CHAPTER XII

ORGANIZED LABOR VERSUS UNORGANIZED LABOR

An Age of Organization. Organization Especially Necessary to Workingmen. The Separation of Wage Earner from Wage Payer. Defenselessness of the Individual Workingman. The Track Layer and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Free Competition for Jobs at its Worst. The Influence of the Employer upon the Life, Health, Safety, Manners, Morals, and Character of the Workingman. What Freedom of Contract Means to Unorganized Workingmen. It Takes Two to Make a Contract. Advantages of Trade Unionism. Its Absolute Necessity.

THE

HE age is an age of organization. Not only in industry, but in every field and phase of human life, have men combined into groups and worked as a unit. Thus, we have political organizations; organizations of men engaged in various trades or industries; organizations of lawyers, doctors, ministers; organizations of men into clubs, into friendly or benefit societies; organizations for the pursuit of arts, of science, of education; organizations of men into universities, organizations of men into cities, states, and nations, and, finally, organizations extending over national boundaries and reaching all sorts and conditions of men, the organizations called churches. Everywhere, look where we may, we see men of all classes and all characters organizing for all purposes, and effecting by concerted action what cannot be accomplished by individual action. The age is an age of organization, moreover, of the representation of the many by the few, of conventions, of the interchange of thought among men united in purpose, of unity of action and concert of management. What is true of all other classes is true to no greater and no less extent of workingmen. What these organizations are to various classes of men in society, trade unions are to the workingmen in the pursuit of their industrial happiness.

Were the workingmen of the United States not a separate class, with separate class interests, there would be less necessity for their separate or

ganization. If the modern wage earner evolved into the capitalist, as the boy into the man, or the caterpillar into the butterfly, he might not be obliged to associate with his fellow-craftsmen in order to improve his conditions. There is, however, a growing separation in interest and feeling between employers and workingmen. "The business men in the present generation," says Professor Arthur Twining Hadley, President of Yale University, "have in large part risen from the ranks of labor to their existing position of leadership; but whether the same thing can be predicted for the next generation is very doubtful. Certain it is that the prospect of becoming capitalists does not act as so powerful a motive on the laborers of to-day as it did on those of a generation ago. The opportunities to save are as great or greater; but the amount which has to be saved before a man. can hope to become his own employer, has increased enormously. When a man who had accumulated a thousand dollars could set up in business for himself, the prospect of independence appealed to him most powerfully; when he can do nothing but lend it to some richer man, the incentives and ambitions connected with saving are far weaker--too weak, in many cases, to lead the man to save at all, except through the medium of a friendly society or trades-union." We thus have a separation of the community into more and more rigidly defined groups, different in industrial condition, distinct in ideals, and oftentimes antagonistic in ambitions and sympathies.

Not only is the individual workingman's chance of becoming an employer rapidly disappearing, but with every advance in industry, with each new development of enterprise upon a large scale, his importance is diminishing and his power to bargain individually, growing less. The industrial development of the past century and a half has made the employer grow and the workman shrink. When the man who received wages and the man who paid wages worked side by side on the same wooden bench, the present inequality between the individual workman and the employer did not exist. The employer who formerly owned thousands of dollars, however, is now the possessor of hundreds of thousands or millions, and the employer of the

future will no longer be a man, but a vast corporation with a capital of hundreds of millions, if not, as in the case of an existing corporation, with a capital of over a billion of dollars.

Owing to the present growing inequality between capitalists and individual workingmen, the advantage, the necessity even, of trade unionism becomes apparent. The United States Steel Corporation can better do without the services of an individual puddler or roller than the puddler or roller can do without the wages of the United States Steel Corporation. A tracklayer or brakeman upon the Pennsylvania Railroad is more anxious to keep his job than the Pennsylvania Railroad is desirous of retaining his services. The very freedom of contract which the workingman now possesses is, if he is unorganized, at least to a certain extent, a disadvantage. It was formerly supposed that as soon as all restrictions upon the inalienable right of a man to work were removed, the workman would become prosperous, since free competition and the play of supply and demand would work out to his advantage. What has actually occurred, however, is that the individual workman, unprotected by a union, is more and more at the mercy of the large employer and more and more defenseless with every advance made by modern society.

