288. The Viewpoint of the Trade Unionists

BY ROBERT F. HOXIE

Among the main charges brought against the unionist by the employer are these: first, that he refuses to recognize the generally conceded rights of the employing class; secondly, that he does not recognize the sacredness of contract; thirdly, that while he is struggling to obtain higher wages and shorter hours of work, he persistently attempts to reduce the efficiency of labor and the extent of the output. Assuming these charges to be substantially correct, let us in the case of each seek without prejudice to discover the real grounds of the laborer's attitude and action.

I. The "rights" which the employer claims, and which the unionist is supposed to deny, may perhaps be summarily expressed in the phrase, "the right of the employer to manage his own business." To the employer it is a common-sense proposition that his business is his own. To him this is not a subject of argument. It is a plain matter of fact and carries with it the obvious rights of management unhampered by the authority of outside individuals. But to the laborer it is different.

The laborer, like all the rest of us, is the product of heredity and environment. That is to say, he is not rational in the sense that his response to any given mental stimulus is invariable. On the contrary, like the rest of us, he is a bundle of notions, prejudices, beliefs, unconscious preconceptions and postulates, the product of his peculiar heredity and environment. These unconscious and subconscious psychic elements necessarily mix with and color his immediate activity. What is or has been outside his ancestral and personal environment must be either altogether incomprehensible to him, or else must be conceived as quite like or analogous to that which has already been mentally assimilated. He cannot comprehend what he has not experienced.

Now, it is well known that the environment of the laborer under the modern capitalistic system has tended to become predominantly one of physical force. He has been practically cut off from all knowledge of market and managerial activities. The ideals, motives, and cares of property-ownership are becoming foreign to him. More and more, in his world, spiritual forces are giving way to the apparent government and sanction of blind physical causation. In the factory and the mine spiritual, ethical, customary, and legal forces and authorities are altogether in the back

"Adapted from "The Trade-Union Point of View," in the Journal of Political Economy, XV, 345-356 (1907).

ground. Everything to the worker, even his own activity, is the outcome of physical force, apparently undirected and unchecked. by the spiritual element. The blast shatters the rock, and whatever of flesh and blood is in range is also torn in pieces. The presence and the majesty of the law and contract are altogether ineffective in the face of physical forces let loose by the explosion. In like manner the knife cuts, the weight crushes, the wheel mangles the man and the material with equal inevitableness. No sanction, religious, moral, customary, or legal, is there. Even outside the strictly mechanical occupations the machine and the machine process are coming to dominate the worker, and the growth in size of the industrial unit renders his economic relationships ever more impersonal-withdraws farther from his knowledge the directing and controlling spiritual forces. The laborer thus environed inevitably tends to look upon physical force as the only efficient cause and the only legitimizing sanction. He tends to become mentally blind to spiritual, legal, contractual, and customary forces and their effects.

To the laborer, as the product of this environment, the proprietary and managerial claims of the employer tend to become, of necessity, simply incomprehensible. The only kind of production which he can recognize is the material outcome of physical forcethe physical good. Value unattached to and incommensurable with the physical product or means of production is to him merely an invention of the employing class to cover up unjust appropriation. He knows and can know nothing about the capitalized value of managerial ability or market connections. To him, then, the important point is: By what physical force are these things made what they are? It is a matter of simple observation that the employer exerts no direct or appreciable physical force in connection with the productive process. Therefore, in the eyes of the laborer, he simply cannot have any natural rights of proprietorship and management based on productive activity.

In the same way all other grounds on which ownership and the managerial rights of the employer are based have become inconclusive to the laborer. Appropriation, gift, inheritance, saving, contract, in themselves do not produce any physical effect on the only goods which he can recognize. Therefore they cannot be used to prove property in any just or natural sense. They hold in practice simply because back of them is the physical force of the police and army established and maintained by the middle class to protect its proprietary usurpations. Thus the whole claim of the employer to the right to manage his own business to suit himself

has become and is becoming in a way incomprehensible to the laborer on grounds of natural equity. At the same time, by virtue of habit and the sanction of physical force as a productive agent, he sees himself ever more clearly the rightful proprietor of his job and of the products of it. All this is the natural and inevitable outcome of the conditions under which he lives and toils.

2. The unionist laborer does not recognize the sacredness of contract. This is, if anything, a more serious charge than the preceding one.

As a matter of fact, the laborer is so circumstanced that obligations of contract with the employer must appear secondary in importance to his obligations to fellow-workers. This is not difficult. to show. Ever since the establishment of the money-wage system, the everyday experience of the laborer has been teaching him the supreme importance of mutuality in his relations with his immediate fellow-workers. The money payment, related not to the physical result of his efforts, but to its economic importance, has been blotting out for him any direct connection between effort and reward. Experience has taught him to look upon his labor as one thing in its effects and another thing in its reward. As a thing to be rewarded he has learned to consider it a commodity in the market. As such he knows that it is paid for at competitive rates. He has learned that, if he undercuts his fellow, prompt retaliation follows, to the detriment of both, and he has learned that combination with his fellow results in better immediate conditions for both.

