his average wage in all industries was approximately $11 per week. If we figure his average annual employment as 49 weeks, he is paid in the neighborhood of $547 per year, by no means a princely sum, but more than double the amount earned by a European workman and probably four times what the laborer of China, Japan, or India can hope to receive. When we remember that this is supplemented, in a very large percentage of cases, by the earnings of the wife or children or by income from property, the income of the average American working family cannot be considered niggardly. Education has intensified the worker's feeling of dissatisfaction with the environment by which he must often perforce be surrounded, but it has, at the same time, sharpened his appreciative faculties, thus increasing the amount of real income derived from a given unit of expenditure. The advent of the motion picture has furnished an extensive field of enjoyment at comparatively slight expense. Other consumers besides the working class have been compelled to share in the expense of compensating unfortunate workers for time lost because of accidents. The decline in the purchasing power of wages has also been offset by an increased income from public sources. Better streets and lights, better hospitals, better libraries, better parks and playgrounds, and better schools have all enhanced the real income of the common people, and the tax-burden of the ordinary laborer for these purposes is comparatively light. F. Insecurity through Inadequate Social Control [NOTE. The selections in this section deal only with the legal phase of social control. The student should consider whether there are other forms of social control which are "inadequate" and thus promote insecurity of the worker.] 224. AN OUTGROWN LEGAL PHILOSOPHY1 As President Hadley has well pointed out, our constitutional guaranties have largely been developed and applied by the courts for the protection of property rights. Under the social and industrial conditions that prevailed before the Civil War this development was, at least to some extent, justifiable, for property was then practically within the reach of all and its protection was clearly a matter of general interest. Where the acquisition of property is measurably within the reach of all there can be no conflict between property rights and individual rights. 1 Taken by permission from W. F. Dodd, "Social Legislation and the Courts," Political Science Quarterly, XXVIII (1913), 2−3. But since the Civil War there has been developing in this country a larger and larger class to whom the acquisition of even a small amount of property is less and less possible. And at the same time there have appeared large accumulations of property in the hands of a small number of persons. Thus has arisen a conflict between property rights and individual rights. More accurately, perhaps, the conflict may be described as one between the claims of those owning or controlling large masses of property and the claims of those having little or no property. The claims of those having large accumulations of property are based upon the plea of the sacredness of property; and this plea finds recognition in our earlier constitutional principles. The claims of those having little or no property are based on the plea that the individual, even though without property, is of more moment than property; and this plea is supported by the humanitarian philosophy of the present day. These positions in the long run should not prove irreconcilable, but certain it is that the interests of owners of large property as such must give way to the broader interests of society. The individual, whether with or without property, is the object of the new social and industrial legislation. Our legal philosophy and our whole system of constitutional guaranties were developed to fit conditions when property was the most general interest of the community, and the highly individualistic philosophy of our laws was one not unadapted to the conditions of this country in the early days. For at least a generation, however, we have been living in a state of social and industrial development to which the earlier individualistic philosophy does not fit itself, and the adjustment of legal principles and legal philosophy to these new conditions is a slow one. See also 233. The Socialization of Law. 407. Dissatisfaction with Present Formal Social Control. 408. Dissatisfaction with Present Informal Social Con trol. 225. DIFFICULTIES OF CONTRACT IN LABOR' Throughout the period of westward expansion the homestead laws were the underpinnings by which men adjusted themselves to the land, as the basis for subsistence. On them, and on contractual relations which smacked of the soil, they built up the great commonwealths of the Mississippi Valley and beyond. 1 Adapted by permission from P. U. Kellogg, "The Field before the Commission on Industrial Relations," Political Science Quarterly, XXVIII (1913), 594–606. With the development of manufacturing, the currents have set in new directions; cities have piled up; the people have massed in great trade groups; employments embedded in corporate industry have become the basis for subsistence for vaster and vaster numbers of Americans. On the contract of hire depends their prosperity. Now, the laws and customs of adjusting rights and interests among agricultural peoples have been the development of centuries. They have become molded in forms conformable to democracy. But while organic social changes have come in with modern industry, as radical as the change in tools from wheelbarrows to electric cranes, the terms of the contract of hire have not been reconsidered in relation to the new conditions. If we apply to the farming life of America the words "equity," "tenure," and "security," we obtain a fairly clear idea of the economic base upon which households and granges, counties and states, have been built up. But if we apply the test of the same words to the working life of American industrial