CHAPTER XXVII

INDUSTRIAL RECONSTRUCTION

OUR modern industrial evils are so grave and so deep-rooted that it is highly questionable whether the pressure of public opinion, piecemeal legislation, and the development of codes of honor can strike deep enough to eradicate them. Is not, perhaps, the whole system morally wrong? Instead of these endless attempts to cure the natural results of the system, is there not need of a radical reconstruction? Various attempts have been made, divers proposals are offered, in the hope of curing the causes of present maladies and devising a juster system. Many of these are doubtless impracticable, or tend to work more hardship than amelioration. But each proposal, of any plausibility, has a right to a hearing if it offers to end the great wrongs of contemporary industry; we must be very confident that it will not work before we reject it. For some way must be found to right these wrongs, or our whole industrial order will go to smash. We must not condemn too hastily a method which has not had a thorough trial, or whose defects time and experience might remedy. For mistaken experiments can be discontinued; and great as is the danger in incautious radicalism, the danger in "standing pat" is greater.

Ought the trusts to be broken up or regulated?

The greatest sinners are, certainly, to speak generally, the great corporations that we call trusts-though the word "distrust" would better express contemporary feeling! So great has popular hostility to them become that the Democratic party platform of July, 1912, declared that "a private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable," and demanded "the enactment of such additional legislation as may be necessary to make it impossible for a private monopoly to exist in the United States," i.e., "the control by any one corporation of so large a proportion of any industry as to make it a menace to competitive conditions." But is it necessary to destroy this splendidly efficient concentration of industry in order to avoid its evils? The proposal to revert to the older competitive plan is reminiscent of the outcry against machine production a century earlier, and the earnest pleas then made to return to the hand-tool method." Big business" constitutes one of the greatest advances in human industry, and therefore has surely come to stay.

From the era of individual workers owning their tools, mankind advanced to the age of competition between small concerns using machines; no less marked an advance is that to the age of large-scale production and unified industry. Its advantages may be briefly summarized:

(1) The competitive system involves needless duplications of plant, machinery, and workers; clerks stand idly in rival stores, waiting for trade, drummers spend their time in getting trade away from one another, great sums have to be spent on advertising. Monopoly means a saving of all this wasted time, labor, and money.

(2) The competitive system means great fluctuations in industry, constant anxiety, forced cut prices, and frequent failures, with their financial ruin and heartbreak to employers and loss of work to employees. Monopoly means stability, comparative freedom from anxiety, and a saving of the economic confusion and loss of bankruptcies.

(3) The great scale of monopolistic production tends to still further economies. Raw ported in larger quantities, and so at lower cost; less need be kept on hand at a given time. The utilization of by-products, made feasible by large-scale production, has proved, in many cases, a striking addition to human wealth.

(4) Monopolistic production means that more money can be put into improved processes, into plant and machinery, into making factories sanitary, and working conditions pleasant. The conspicuousness of the plant makes it more open to public criticism and more likely to awaken a sense of pride in the owners. Conditions are seldom tolerated in the big concerns that go unheeded in the little shops.

Surely our attempt, then, must be to retain "big business," and cure its evils, rather than to turn the hands of the clock backward by reverting to the wasteful competitive system. If this proves possible, we should work for the organizing of the as yet unorganized industries. Half of human effort is still wasted, through lack of such organization. If the innumerable butcher shops, grocery stores, apothecary shops, dry goods stores, etc, throughout the country, were consolidated locally, and then for some considerable section of the country, we could have greatly reduced prices and greatly improved shops. Mr. Woolworth's chain of five- and ten-cent stores offers a familiar contemporary example of the efficiency and saving to the consumer of such consolidation.

What are the ethics of the following schemes:

I. TRADE UNIONS AND STRIKES? We must, then, consider what methods of regulating, without destroying, monopoly are efficient and morally defensible; and, first, the method into which the working classes have put most of their effort and enthusiasm. The labor-unions have, as a matter of fact, actually effected certain results, which we may rapidly review:-

(1) Their chief accomplishment, and indeed effort, has been the raising of wages and shortening of hours for labor. Their success, however, has fallen far short of their hopes; and it is impossible to say how much more they have accomplished in this direction than would have been effected by other causes without their efforts. As a whole, the employing class disbelieves in the unions and is strenuously disinclined to yield to their desires. And at present the employers are usually stronger than their employees, unless public opinion or legislation forces them to surrender their position.

(2) To some slight extent, but only to a slight extent, they have effected amelioration in other matters have freed labor from the tyranny of company stores, decreased child labor, secured the installation of safety appliances, sanitary conditions, and other needed improvements.

(3) Their social effect has been greatest. They have amalgamated our stream of heterogeneous immigrants and fired them with common understanding and purpose; they have taught the ignorant to cooperate, made them think, frowned to some degree upon vice, insured their members to. some extent against illness and death, and promoted general friendliness among the laboring classes.

On the other hand, their methods have been productive of much harm:

(1) The economic loss due to strikes has been enormous; the employers have suffered heavily, the public has suffered heavily; the laborers have suffered most of all. Social amelioration certainly ought not to have to come about through such wasteful methods and such bitter privation.

(2) The inconvenience caused the public by strikes has often been very great, especially where the coalmines or railways have been affected. Only a few years ago a veritable tragedy was barely averted, when President Roosevelt succeeded, after the most strenuous efforts, in ending the general coal strike in the winter season. A strike of locomotive engineers means obviously a great peril to the traveling public.

(3) The antagonisms and class hatreds engendered by this sort of industrial warfare do infinite moral harm, and retard heavily the peaceful solution of the problems. The class organs always denounce in bitterest terms the opposing class, and lawlessness always lurks in the background.

(4) Apart from their conduct of strikes, the labor unions must answer to many serious indictments. They have endeavored to restrict output, in order to raise prices. They have sought to restrict the number of apprentices in a trade, and have opposed trade schools, in order to keep down the competition for positions. They have insisted on a uniform wage without regard to efficiency. They have opposed scientific management and the increase of efficiency in various industries, in order to retain more workers therein. They have insisted upon the retention of incompetent employees, thereby directly causing railway accidents and other evils. They have often antagonized such other ameliorative methods as profit sharing and government regulation, and have rejected overtures from employers, because these-to quote from a union pamphlet-"remove the scope and field of trade-unionism." They have at times been run in the interests of selfish leaders and seemed chiefly a moneymaking scheme of a few grafters.

There can be no question, on a dispassionate consideration, that the militant methods of the trade unions are an unfortunate and temporary expedient. The grievances which they have sought to remedy are very real and very bitter; and perhaps, on the whole, the unions have done more good than harm, and accomplished results that would not so soon have been effected in any other way. But they have been rather strikingly unsuccessful. After fifty years of propaganda, seventy per cent of all industrial workers remain non-unionized; and there has been a relative loss in their numbers during the past decade. They have never succeeded in cornering the labor market, and there seems to be no prospect of their succeeding. In all events, for a permanent and thoroughgoing solution of labor troubles we must turn to some other method.