YOUR PART IN POVERTY
Chapter I
WORKMEN
A WORKMAN’S working life begins at a very early age. In some places boys start work at thirteen or fourteen years of age, or even earlier, and set out to face the world and all its hardships and dangers with very little training, except such as may be given them by mother and father. Once they have started, there is seldom anything between them and the necessity for sticking at work, except the Poor Law and its wretched institutions, until earth covers them in the grave. On the boy’s ability to keep himself in health and strength depends his ability to earn his bread and make a place for himself in the world. Once having attained the age of manhood, the average workman reaches the highest point in material wealth that he will ever reach. I do not believe this factor of life is ever really grasped by most of those who talk and write so glibly about the working classes. The skilled artisan, who has served an apprenticeship in a given trade, knows that he will earn so much an hour. As a rule he will marry on that wage, which often amounts to only 30s. or £2 per week, and this will be his standard for the remainder of his working life. As things go, considering the standard set for the working class, this may appear a reasonable and satisfactory condition of life. It is obvious, though, that the coming of each new baby must lower the standard of life, owing to the fact that the family income is fixed. Even that is not quite true, for the income is fixed only while there is work for the man to do. Often there are long periods of unemployment which bring down the average of a man’s earnings, and often long periods of sickness when—in the case of a workman—wages stop altogether. This is the great difference between the wage-earner and the salaried person; a clerk or manager generally continues to draw salary if away from business owing to sickness, but an engineer or labourer finds his wages stopped the moment he leaves work, from whatever cause—with the exception of absence due to accident, in which case, under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, certain payments are made, though even these are often evaded and the men left penniless.
There are some few employers who treat their workers a little better than this during times of sickness; such are Government departments, municipalities, and a few large employers; but none of them treat the wage-earner on the same terms as the salaried man or woman, and wherever sick pay is granted it is granted for a strictly limited period, and, after the first week or two, is cut down to vanishing point.
It is the same with holidays. To many families holidays mean a shortage of food, because there is less money coming into the home. All that Bank Holidays mean for the working-class mother is more worry, more anxiety, more difficulty in making ends meet. It is this which keeps people who live in small houses and mean streets at home when they should be out in the countryside enjoying the pure fresh air. It always appears to me that those who manage our affairs for us imagine that if workpeople were to enjoy holidays they would never want to go back to work again. I am not at all sure that, even were this the case, it would be so unmixed an evil as some of my friends think. It is sometimes said with a sneer that working people do not know how to use leisure—and working-class children, too; and good people like Mrs. Humphry Ward establish play centres in order to teach the children of the masses how to play. To my mind this is a most unnatural proceeding. Luckily for me I was brought up in a home set in the midst of a great open space on which I could play with my brothers and other children. We were never trained to play, but just played the same old games our fathers had played, till we were old enough to join sports clubs. All children should have the chance of meeting in the open air away from teachers, and be given the opportunity for developing their own powers of initiative.
The man who toils for his bread is taught in the bitter school of experience that he must not expect holidays except as expensive luxuries. Even in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where, because the whole family works for wages, a holiday is possible, an annual week’s holiday at Blackpool or the Isle of Man is all that can be looked forward to.
In this matter of holidays, contrast what I have said about the workmen with what happens to the other classes. The clerks and other salaried people are paid full pay for all public holidays, and are given a summer holiday which runs into one, two, or even four weeks at full pay. Of course such people know how to use their leisure; they have plenty of opportunity to learn. Let me repeat that the boy who goes to work in an office grows up accustomed to holidays on full pay, but the boy who goes into the workshop to hard manual labour grows to manhood well drilled in the belief that holidays are not for him unless he is prepared to lose his wages.
