TRADE UNION CAPITALISM

NOW we must go into the history of the resistance offered by the proletariat to the capitalists. It was evident, to begin with, that no woman or man could do anything against the employers single-handed. The stock retort, “If you will not take the wage offered, and do the work put upon you, there are plenty who will”, checkmated the destitute solitary bargainer for a decent living wage and a reasonable day’s work. The first necessity for effective resistance was that the employees should form some sort of union and stand together. In many cases this was impossible, because the employees did not know oneanother, and had no opportunities of coming together and agreeing on a joint course of action. For instance, domestic servants could not form unions. They were in private kitchens all over the country, more or less imprisoned in them, and working singly, or at most in groups of two or three, except in the houses of the very rich, where the groups might be as large as thirty or forty. Or take agricultural laborers. It is very difficult to organize them into unions, and still more difficult to keep their unions together for any length of time. They live too far apart. The same thing is true more or less of almost every kind of labor except labor in factories and mines or on railways.

In some callings there are such differences of pay and social position that even if all their members could be brought together they would not mix. Thus on the stage an actor may be a highly accomplished gentleman with a title, who plays Hamlet, or a lady who is an aristocrat and a Dame of the British Empire, and plays Portia: both of them receiving weekly salaries counted in hundreds of pounds. With them are working every night actors and actresses who never utter a word, because, if they did, their speech would betray the fact that, far from being the court lords and ladies they are dressed up to look like, they are not earning as much as the carpenters who shift the scenes. It is even possible for an acrobat or clown to be more highly paid than Hamlet, and yet in private life be so illiterate, and have such shocking table manners, that the titled Hamlet could endure neither his conversation nor his company at dinner. For this reason a union of actors is difficult: a class split is inevitable. Union is possible only in trades where the members work together in large bodies; live in the same neighborhoods; belong all to the same social class; and earn about the same money. The miners in the coalfields, the cotton spinners in the factory towns of Lancashire, the metal smelters and fitters in the Midlands, were the first to form enduring and powerful unions. The bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and joiners who come together in the building trades were also early in the field with attempts at unionism. Under the stress of some intolerable oppression they would combine to make the employers see their situation in some particular point; and when they had carried that point, or were defeated, the union would dissolve until another emergency arose. Then they began to subscribe to form little insurance funds against unemployment, which obliged them to keep the union together; and in this way the unions grew from momentary rebellions into permanent Trade Unions of the kind we know.

We now have to consider what a union of proletarians can do to defend their livelihood from the continual encroachments of Capitalism. First, when the union is sufficiently complete, it enables them to face the employer without any risk of being told that if they will not submit to his terms others will. If nearly all the bricklayers in a town form a union, and each pays into it week by week a small contribution until they have a little fund to fall back on, then, if their employers attempt to reduce their wages, they can, by refusing to work and living on their fund, bring the employers’ business to a dead stop for weeks or months, according to the size of the fund. This is called a strike. They can strike not only against a reduction of wages but for an increase, or for a reduction of their working hours, or for anything that may be in dispute between them and the employers. Their success will depend on the state of the employers’ business. The employers can practically always wait if they choose until the strike fund is exhausted, and thus starve the strikers into submission. But if trade is so flourishing at the moment, and the employers consequently in such a hurry to get on with their profit making, that they would lose more by an interruption to their business than by giving the strikers what they demand, then the employers will give in.

But the employers will bide their time for a counterstrike. When trade gets slack again, and they have little or nothing to lose by shutting up their works for a while, they reduce the wage, and lock out all the workers who will not submit to the reduction. This is why an employers’ strike is called a lock-out. The newspapers use the word strike for strikes and lock-outs indiscriminately, because their readers blame the workers instead of the employers for a strike; but some of the greatest so-called strikes should have been called lock-outs. A boom in trade always produces a series of strikes which are generally successful. A falling-off in trade produces a series of lock-outs; and they, too, are generally successful, the one series undoing the work of the other in a dreary see-saw. After the war we went through a gigantic boom followed by a disastrous slump, with strikes and lock-outs all complete. Your own experience of these civil wars of strike and lock-out must have left you convinced that they are public disasters which would have no sort of sense in a well ordered community. But let that pass for the moment. We have not yet finished our study of primitive Trade Unionism, nor seen what it led to besides saving up for a strike and then “downing tools”.