districts, we get at once a vivid impression of the insecure footing of our wage-earners. Not merely the sudden massing of industrial workers but the unevenness in the size and strength of the parties to the work contract put strains upon it. Corporate bargainers range from small concerns, which retain much of the old personal contact between master and man, to far-flung enterprises governed by wire, which have injected a system of absentee capitalism into American industrial life as definite in its effects as is absentee landlordism. In strength of position these corporate bargainers range from the isolated contractor, whose work must be prosecuted on an exposed corner and at a rate of speed enforced by real-estate owner and prospective tenant, to the manufacturer whose walled plant enables him to store up finished goods to tide over a strike. They range from associations of such manufacturers, which can put a strike-breaking force into the plant of any member and break the back of a local strike regardless of its merits, to nationalized industries, which can effect the same end by closing down a plant here and operating elsewhere. They range from manufacturers who view organized labor as nothing more than a disrupter of orderly administration to be fought at every turn, to manufacturers who not only bargain with it, but look to it to aid in the discipline of unsteady workers to settle disputes between crafts. There is equal unevenness in the ranks of labor. The workers range from those in sedentary trades, thick with traditions, to those in new and hazardous callings like that of the structural iron workers, which attract foot-loose men of the same devil-may-care stamp as did our frontier settlements. They range from old employees, indispensable core of an industry, to the machine hands of the loft districts of the cities, whose employers take them on and lay them off with no more sense of responsibility than they feel when they throw the switch that turns on their electric power. They range from mass organizations which embrace every worker in an industry, from common labor up, to craft organizations hedged in by apprenticeships from competition with the common laborers; from elemental, unorganized bodies of men who strike spontaneously under some common spur, as at McKees Rocks and Lawrence, to highly disciplined orders, like the railroad brotherhoods, whose stages of development have been as distinct in character, ideals, and methods as are those of thoroughly organized business concerns. The organizations of workers range from isolated local bodies to international unions with staffs of paid organizers; from irresponsible associations with unitemized accounts and a ring control which matches that of machine politics, to organizations on a business basis with large benefit funds and responsible executives. We have thus reviewed rapidly some of the social bearings of the work contract to which we, singly, in groups, and as a whole are parties; the inequalities in the organizations which participate, the injection of women and children and immigrants into the situation to complicate the bargains of men, the revolutions in manufacturing methods which make the work bargain an ever-recurring fact, the technical development which makes it difficult, the social pressure which distorts or molds it, the laws which apply to it with uncertainty. As Professor Hoxie puts it: "It will not do to attribute the resulting conditions and actions to ignorance, selfishness, or perversity on the part of employers or workers. They but act as the inherent forces of the modern industrial system dictate." situation is one at best filled with organic change, adjustment, readjustment. It would put to the test the most firmly woven and clearly defined fabric of industrial relations. But as a matter of fact our industrial relations are not firmly woven nor clearly defined. The economic motive has been the only element, sure, certain, omnipresent. Under pressure from it, as a natural consequence, men have taken things into their own hands; singly and in groups they have applied remedies which at worst gouged their fellows and The and at best have been but a partial solution. Encroachment from one quarter has been answered by encroachment from another. The leadership which has been the subject of most serious public criticism has been of the sort which has forged to the front among men on a war footing from the beginning of time. The excesses on both sides have been of the sort which are inevitable when the fabric of fair play is not strong enough nor well enough devised to stand the tension. 226. FREEDOM OF CONTRACT AND LABOR' The list appended was bulletined at the Chicago Industrial Exhibit of 1906 and reprinted in Charities and the Commons. What "Freedom of Contract" has meant to Labor: 1. Denial of eight-hour law for women in Illinois. 2. Denial of eight-hour law for city labor or for mechanics and ordinary laborers. 3. Denial of ten-hour law for bakers. 4. Inability to prohibit tenement labor. 5. Inability to prevent by law employer from requiring employee, as condition of securing work, to assume all risk from injury while at work. 6. Inability to prohibit employer selling goods to employees at greater profit than to non-employees. 7. Inability to prohibit mine owners screening coal which is mined by weight before crediting same to employees as basis of wage. 8. Inability to legislate against employer using coercion to prevent employee becoming a member of a labor union. 9. Inability to restrict employer in making deductions from wages of employees. 10. Inability to compel by law payment of wages at regular intervals. 11. Inability to provide by law that laborers on public works shall be paid prevailing rate of wages. 12. Inability to compel by law payment of extra compensation for overtime. 13. Inability to prevent by law employer from holding back part of wages. note. Taken by permission from John Dewey and J. H. Tufts, Ethics, pp. 505-6, (Henry Holt & Co., 1910.) |