The employers, the managers and directors can and do take holiday when they so desire. The well-to-do show us a splendid example of how to get through life with a maximum of rest and holiday-making. The shooting season, the London season, the season on the Riviera, with an occasional trip further afield, make up the common round, the daily task of many of those who are so fortunate as to find themselves able to enjoy incomes derived from rent, profit, and interest. Even in the midst of a great war we read of Cabinet Ministers enjoying life on the golf course and taking their rest by the sea. Many of the clergy of all denominations take long holidays away from their congregations—not once a year, but perhaps twice and sometimes even three times in one year. Indeed, all the official classes—religious, civil, and military—feel the need for taking holidays at frequent periods throughout the year, and always on full pay. Perhaps judges are the public men who most thoroughly understand and enjoy the blessedness of rest and peace from work. Their salaries vary from £5,000 to £6,500 a year, with the prospect of a comfortable pension of £3,500 a year after a few years’ service. They also have their Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun holidays, and then the Long Vacation running into several months; and all the time their salaries run on. I must not be understood as objecting to these holidays. I am a firm believer in holidays, though I get precious few. I call attention to these facts because I want to make rich people understand that their comfortable holidays are paid for by the people who get practically no holidays at all, and to point out how unjust it is that those who work the hardest should be denied all means of rest and recreation.
Many people discuss this question as if there were some sort of virtue in work as a means of keeping people in health and contentment. Work is a benefit to mankind only when it is for some given end. We are all acquainted with the words “change of work is rest.” This is true, and those of us who fill all our waking time with work of one sort or another know quite well we are able to do so only because our work is of a very varied character; not one of us, if given the choice, would care to change places with the labourer or artisan whose daily life, year after year, is the same piece of dull, uninteresting toil, such as minding an automatic machine or going to the pit to dig coal, and who is able to find freedom and respite only at the cost of loss of wages. No; those of us who were brought up to manual labour and have escaped from it never want to go back under the same old bad conditions. We may dig a garden for recreation; to prove our patriotism in war time we may go to work in a munition factory or other Government works, but never again, if we have our way, will one of us, man or woman, voluntarily choose to become a day labourer with a labourer’s wages and conditions of service.
There is another aspect of the workers’ life which needs stressing now that the Church has organised its National Mission. In every church throughout the world the words “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” are said by the minister, and yet all these ministers know that hundreds of thousands of men and women, boys and girls, are not allowed to rest from their labours. There are multitudes who work every Sunday of the year. For them there is not even one day’s rest in seven. This is true in normal times as well as now. We are in the midst of a great war. So destructive of mental and physical force is this denial of one day’s rest in seven that the Ministry of Munitions now insists on a six days’ week, not for religious reasons, but in order to secure a bigger output, and also because it has been discovered that even machines must have rest. For those who are given the day’s rest the day is made as miserable as possible. In crowded towns the only places left open are the public-houses and a few cinemas. There are parks and open spaces, but girls and boys and young people are not allowed to play the ordinary games. Football, cricket, hockey, netball, quoits, and bowls are all forbidden. (On the rich man’s golf course play is allowed, and tennis and cricket may be enjoyed by those who can afford them.) In some country places men are even censured for working in their gardens and allotments on Sundays. What a mad kind of world it is in which all these contradictions in the name of religion exist! If the Church has any message in this respect, it should be to teach people that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Church should bid people meet for common worship, thanking and praising God with hymns and psalms of thanksgiving for the loving-kindness which has made so many things bright and beautiful; and after such a service as would emphasise the true beauty and unity of life we should all settle down to whatever joy or pleasure we are able to secure from sports and games or other means of recreation.
To come back to sickness. A man who is sick may be getting 10s. a week sick pay, and in some cases as much as 18s.; but even so it is always less money than when he is at work. Employers and Friendly Societies argue that it is quite wrong for the workman to get as much money when he is sick as when he is in health, because, they say, unless a man loses by not being at work he is likely to malinger. This argument is one of those stupid, ridiculous theories of life and conduct which in practice work out very badly and very cruelly indeed. For the man who is sick and at home is a great burden on his wife, and every extra penny that is spent on him means less food, less of the necessities of life, for the rest of the family. It means also that a decent man drags himself back to work long before he has any business to do so, and so risks early permanent disablement or the bringing on of some chronic illness from which he never properly recovers.