The first necessity of the situation was that everybody in the trade should join the union, as outsiders could be used by employers to break the strike by taking on the work that the strikers refused. Consequently a fierce hatred of the men who would not join the unions grew up. They were called scabs and blacklegs, and boycotted in every possible way by the unionists. But vituperation and boycotting were not sufficient to deter the scabs. The unions, when they declared a strike, stationed bodies of strikers at the gates of the works to persuade the scabs not to enter. No Intelligent Woman will need to be told that unless there was a strong force of police on the spot the persuasion was so vigorous that the scabs felt lucky when they survived it without broken bones. At last there came a time in Sheffield and Manchester when scabs working at furnaces found bombs there that blew them to pieces; when machinery and tools were tampered with so as to make them dangerous to those who used them (this was called rattening); and when factory chimneys were shattered by explosives like fulminate of mercury, so risky to handle that only very ignorant and desperate men would venture on their use. This was stopped less by punishing the perpetrators than by forcing the employers to relax the provocation. For instance, the Sheffield sawgrinders died prematurely, and suffered miserably during their lifetimes, because the air they breathed was half steel dust. It was quite easy to prevent this by using vacuum cleaners (as we call them) to suck away the deadly dust; but the employers would not fit them, because, as they cost extra capital on which there was no extra profit, an employer who fitted them could be undersold by those who did not. At that time a Sheffield steel worker of fifty (when he was lucky enough to reach that age) looked like a weedy and very unhealthy lad of seventeen. In the face of such murderous conditions, persisted in for a hundred years, the burst of outrage on the part of the victims seems trifling enough. At last the Government had to come to the rescue and force all the employers to fit suction fans. Sheffielders’ lungs are now no worse than most people’s, and better than those of many who are not so carefully protected by the law.

But accepting a lower wage than that demanded by the union was not the only way in which an employee could drag down his fellows. In many trades it was not much use fixing the wage the worker was to receive unless the quantity of work he gave for it was also fixed. You must be tired by this time of the silly joking of the Capitalist newspapers about bricklayers who are not allowed by their unions to lay more than three bricks a day. A bricklayer has clearly as much right to charge a day’s wages for laying three bricks as his employer has to sell the house when it is built for the biggest price he can get for it. Those who condemn either of them are condemning the Capitalist system, like good Bolshevists. The three-brick joke is only a comic exaggeration of what actually occurs. The employers, to find out how much work can be got out of a man, pick out an exceptionally quick and indefatigable man called a slogger, and try to impose what he can do in a day on all the rest. The unions naturally retort by forbidding any of their members to lay a brick more than he must do if he is to be worth employing at all. This practice of deliberately doing the least they dare instead of the most they can is the ca’canny of which the employers complain so much, though they all do the same thing themselves under the more respectable name of “restricting output” and selling in the dearest market. It is the principle on which the Capitalist system is avowedly founded.

Thus Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! You may ask why this does not end in a deadlock. The answer is it is producing deadlocks twice a day or thereabouts. The King’s speeches in opening Parliament now contain regularly an appeal to the workers and employers to be good boys and not paralyze the industry of the nation by the clash of their quite irreconcilable interests. The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles. The mass of the nation has been humbly and ignorantly taking what the employers offer and working as well as it can, either believing that it is doing its duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call it, or not thinking about the matter at all, but suffering its lot as something that cannot be helped, like the weather. Even late in the nineteenth century, when there were fourteen million wage workers, only a million and a half of them were in trade unions, which meant that only a million and a half of them were selling their labor on systematic Capitalist business principles. Today nearly four and a half millions of them are converts to Capitalism, and duly enrolled in militant unions. Between six and seven hundred battles a year, called trade disputes, are fought; and the number of days of work lost to the nation by them sometimes totals up to ten millions and more. If the matter were not so serious for all of us one could laugh at the silly way in which people talk of the spread of Socialism when what is really threatening them is the spread of Capitalism. The moment the propertyless workers refuse to see the finger of God in their poverty, and begin organizing themselves in unions to make the most money they can out of their labor exactly as they find the landlord doing with his land, the capitalist with his capital, the employer with his knowledge of business, and the financier with his art of promotion, the industry of the country, on which we all depend for our existence, begins rolling faster and faster down two opposite slopes, at the bottom of which there will be a disastrous collision which will bring it to a standstill until either Property drives Labor by main force into undisguised and unwilling slavery, or Labor gains the upper hand, and the long series of changes by which the mastery of the situation has already passed from the landlord-capitalist to the individual employer, from the individual employer to the joint stock company, from the joint stock company to the Trust, and finally from the industrialists in general to the financiers, will culminate in its passing to capitalized Labor. The battle for this supremacy is joined; and here we are in the thick of it, our country ravaged by strikes and lock-outs, a huge army of unemployed billeted upon us, the ladies and gentlemen declaring that it is all the fault of the workers, and the workers either declaring that it is all the fault of the ladies and gentlemen, or else, more sensibly, concluding that it is the fault of the Capitalist system, and taking to Socialism not so much because they understand it as because it promises a way out.

When this open war was first declared, the employers used their command of Parliament to have it punished as a crime. The unions were classed as conspiracies; and anybody who joined one was held to be a conspirator and punished accordingly. This did not prevent the unions: it only “drove them underground”: that is, made secret societies of them, and thereby put them into the hands of more determined and less law-abiding leaders. The Government at last found it impossible to go on with such coercion; for the few cases in which the law could be carried out had the effect of martyrdoms, producing noisy popular agitations, and stimulating Trade Unionism instead of suppressing it.