There is no doubt that upon the whole the American workingman receives better wages, both in money and in what money will buy, than the workingman of any of the nations of Europe. But, like all men who are dependent upon their earnings, the American wage earner standing alone is in a precarious condition. There are at work hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans, whose entire belongings do not amount in value to more than two or three weeks' wages, and there are many who draw their present week's pay with the intention of liquidating their last week's debt. In all employments, and especially in large cities, work is precarious and uncertain; and in hard times particularly, the fear of enforced idleness acts as a terrible weight upon the mind of the workingman. The majority of workingmen do not hold their own and do not have a fixed income sufficient

to support them in case of loss of work. There is no prospect of aid from the government or from charitable societies, in case they become ill or prematurely aged.

Under such conditions the unorganized workman in the United States, as elsewhere, is frequently obliged to accept extremely low wages, to work for excessively long hours, and to labor under unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Of course, the unorganized workman may, in periods of exceptional prosperity, draw advantage from an abnormal demand for labor; but in ordinary times, and especially in periods of depression, he must accept the wages that are offered. The free competition for labor frequently works great hardship. A man with a family at home and without a dollar in his pocket will be willing to work for almost any wage, and the men in the same trade who have greater resources will be obliged to accept the same rate of remuneration. The strength of the chain is the strength of its weakest link, and the power of resistance of unorganized workmen is the power of the poorest and least resourceful of them. The competition of women and children, willing to work for spending money, drives down still further the wages which unorganized men and women, solely dependent upon their own work, will be forced to accept. The pin money of the farmer's wife fixes the amount of the needle money of the city seamstress. The unrestricted competition for the opportunity to work in the ready-made clothing and other sweated trades before the existence of the union was such as to reduce whole masses of the population to a level of wages, and force them to an intensity and duration of work, inconsistent with health, morality, or the propagation of the species. The competition for jobs in unorganized and unregulated trades brings forth a struggle which is pathetic and from a moral point of view, unutterably brutal and anarchic. An eye witness, writing prior to the famous dock strike of 1889, says: "There is a place at the London Docks called the cage, a sort of pen fenced. off by iron railings. I have seen three hundred half-starved dockers crowded round this cage, when perhaps a ganger would appear wanting

three hands, and the awful struggle of these three hundred famished. wretches fighting for that opportunity to get two or three hours' work has left an impression upon me that can never be effaced. Why, I have actually seen them clambering over each other's backs to reach the coveted ticket. I have frequently seen men emerge bleeding and breathless, with their clothes pretty well torn off their backs."

The scene above described is true not of London alone, nor of dock hands alone. During the bad times of 1893 and 1894, groups of half-starved workingmen were seen in the large cities surrounding newspaper offices at daybreak, waiting for the first edition of the paper, with its want “ads.,” and then racing to the place where the job was offered to be the first to take the position at any price. Wherever unorganized, unskilled workmen strive for jobs, they do so under the burden of this blind, merciless, remorseless competition from men who are unemployed or men who are but partially employed. This competition is no less terrible because unseen. When in bad times an employer advertises for a clerk and receives, as is often the case, a hundred or more applications, the misery that produces so unregulated and excessive a demand for the position offered is no less fearful because its effects are not immediately visible.

To a very great extent trade unionism regulates this unrestricted competition and directs it into socially advantageous channels. In union there is strength. Through trade unionism the wages of workmen cease to be regulated by the wages of the man with the least resources and the greatest needs, and become the remuneration that the average man in the trade might demand. Trade unionism takes labor from the list of perishable articles that must be sold on the spot and immediately, or not at all, and gives to the workingman a reserve power and to his labor, a reserve price. Through the trade union, the workingman bargaining for a position gets his second wind. By emphasizing the solidarity of labor the union renders the competition of workmen with each other less keen. The instinctive feeling among workingmen against underbidding one another is crystallized by