As a mere matter of expediency men who are sick ought to get not only their normal wages, but something extra, so that they could secure the necessary means of recovery.
In periods of unemployment a workman may also receive out-of-work pay under the National Insurance Act at the rate of 7s. to 10s. per week. This, again, is fixed low, because the authorities are afraid that if, while unemployed, men are able to live decently and properly with their wives and children, they will not be anxious to go to work again. A more short-sighted policy it is impossible to find. The few miserable shillings are only sufficient to starve on, and in large numbers of cases mean demoralisation, because want of food and want of nourishment always make men despondent and despairing, and often rob them of character and morale.
How differently we treat soldiers! These we maintain on full pay in peace time in order to keep them fit for the day when they may be needed. The workman on whom we all depend is left to starve, or given just enough to exist upon, and then we wonder that he loses heart and dignity and sometimes even honesty, and often becomes quite unemployable.
Contrast all this with the conditions of life enjoyed by the employer and the comfortable classes. First of all, there is no going to work at thirteen years of age; no half-timers are found amongst their children; no stoppage of income takes place because of sickness; even in times of bad trade the majority of employers and the majority of people who live on salaries are never obliged to go short of the necessities of life. We never expect Cabinet Ministers, whose wages amount to £5,000 a year, to draw less during the time they are off duty owing to sickness. It is illustrative of the attitude of mind we have towards each other that it was the Cabinet Minister in charge of the National Insurance Bill who, having laid down in Parliament the principle that workmen must not be allowed a decent income when unemployed or sick, was himself away from his duties for many weeks at a time because of illness, during which time he drew his wages at the rate of £5,000 a year as usual. No one appeared to think it necessary even to ask for a doctor’s certificate to prove that he was really ill. No one thought of accusing him of malingering. No one imagined for a moment that a Cabinet Minister would stop away from work a minute longer than was necessary. For the workman, it is another story. An altogether different standard is set. He must be driven back to work at the earliest possible moment; and the whip of starvation must be used to send him back, irrespective of his condition of health.
These unequal conditions of service and unfair relationships are the result of the outstanding fact that labour is looked upon by society as something to be bought and sold, and is treated like any other piece of machinery which is needed for a certain job.
When a worker becomes old and inefficient he is sacked; when profit can no longer be secured from his labour he is sacked. If a machine will do his work cheaper he is told to find some other job or starve. Money-making is all that counts in the Capitalist system, and unless it contributes to this end the labour of the workers is not required. They have no ownership, no control, either of their own lives or of their industry. They are just items in the machinery of production, and it is this fact which separates them off from every other class and makes them what, in fact, they are—the dependent wage-slaves of the possessing classes.
Since 1870 the nation has given a certain amount of education to all children above five years of age. Meagre as the education is, it has nevertheless been sufficient to make many workmen understand their social and economic subjection, and it is this realisation of their helpless subjection to others which determines so many of them to join the Trade Unionist and Socialist movements. They want to share in the ownership of national industries; they want to control and organise the working of industries. Up to a few years ago the workman only demanded better wages and shorter hours, but he has now discovered by actual experience that high prices and high rents continually swallow up increases in wages. He has been educated by Mr. Lloyd George to understand that private ownership of land means that a landowner can sit down and, by just doing nothing, actually grow in riches because of the power which ownership gives—power which the owner can exercise at an opportune moment in order to squeeze rack rents from those who have created the values which make such rack rents possible. In addition, the workman understands that with the introduction of labour-saving machinery the Capitalist has become able to put a man’s own children in competition with the man himself. The automatic machine has made it possible for a man’s economic foes to be members of his own household; and, realising this, and understanding also that the opportunities of rising in the social scale grow less and less, men are now organising for a complete change in the present system. Their work in this direction has been very much hampered because of the war, but there are groups of people who are determined to keep together in order that when the war is over they may once more take the field and by united effort establish a co-operative system of production and distribution to replace the present unsound order, based as it is on the subjection of the workers by means of the wages- and profit-making system. We know that until this fundamental change is made our labour is in vain.
