Chapter XII - Legislation On Labor

Coming back to legislation on Labor, it belongs to the PRIMARY FUNCTION of government; which is to protect life, liberty, and property. Mr. Gompers . [ 264 ] Legislation on Labor says Labor is not property; but as it is the only thing that the laborer has to sell, he would be pretty badly off without it and the right to get· all. he can for it. That right, however, is limited by his neighbor's right to do exactly the same thing. All that the law ought to say to one laborer is the broad negative, that he may ·not stop other laborers from selling their labor if they choose. He is already free, as they are, with out any law, to sell his own labor. It is as essential to him as it is to them that nobody on .earth shall put any obstacle in the way of that sale. All'of this is fully established by the Common Law; and its provisions for keeping the peace, and main taining law and order, are entirely sufficient, if faith fully executed by government, to remove every ob stacle from the open path of every laborer to the highest market price obtainable for his own work.

The Common Law against combination in restraint of trade (which last includes the laborer's sale of his own labor) is entirely sufficient, if faithfully enforced by government, to prevent mass, or mob action to obstruct that open path. Absolutely nothing is re quired in the way of further legislation, or further action of government, to insure to every worker the best going wages obtainable for such skill and in dustry as he possesses. Such insurance is inherent in entirely free operation of the law of supply and demand. Now, Organized Labor, Gompers's "Labor," is the combination of as many laborers as its organizers think best (and no more), for the purpose of block ing the free operation of the law of supply and de mand; of closing the open path to going wages, or doing entirely away with free competition of laborer against laborer in determining them; and of estab lishing an arbitrary wage, for the partners in the [ 2651 Too Much Government-Too Much Taxation combination, by withholding labor and products of labor from the employer, and through him from the general public. All this is frankly avowed by Gompers and his associates; and because it has again and again been declared criminal under the Common Law by the courts, Organized Labor has lobbied through Congress the provisions of the Clayton Act, exempting trade unions from Common or Statute Law penalties; furthermore, it is openly and con stantly in politics, to take away from the courts all power to enjoin or penalize labor lawlessness.

Thus Organized Labor becomes a quasi-political machine, and to the extent of its voting power it is able to menace candidates for legislative office. This menace has proved so far dreadful enough to scare Congress and several successive administrations down to the soles of their shoes. Gompers and his associates have been permitted to expand labor combination to several million men; organized into so-called international unions, the latter integrated into the great American Federation of Labor. It maintains imposing headquarters and a powerful lobby at Washington, both so well known as to need no further description here. Because of its possible voting power, its utter criminality has been and is ignored by Congress after Congress, and President after President. It loudly trumpets the "right to organize, the right to strike, and the right of collective bargaining," as among the rights guaranteed to free citizens by the Constitution of the United States.

On the contrary, they are no such thing; and every body knows it. The Federation and the Railway Brotherhoods have, however, grown so bold that they hold up all of the people without hesitation on the one hand-and menace the country, especially the great. cities, with loss of transportation, starva[ 266] Legislationon Labor tion, and lack of fuel; while, on the other, they menace the Administration and Congress with defeat at the next election unless Government becomes their willing tool. At the same time, recognizing that Organized Labor numbers less than a tenth of the voting popula tion and that the other nine tenths may at any time upset their political programme, and throw all wages and working conditions into free determination by the law of supply and demand, its crafty leaders continually and consistently work to hoodwink the mass of voters by interposing governmental agencies or commissions for establishing arbitrary wages and conditions. These boards. and commissions have so far been largely composed of Organized Labor's own representatives and have been regarded by the public, until very recently, as something like courts of social justice, intended to do the right thing between worker and employer. Inasmuch, however, as Organized Labor has no intention whatever of mere social justice, but proposes frankly to secure for organized laborers the greatest possible advantage over the outside nine tenths above mentioned, in practioe it. accepts the decisions of those commissions only when they suit, and ruthlessly rejects them when they do not.

Furthermore, as the decisions are generally arbitrary, fixed without any relation to markets and commer cial conditions, they are equally apt to be rejected by employers, whose rights they are supposed, by way of political camouflage, likewise to safeguard. All the way through, the constitutional power of the na tional and the state governments to interfere between buyer and seller of labor or anything else, and arbi trarily to determine the conditions and the considera tion to be accepted by both parties to what is' sup posed to be a free and voluntary bargain, has been [ 267 ] Too Much Government-Too Much Taxation excessively shady and doubtful; and always in dan ger of denunciation by the Supreme Courts as ultra vires. To make a very long story short: this whole mon strous scheme of Gompers & Co. to organize and maintain the A. F. L. as a national combination in restraint of trade, together with that other political monstrosity, begotten by Roosevelt, brought to present overgrowth by Wilson, and hung around Harding's neck like a boa constrictor-I mean. na tional arbitration and conciliation-is not only in violation of Common Law and of constitutional in dividual right, but is and has been throughout a practical failure of the largest magnitude. There could be no more conspicuous demonstration of its uselessness than President Wilson's commissions to settle the steel strike; the present (August, 1922) dead lock between the railway strikers and the Railway La bor Board; or the futile efforts of the Administration, through the Department of Labor, to force the coal operators of the whole United States into collective bargainingwith the United Mine Workers. All parties concerned without exception are dissatisfied and at a standstill. The only employers and laborers who are working happily together in the coal trade just now are in the non-union mine regions. The great rail road which most conspicuously is succeeding in giving the public service is the Pennsylvania, which has come to some sort of direct dealing with its own men, en tirely sidestepping the national organizations. The reader, if he wants to burden himself with a lot of perfectly useless research, can multiply illustrations literally by hundreds, in looking over the long record of strikes in the last 40 years. The greater the Fed eration of Labor has grown meantime, and the broader the extension of political interference between em[ 268) Legislation on Labor ployer and employee, the worse the tangle and the harder the knot into which commerce and industry have been tied. It is indeed high time that the aver age voter should see through the camouflage of gov ernmental adjustment; and demand that the national tangle shall be cut away at once by law.

Coming back to the legislator, the question for him is absolutely simple. As a matter of fact, he need do nothing except to leave strikes to time and the Common Law as it is. Nevertheless, it would serve to clarify the situation and crystallize public opinion, which is now in a state of active ebulition, were Congress simply to repeal the Clayton Act and pass a declaratory Resolution, denying, as Calvin Coolidge did, the "right to strike against the public safety anywhere, anyhow, any time"; particularly, all "international" or "federated" right to organize and strike nationally in any tirades; and finally deny ing the right to picket and prevent the free operation of the law of supply and demand. Such action by Congress, if followed, as it naturally would be by state legislatures,would leave to the union laboring man entirely unimpaire.d his constitutional right to work or cease work for· the individual employer; and to the non-union laboring man the same freedom.

The right to conspire to strike in combination against all employers never existed! [ 269] CHAPTER XIII LEGISLATION ON PROFITEERING ANOTHER hangover of Collectivism that continues to plague Washington is the Wilsonian dream of stopping "profiteering," to wit: the theory that a moral duty rests upon· national or state administra tions to see to it that no man makes a good thing out of his fellow man by happening to control, with or without intention, a lot of some commodity short in supply and wanted by the public. If I am not mistaken, the Common Law is sufficient to provide against that contingency also if the man who resorts to it is willing to risk the cost of suit; certainly there were a few centuries ago in England laws against "forestall and regrating," which were meant to prevent rich men from buying up food in times of coming famine and holding for the rise in prices bound to come.