grown perverted by abuse, and he resorts to drink and even worse. While these unhappy abandonments add misery to misery and in all forms aggregate yearly an enormous sum in money squandered and energy misdirected, it must be remembered of this great total, frequently said to represent so much of the misery of wage workers as a class, that the wage aggregate is represented in proportion only. Few even estimate this proportion. Our annual consumption of intoxicants and other harmful luxuries is bunched into the appalling total and labor is invited to swear off and join our plutocracy.

If those who attribute to such causes the destitution of workers, wish to be temperately honest in dealing with the drink feature of the case, they would remember and make mention of the great percentage of this annual waste which the people who store costly drinks in their cellars should be credited with, and the amount expended by fashionable clubs. The same distinction would accompany the reckonings of tobacco totals. In the indulgence of all vices, the by far most expensive form and proportion is represented by the rich and wellto-do. This is left untouched by the claims of temperance and economic advocates who seek to fasten on labor's profligacy and improvidence the sole cause of misery in the class. The numberless ways in which labor's stipend is being continually decreased, the countless methods by which, when received, it is made to contribute to the vested and monopolizing powers of classes is laboriously and sedulously ignored.