People talk at large sometimes about the greed and avarice of the working classes—their unwillingness to give service without payment and their exorbitant demands in respect of wages and hours. I have never been able to accept such a point of view at all, for it seems to me all the old bad rules which govern our industrial relationships are inherent in the system. What I mean is that, given a society where men and women are expected to compete and scramble for a living, it is inevitable that cheating and meanness should follow. Besides, what sort of an example do the other classes set the workers? Is not their law of life to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market? And do they not insist that cheapness, not worth, is the governing factor in life?
Just before the war, when the governing classes wished to find some means for pacifying the workers and soothing them to sleep, Liberal capitalists organised deputations to Germany in order to be able to prove what an awful place the Prussianised German Empire was for a workman to live in because of the evils of Protection. It was the same set of capitalists who gave Mr. Lloyd George the position which enabled him to set the mark of servitude on the shoulders of the workers by his German-inspired Insurance Act, and it has been because of that Act and the accompanying Labour Exchange Acts that the Government have been able, instead of relying on the workman’s loyalty and patriotism to organise and carry through all national work, to arrange national industry during the war on purely German lines by means of highly-paid bureaucrats, without the workers having the least say as to how their work should be done.
On the other side Tory capitalists organised deputations to Germany, and to their own satisfaction proved that life for the working people under Kaiser Wilhelm II. was much more desirable than under King George V. of England.
We can now place our own value on the reports issued by both these deputations and on the one issued by that other deputation organised by the Labour Party. I recall these incidents of 1913-4 not to try and score off anyone, but to show that those of the capitalist class who wish to preserve and perpetuate the wages system are willing to use every means to obtain their ends. It is beyond dispute that Mr. Lloyd George, in passing Acts establishing National Insurance, &c., and the Conservatives, in wishing to establish a system of tariffs, had the same idea in mind: that is, they wished to ease and palliate some of the evil effects of industrial life. None of them wished to abolish the causes which produce strife and want and bitterness.
The class war which I mentioned earlier is a very real thing in the life of the worker, and it shows itself in various ways and under varying conditions. Often we can see the war being waged by means of unemployment, when, because of some collapse in international organisation, trade breaks down, and the first victims are the workers, who by the hundred thousand are flung helpless on to the streets. After the South African War such a condition of things prevailed. In some industries this dislocation was still further accentuated because of the invention of machinery by the use of which production was increased and labour was displaced. The machine is always set against the workman, and often brings starvation and misery into thousands of working-class homes.
Is it not extraordinary that people should suffer because there is power to produce more than we need? Yet unemployment is always the first result of using what is known as labour-saving machinery; and, if we would understand the conflict of interests which exists between the employing and the working class, we must admit that the owner of the machine (supported as he is by all the power of the State) who drives out workmen and refuses to allow them to work is acting in an anti-social manner, even though he is but following law and custom. There is a complete division of interest here, which must be understood by all those who wish to lend a hand in improving conditions, for until this is overcome and machinery is made the servant of all men there will be no peace in the world of industry.
Occasionally there are lock-outs and strikes. A lock-out is a declaration of war by the employers, a strike is a declaration of war by the workmen. In both cases the employers’ weapon is starvation. The employers hope to beat the men by refusing to allow them to earn wages, and the workmen strive to beat the employer by stopping profit and dividends. During a lock-out or strike untold suffering and misery are endured by the women and children, and it is this fact which the employers rely upon to assist them in winning their fight, for, although dividends may have stopped, it is very seldom the case that an employer’s wife and children starve. In fact, some employers are able to make a labour dispute pay, because they are able, owing to the shortage produced by the dispute, to make money out of old stocks. It is certain that during the great coal dispute coal-owners, by raising prices and selling off rubbish which was otherwise unsaleable, more than recouped themselves for any shortage of profit the strike may have occasioned.
