The

Plan.

to be due to unhealthful conditions of employment to the factory inspectors, and the latter, so soon as they become persuaded that a trade is dangerous and in need of special regulation, are required to bring the matter to the attention of the Home Secretary. That officer, if he deems it necessary, drafts, with the assistance of experts, rules calculated to meet the needs of the situation and sends copies of them to the employers who will be affected, with the request that they file their objections to them within twenty-one days. These are carefully considered, and revised rules are then issued which have the force of law unless vetoed by either House of Parliament. The obvious merit of this system is the ease with which it adapts itself to changing industrial conditions.

In the United States the constitutional principle that adWisconsin ministrative officers may not be clothed with legislative power has been an obstacle to the adoption of a similar system. This principle is not absolute, however, and already one stateWisconsin has devised a plan, which the courts have upheld, for securing the flexibility of the English system. This is to prescribe in the law that work places and conditions of employment shall be "safe" and to leave it to an Industrial Commission of three members to issue regulations declaring what guards, etc., are necessary to safety. As these regulations are subject to judicial review it has been held that no constitutional principle is violated by the plan. Wisconsin and seven other states also require physicians to report all cases of illness due to certain occupational diseases to the state departments either of labor or health, so a fund of information is gradually being collected as to the occupations for which special safeguards should be prescribed.

Associations

Working

Legisla

As the National Child Labor Committee is leading the movement for better and more rigidly enforced child-labor legislafor Labor tion, so the National Consumers' League and the American Association for Labor Legislation are leaders in the effort to secure better protection for women workers and for employees in dangerous and unhealthful trades. An interesting aspect of the work of the last association results from its affiliation with the International Association for Labor Legislation, whose headquarters is at Basle, Switzerland. Through the

tion.

biennial congresses of this international organization, representatives from the sixteen state sections are brought together and steady, if slow, progress is being made toward more rigid and at the same time more uniform labor laws for all of the participating countries.

Opinion

§ 332. The subject of the legal regulation of labor is one Present of great complexity. Up to the present time a priori objec- State of tions to such regulations have delayed their introduction, and Public only gradually, as experience has demonstrated their useful- in the ness, have they been extended to situations which seem to re- United quire them. In the United States the notion that the legis- States. lative power should not be used to regulate hours and conditions of employment has been abandoned by most thoughtful persons, but the prejudice against any interference with wages, like that practised in New Zealand and Australia, remains nearly as strong as ever. There is, of course, good ground for this distinction. Hours and other conditions of employment affect directly the health and vigor of the working classes; wages only indirectly. Moreover, workmen are less mindful of their own interest in connection with hours and sanitary arrangements than in connection with wages. Making all allowance for these considerations, many thoughtful persons still believe that, under certain circumstances, notably those found in connection with the sweating system, the regulation of wages must also be undertaken by the government if serious evils are to be corrected. It is sometimes argued that the law cannot fix the rate of wages, but this is contrary both to reason and experience. The law cannot fix both wages and the number of persons who shall be employed at those wages, but it can declare that no one shall be employed in given trades unless paid certain minimum wages, and enforce its decree. The result may be an addition to the number of dependents, who are "unemployable" at the wages fixed because too inefficient to earn them, but it may be better and cheaper for society to support such persons in some other way than to permit their competition to hold the wages of great sections of the population down to a starvation level. In order to mark off the dependent from other classes the state may find it necessary itself to fix a standard by which

Need of

in Labor

Legislation.

the ability of the individual for independent self-support may be determined. Without undertaking to advocate the establishment by law of standard or minimum rates of wages for the sweating trades, the author wishes to insist that there would be nothing in this policy inconsistent with the theory of wages that has been explained in these pages, and that it merits the same unprejudiced consideration as is now accorded by intelligent people to proposals for restricting the employment of children or women, or for requiring the use of safety appliances in connection with dangerous trades.

