to resort to some means of self defense, and the remedy applied by the workingman is apt to be harsher and cruder than that which the employers would I have imposed upon themselves. The present agitation among some employers for a premium system, by which only a portion of the gain from increased exertion is to go to the employee, and by which the piece rates are to be considered as permanent, appears to be a wholesale admission on the part of the employers of their past folly in unfairly cutting prices and overrushing workmen. Where a temporary restriction of output has been invited and justified by over-rushing, pace setting, and price cutting by employers, it does not follow that such restriction would continue to be justified if the employer were willing to afford substantial guarantee that these evil practices would not be resorted to in the future. It is to the interest of workmen and of employers as well that all restrictions upon output, except in so far as they are clearly and obviously necessary to prevent loss of health or inferior workmanship, should be permanently and completely abolished. In the few trades in which restrictions exist, and in which they have been occasioned by the employers, the overtures for their removal should be made by the latter, and the workingmen should not put obstacles in the way of accomplishing this result, but should evince a willingness to meet the employer half way. When the unions are simply attempting to mitigate the evils which result from pace setting or over-exertion it is not fair to accuse them of restricting the output. There still remains, however, a belief among certain workingmen that restrictions would be justified by the desire to make work. There seems to be prevalent among many persons, both employers and workmen, the idea that there exists only a certain fixed amount of work to go around and that the more work one man does the less work there will be left for others. This belief in a definite amount of work to be distributed occasionally tends to make a workman go slow with the job in order to make it last longer, or in order to make work for others who may be unemployed. To do too much work is supposed, sometimes, to be "hogging it," to be taking the bread out of another man's mouth. This may, occasionally, be more or less true, although even in such cases the employer has rights which should be respected and a man should do—as he ordinarily does do— a fair day's work for a fair day's wage. For the whole of society, however, the theory is not true. Within certain limits the more work done the more remains to be done. The man who earns large wages in a blacksmith's shop creates a demand for labor when he spends his wages in shoes, clothes, furniture, or in books, and a large production tends to make his product cheaper. To render work more expensive merely for the sake of restricting output, is to lessen the amount of work that will be done, and it is only by doing a fair day's work that a fair day's wages can be permanently maintained. The wages of workingmen, sooner or later, fall with any unreasonable restriction upon the output, and what is of still more importance, the habit of slowing up work permanently incapacitates the workman for continued and intense effort. It is, therefore, of supreme importance that the present policy of American trade unions, the policy of non-restriction, should be continued and enforced. The future of the trade unions of this country must rest upon an ever-growing emphasis upon efficiency of work and sufficiency of remuneration, and the theory of the restriction of output must never become a fixed program and must never be adopted as a policy. CHAPTER XXX THE PASSING OF THE APPRENTICE Former System of Apprenticeship. System Older than Trade Unionism. Gradual Disappearance of the Apprentice. Wholesale Employment of Children. Apprenticeship in Certain Trades Increasingly Difficult. Lack of Training at Present Time. The Policy of Unions toward Apprenticeship. Do Trade Unions Unjustly Restrict the Number of Apprentices? The Exploitation of Child Labor. Industrial Schools. NE of the problems with which in the past the union has had to deal has been the question of apprenticeship, or the technical education of the workman. All work involves a certain preliminary training requiring years, months, weeks, or, it may be, only days, according to the skill and intelligence necessary. In the old days, this skill was acquired by the system of apprenticeship. At the age of fourteen or thereabouts a boy was indentured or apprenticed to the employer and remained with him for a period of seven years or more, obtaining in that time a thorough knowledge of the trade. The system was based upon the mutual advantage to both parties, the master instructing the youth, and the youth receiving small wages or none at all. The course of instruction was long and formal, as was the case with students of law, medicine, or divinity, and at its termination the youth was admitted to a trade, in which he was protected from the competition of interlopers, or men who had not served a like apprenticeship. The system of apprenticeship was not invented by trade unions, but existed for many centuries before the modern labor organizations were formed. It was a definite formal relation between employer and youth, regulated by guild laws and later by the law of the land. There existed at the same time, however, an informal apprenticeship of the sons of journeymen to their fathers, the boys learning their trade directly from their parents and being paid or not as the latter determined. |