Look where we may, in times of prosperity or times of bad trade, there is this strife which undermines confidence, destroys religion, and makes us all warriors in a fight where all are losers—for we can all surely echo the words of our Lord: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” There is no soul in business to-day; it is just one wretched struggle for pelf and place, and the working class are pawns in the game. If it pays to employ them they are given work; if it does not pay, out they have to go, for business is business and business is profit-making. Consequently the worker discovers that as he grows older he is wanted less and less. Before the war the cry was “too old at forty.” That state of things has changed for the time being, but will come back again when what are called peace conditions once more prevail, unless, indeed, the war changes our whole attitude of mind towards one another. How often I have seen the aged worker sacked, with not a halfpenny of allowance, and his son taken on in his stead! I have said there is no soul in business, and it is true. Someone has traced all this down to the limited liability companies, which have “no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned.” No doubt the institution of such companies is to a large extent responsible for modern relationships; but what I want to emphasise is the point made a little way back—that if men are employed for wages, and cannot get employment or earn their bread otherwise, then they are living in subjection to other people. We may endeavour to get round this as we will, but it will remain the outstanding fact of present-day conditions, making of life one long struggle, not only for comparative comfort even, but for mere existence. It is true that classes merge more and more into each other, but new classes are continually being created: more divisions, more ranks, in the perpetual warfare which we make of life. For the multitude this strife and struggle bring sorrow and sadness, the maiming and wounding of body, of soul, of spirit. For us all it produces meanness and sordidness, making us capable of brutal and demoralising conduct which stamps us with the mark not of men but of beasts, turning us into liars and hypocrites, destroying our faith and confidence in each other, and leaving us all beggared and hopeless in the fight upward for a nobler life.
The sort of nonsense which tells us that there is plenty of room at the top is only like a saying attributed to Napoleon I.—that every private soldier carries a marshal’s bâton in his knapsack. That sort of statement treats people as if they were destitute of intelligence. Under present conditions we cannot all be employers or managers or directors—if, indeed, that were a desirable consummation. For the vast majority society as at present arranged allows no other means of living but the kind of struggle I have been trying to describe, and those who wish to see the world redeemed from sin and vice and crime must start their work by finding out how to organise industry so as to ensure that all useful labour shall be considered honourable and of value. In other words, we must so raise the status of the worker in our minds that he will at last begin to realise that his labour and himself are things of real worth and consequence to the whole community. We must unite in preaching discontent, and, in so preaching, emphasise the fact that for the workers there is no chance of social redemption unless they all combine and, by using the power which combination gives, alter the whole basis of our social life. I do not ask that any of us should preach or practise violence. I am more convinced than ever that violence in any shape or form is an evil, that “we cannot cast out devils by devils,” that the workers must discover some more excellent way. Their greatest power is the power of standing still and just doing nothing, but they must all stand still together. Those of us who wish to help them must teach them that they must all stand together or else remain as they are, slaves of the classes who own the land and all other means of life. We who would help and stand by the workers can do so in one way only, and that is by using our powers to teach the lesson of solidarity. Napoleon’s motto in all his campaigns was “Divide and Conquer.” The capitalist and commercial classes have learnt the same lesson, and by very judicious and, at the same time, very mean methods divide the working classes into various camps—some political, some religious: in some places this result is attained by starting competing Trade Unions. The employing classes do not scruple actually to buy the leaders of the Trade Union movement by the gifts of money, place, and power. A regular bureaucracy of ex-Labour leaders are in the employ of the Government as strike settlers, or, as some of us think, as strike breakers. Others are occasionally taken into partnership or are appointed foremen and managers, and so removed out of their class. When the working class is organised and actuated by true comradeship and brotherhood there will be no such “great refusals” or betrayals, but, instead, all men and women will stand as one great body, determined to rise together: and it is the duty of Christians—in fact, it is the duty of all good citizens—to assist in promoting this spirit, in order that the working class may by its own efforts win its own salvation.