The worker does not, of course, look far beyond the immediate results. In severing the obvious connection between his task and the complete product, in removing from him all knowledge of the general conduct and condition of the business, in paying to him a fixed wage regardless of the outcome of the particular venture, and in paying him a wage never much in excess of his habitual standard of living, the factory and wage system have accustomed him to a hand-to-mouth existence, have barred him from all the training effects of property-ownership, and have atrophied his faculties of responsibility and foresight. Moreover, it is not to be expected that today's empty stomach will be comforted by tomorrow's hypothetical bread, least of all by bread which is likely to comfort the stomach of another. Is it any wonder, then, that the laborer does not and that he cannot follow the economist in his complicated arguments to prove that, in the long run and on the whole, the keenest competition among laborers brings the highest rewards?

Proneness to breach of contract, therefore, is seen to be a natural and evitable outcome of his life and working conditions.

3. The third charge against the unionist which we have undertaken to examine states that while he is struggling for increase of wages he is at the same time attempting to reduce the efficiency of labor and the amount of the output. In other words, while he is calling upon the employer for more of the means of life he is doing much to block the efforts of the employer to increase those

means.

There is no doubt that this charge is to a great extent true. In reasoning upon this matter the employer, viewing competitive society as a whole, assumes that actual or prospective increase in the goods' output means the bidding-up of wages by employers anxious to invest profitably increasing social income. It follows that in competitive society laborers as a whole stand to gain with improvements in industrial effort and process. In the case of the individual competitive establishment it is clear that the maximum income is ordinarily to be sought in the highest possible efficiency, resulting in increased industrial output. At least this is true where there are numerous establishments of fairly equal capacity producing competitively from the same market. Under such circumstances the increased output of any one establishment due to "speeding up" will ordinarily have but a slight, if any, appreciable effect on price. Each individual entrepreneur, therefore, is justified in assuming a fixed price for his product and in reckoning on increase of income from increase of efficiency and industrial product. Apparently it rarely occurs to the employer that this analysis is not complete. Having assumed that definite laws determine the manner in which income is shared among the productive factors, he apparently concludes, somewhat naively, that just as the laborers in society will in the aggregate profit by increase in the social income, so also will the laborers in any individual establishment profit by increase in its income.

To this mode of reasoning, and to the conclusions reached through it, the unionist takes very decided exceptions. To the statement that labor as a whole stands to gain through any increase in the social dividend he returns the obvious answer that labor as a whole is a mere academic conception; that labor as a whole may gain while the individual laborer starves. His concern is with his own wage-rate and that of his immediate fellow-workers. He has learned the lesson of co-operation within his trade, but he is not yet class-conscious. In answer to the argument based on the individual competitive establishment he asserts that the conditions

which determine the income of the establishment are not the same as those which govern the wage-rate. Consequently, increase in the income of the establishment is no guarantee of increase of the wage-rate of the worker in it. Conversely, increase in the wagerate may occur without increase in the income of the establishment. Indeed, in consequence of this non-identity of the conditions governing establishment income and wage-rate, increase in the gross income of the establishment is often accompanied by decrease in the wage-rate, and the wage-rate is often increased by means which positively decrease the gross income of the establishment.

The laborer's statements in this instance are without doubt well founded. The clue to the whole situation is, of course, found in the fact that the wage-rate of any class of laborers is not determined by the conditions which exist in the particular establishment in which they work, but by the conditions which prevail in their trade or "non-competing group." With this commonplace economic argument in mind, the reasonableness of the unionist's opposition to speeding up, and of his persistent efforts to hamper production, at once appears.

289. Articles of Faith

a) An Economic Creed®

The National Association of Manufacturers of the United States of America does hereby declare that the following principles shall govern the Association in its work in connection with the problems of labor:

1. Fair dealing is the fundamental and basic principle on which relations between employes and employers should rest.

2. The National Association of Manufacturers is not opposed to organizations of labor as such, but it is unalterably opposed to boycotts, black-lists and other illegal acts of interference with the personal liberty of employer and employe.

3. No person should be refused employment or in any way discriminated against on account of membership or non-membership in any labor organization, and there should be no discriminating against or interference with any employe who is not a member of a labor organization by members of such organizations.

4. With due regard to contracts, it is the right of the employe to leave his employment whenever he sees fit, and it is the right of the employer to discharge any employe when he sees fit.

Resolutions adopted at the Eighth Annual Convention of the National Association of Manufacturers, New Orleans, April, 1903.