Then the employers tried what they could do for themselves. They refused to employ unionists. This was no use: they could not get enough non-unionist labor to go on with: and the unionists whom they had to employ refused to work with non-unionists. Then the employers refused to “recognize” the unions, which meant that they refused to negotiate questions of wages with the secretaries of the unions, and insisted on dealing with their employees directly and individually, one at a time. This also failed. Making a separate bargain with each employee is easy enough in the case of a woman engaging a domestic servant or an oldfashioned merchant engaging a clerk or warehouseman; but when men have to be taken on by the hundred, and sometimes by the thousand, separate bargaining is impossible. The big employers who talked about it at first really meant that there was to be no bargaining at all. The men were to come in and just take what they were told were the wages of the firm, and not presume to argue. The moment the formation of the unions enabled the men to bargain, the big employers, to save their own time, had to insist on its being done with a single representative of the men who was experienced in bargaining and qualified to discuss business: that is, with the secretary of the Trade Union; so that all the fuss ended in the unions being not only recognized by the big employers, but looked on as a necessary part of their industry. Finally the unions were legalized; and here, as in the case of the Married Women’s Property Acts, the change from outlawry to legal protection went a little beyond the mark, in its reaction against previous injustice, and gave the Trade Unions privileges and immunities which are not enjoyed by ordinary societies. The employers then found that they also must act together in dealing with the Trade Unions. Accordingly, they formed unions of their own, called Employers’ Federations. The war of Capital with Labor is now a war of Trade Unions with Employers’ Federations. Their battles, or rather blockades, are lock-outs and strikes, lasting, like modern military battles, for months.

Though some of the battles are about victimization (that is, discharging an employee for actively advocating Trade Unionism, or refusing to reinstate a prominent striker when the strike is over), all the disputes in which ground is won or lost are about wages or hours of work. You must understand that there are two sorts of wages: time wages and piecework wages. Time wages are paid for the employee’s time by the month, week, day, or hour, no matter how much or how little work may be done during those periods. Piecework wages are paid according to the work done: so much for each piece of work turned out.

Now you would suppose that the employees would be unanimously in favor of time wages, and the employers of piecework wages: indeed this was roughly so in early days. But the introduction of machinery altered the case. Piecework wages are really only time wages paid in such a way as to prevent the employee from slacking. He has to keep hard at it to earn the wage; but the amount of the wage is arrived at by considering whether what he can make in an hour or a day or a week at piecework will enable him to live in the way he is accustomed to live, or, as it is called, to maintain his standard of subsistence. Now suppose a machine is invented by which he can turn out twice as many pieces in a day as before. He will then find that he has earned as much in the week by Wednesday evening as he had previously earned by Saturday. What will he do? You may think, if you are a very energetic lady, that he will put in the whole week as usual, and rejoice his wife by bringing home twice as much money. But that is not what a man is like. He prefers a shillingsworth of leisure to another shillingsworth of bread and cheese or a new hat for his wife. What he actually does is to bring her just what he brought her before, and have a holiday on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, leaving his employer with no labor to go on with, and perhaps with the most pressing contracts to be finished by a certain date. To force him to remain at work the whole week the employer has to “cut the rate”: that is, to reduce the piecework wage by half. Then the fat is in the fire: the Trade Union resists the reduction fiercely, and threatens that if the employees are to have no benefit from the new machine they will refuse to work it. There was a time when the introduction of machines led to riots and the wrecking of newly equipped factories by furious mobs of handworkers. When the mobs were replaced by Trade Unions the introduction of new machines was often followed by strikes and lock-outs. But when the heated personal disputes of hot-headed employers with resentful employees gave way to cool negotiations between experienced secretaries of Employers’ Federations and equally experienced secretaries of Trade Unions, who had settled similar difficulties many times before, it became an established practice to readjust the piecework wage so as to allow the employee to share the benefit of the machine with the employer. The only question was how much each could claim.

On time wages the employee gets no benefit from the introduction of a machine. The product of his labor may be multiplied a hundred times; but he remains as poor as before. That is why in many industries the employees insist on piecework wages, and the employers would be only too glad to pay time wages: all the more because, when machinery comes into play, the machine works the man instead of the man working the machine, and slacking becomes either impossible or easy to detect.

But it often happens that neither the time wage worker nor the piece wage worker has any say in the matter at all, for the very simple reason that the introduction of the machine enables the employer to “slack the lot” and replace them by girls who are only machine minders. And we have already seen what the effect of women’s and girls’ labor has on wages. Besides, Trade Unionism is weaker among women than among men, because, as most women regard industrial employment as merely a temporary expedient to keep them going until they get married, they will not take the duty of combination as seriously as the men, who know that they will be industrial employees all their lives. In the Lancashire weaving industry, where women do not retire from the factory when they marry, the women’s unions are as strong as the men’s.

In the long run the reserves of the employer are so much greater than those of the employees that though John Stuart Mill’s statement in the middle of last century that the wage workers had not benefited by the introduction of machinery is no longer quite true, yet they have gained so little in comparison with the prodigiously greater national output from the machines, that it is putting it very mildly to say that they have not only not gained but lost ground heavily relatively to the capitalists.