In the United States a serious obstacle to the progress of Uniformity labor legislation has been the inability of state legislatures to agree upon uniform laws. Massachusetts has held an honorable place as a leader in factory legislation, but of late years proposals for a further restriction of hours have been met there with the objection that the cotton mills of the state were already carrying on a losing battle against the cotton mills of the South, which have been free from all but the mildest labor restrictions. Exaggerated as this objection often is, it points to the need of uniform labor laws, at least for neighboring states, and suggests the desirability of national labor legislation. Massachusetts, the state which from its position of leadership has most keenly felt the absence of uniformity, adopted, in 1902, a concurrent resolution favoring an amendment to the United States Constitution which should empower Congress to enact uniform labor laws for the whole country. Another movement in the same direction was the creation, in 1883, of the Association of Officials of Bureaus of Labor of America, which has worked earnestly to secure uniformity in the factory regulations of the different states. The progress toward uniformity that has been made encourages the hope that its absence may be less cf a bar to improved labor regulations in the future than it has been in the past.

REFERENCES FOR COLLATERAL READING

The literature on labor legislation is of a somewhat technical character. *Stimson, Handbook to the Labor Laws. is the standard work for the United States. More exhaustive is the Report of the United States Bureau of Labor on Labor Laws in the United States,

which is brought down to date by the Bulletins of Labor of the same Bureau. Volumes V. and XVI. of the Report of the United States Industrial Commission contain digests of the labor laws of the United States and of foreign countries. Current labor legislation is described in the Bulletins of the International Labor Office and the American Labor Legislation Review. Discussions of the history and effects of labor legislation will be found in North, Factory Legislation in New England (against) and Whittelsey, Massachusetts Labor Legislation (for). A good statement of the arguments for child-labor laws is given in *Murphy, The Case Against Child Labor and The South and Her Children, and Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children. The organ

of the National Child Labor Committee is called The Child Labor Bulletin. An admirable presentation of the argument for short-hour legislation and review of the important American laws and decisions is *Goldmark, Fatigue and Efficiency. See also *Van Kleeck, Women in the Book-binding Trade and Artificial Flower Makers.

The history of labor legislation in Great Britain is treated in von Plener, English Factory Legislation (1876), and *Hutchins and Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (1907). The laws now in force are given in Abraham and Burrows, The Law Relating to Factories and Workshops. The best books dealing with special topics are: *Mrs. Webb, The Case for the Factory Acts; *Black, Sweated Industry.

Subjects

of Concluding Chapters.

Defects

of Wages System.

Definition of Profit

Sharing.

CHAPTER XXXI

PROFIT SHARING AND LABOR COPARTNERSHIP

§ 333. The industrial system which has been described and analyzed in the preceding chapters leaves much to be desired. Labor legislation has been proposed as a means of correcting some of the evils that bear with special hardship upon wageearners, but other and more fundamental measures are widely advocated and merit sympathetic consideration. In these concluding chapters attention can be given only to those reform proposals which are in themselves most important or which have the largest number of supporters. These are Profit Sharing and Labor Copartnership, or Coöperation, discussed in the present chapter; Social, or Workingmen's, Insurance, considered in the next chapter; and Socialism, discussed in Chapter XXXIII. In the concluding chapter the results of our analysis of the present industrial system and of different plans of economic reform are brought together in a brief survey of Economic Progress.

§ 334. One defect charged against the present industrial system is that workmen, upon whose labor and fidelity the success of business undertakings so largely depends, receive no direct share of the profits. Wages constitute usually their sole compensation, irrespective of the gains of the enterpriser who employs them. Wage-earners are thus often without any direct incentive to contribute their maximum to the productive results. To remedy this situation various plans of profit sharing, gain sharing and other modified forms of wage payment have been devised.

Profit sharing has been defined as an "agreement, freely entered into, by which the employee receives a share, fixed in advance, of the profits." Unless the agreement is made in advance the economic purpose of profit sharing, that is, giving the worker an added incentive to be an efficient producer,