The ethical collision: When the right to strike meets the public trust

“ The whole labor movement, with its organizations of workingmen, its labor legislation, its strikes and boycotts, its brotherhood of industry, its demand for shorter hours and larger wages, its rude and sometimes barbaric attempts to exercise control over industrial enterprises in which it has no capital invested, its attempts at profit-sharing and cooperation, its proposed nationalization of land and of industries, is all a movement toward industrial democracy ”

“ What's the name of the story, Doctor?"
"Well," said the Doctor, settling himself back in his chair, "I think I'll call this story 'The Invalids' Strike.'"
"What's a strike?" asked Gub-Gub.
"And what on earth is an invalid?" cried the pushmi-pullyu.
"A strike," said the Doctor, "is when people stop doing their own particular work in order to get somebody else to give them what they want. And an invalid—well, an invalid is a person who is always—er, more or less—ill." ”

“ See if we don’t dang th’ masters this time. See if they don’t come and beg us to come back at our own price. That’s all. We’ve missed it afore time, I grant yo’; but this time we’n laid our plans desperate deep.”
“Why do you strike?” asked Margaret. “Striking is leaving off work till you get your own rate of wages, is it not? You must not wonder at my ignorance; where I come from I never heard of a strike.”
“I wish I were there,” said Bessie, wearily. “But it’s not for me to get sick and tired o’ strikes. This is the last I’ll see. ”

“ Note further that the kinds of conduct which our intuitions regard as authoritatively prescribed are such as long social contact has shown to be essential to the well-being of society, and that this same well-being furnishes us the test of our duty to fulfill obligations which for any reason have become ambiguous and indefinite. May we not conclude, then, that the fulfillment of duty to self and to society is the true end of economic action? If so, "let us bind love with duty, for duty is the love of law, and law is the nature of the Eternal." ”

“ The new laws providing for physical valuation as a basis for determining rates for the use of public utility products or services are an evidence of this change of attitude.
That the public, the user, has been slow to recognize his real interest in public service corporations does not in the least lessen the rightfulness of that interest, or its substantial basis in fact. A savage has little or no ethical life; for although an ethical principle may be absolute per se, the strength of that principle applied depends on contributory circumstances of a nature to compel its recognition. ”

“ Moreover, experience shows that the cost of strikes both to capital and labor in terms of financial losses, physical and moral suffering, and otherwise is enor­mous. Such loss, directly or indirectly, is shared by the whole community. Strikes should not, therefore, be used except as a last resort, for the settlement of industrial and agrarian disputes or for securing recognition of the rights of labor. ”

“ The employers will often, to break a strike, pay to others for a time more than the current rate of wages. The success of the strikers being dependent on their ability to keep the employer from filling their places, their energies are bent upon that end. The losses that strikes cause to workers in stoppage of wages, to employers and investors in destruction of plant and in suspension of profits, and to the public in the interruption of business, aggregate an enormous sum. ”

“ Those who affect such horror at the idea of a teachers’ strike argue that the teachers are public servants, dedicated to a sacred cause. Of course; and all I want to do is to extend the boundaries of this service and this cause. I contend that coal-miners are also public servants, and likewise oil-workers and railway-workers, and every man or woman who contributes the labor upon which civilization rests. I assert that all these workers now occupy the status of industrial serfs, and must raise themselves to the status of industrial citizens. ”

“ At these more developed stages in the wage system, there is from now on not a step toward security or progress, unless labor (as well as the public) is allowed some voice in management. This is the lesson which every industrial autocrat has to learn. Strictly on this issue, the side of the striker is as sacred as any struggling reform in human history. It has long been as sacred as at present, but the practically eventful fact now is that millions of wage earners have become sensitively conscious of the situation. ”

“ The new members the " raw heads " of the Com- mittee are almost hoping that the employers will not agree, for to them a strike means merely a few weeks' " play," at the expense of the Union. And the ordinary workman is so little used to discussing with his adversaries that any statement of the other side of the case is apt to arouse temper. The employers, too, unaccustomed to treating with their men, and still feeling it somewhat derogatory to do so, are not inclined to mince matters, or smooth over difficulties. Hence the meeting becomes noisy ; discussion turns into recrimination ”

“ A great strike threatens to involve the Society in desperate war. Un- consciously biased by distaste for the hard and unthankful work which a strike entails, he finds himself in small sympathy with the men's demands, and eventually arranges a compromise on terms distasteful to a large section of his members. ”

“ And I assure you, if you could attend the meetings we have had in Philadelphia, in Bridgeport last night, in Haverhill and in Harrison, and throughout the country, you would agree that industrialism is coming. There isn't anything can stop it. (Applause.)
Questions by the Audience.
Q.—Don't you think there is a lot of waste involved in the general strike in that the sufferers would be the workers in larger portion than the capitalists? The capitalist class always has money and can buy food, while the workers will just have to starve and wait. ”

“ No strike had ever before taken place under such favorable circumstances to make trouble. Never before were so many of the resident laborers out of work, never before was the country so filled with tramps to flock to such a scene of disturbance, never before was the laboring class of the whole country so ready to join in a move of that kind, and never before were the civil authorities of the city so utterly incompetent to deal with such an outbreak, or if not incompetent, then criminally negligent, in not making an earnest effort to enforce the law. ”

“ The railroaders there are organized in one great industrial union, one card, taking into membership the stenographers, train dispatchers, freight handlers, train crews and section crews. Everyone who works on the railroad is a member of the organization; not like it is in this country, split up into as many divisions as they can possibly get them into. There they are all one. There was a great general strike. It resulted in the country taking over the railroads. But the government made the mistake of placing politicians in control, giving politicians the management of the railroads. ”

“ I have pledged myself and my colleagues in the cabinet to a continuous encouragement of initiative, responsibility and energy in serving the public interest. Let every public servant know, whether his post is high or low, that a man’s rank and reputation in this Administration will be determined by the size of the job he does, and not by the size of his staff, his office or his budget. Let it be clear that this Administration recognizes the value of dissent and daring—that we greet healthy controversy as the hallmark of healthy change. Let the public service be a proud and lively career. ”

“ Above all, let us, as we value our own self-respect, face the responsibilities with proper seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must demand the highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability those public servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the nation or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon our strength and our resources.
Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster. ”

“ The diseases of the age are nervous diseases, and women are growing more nervously high-strung and uncontrollable every day, yet the doctors stand helplessly by and cannot stop it. When, however, there shall be a school of doctresses of high culture and thorough medical education going in and out among the sex with the proper medical authority, they will see, and will be able to prevent, much of the moral and physical neglect and imprudence which, now unchecked in school and home, make such havoc of the vital forces of the present generation. ”

“ The property of the physiologist alone, they might perhaps lie barren; used by the physician or surgeon, they soon bear fruit. The hint given by a physiologist of the past generation becomes a household word with the doctors of the present, and their records in turn offer rich stores of suggestive and corrective facts for the physiologists of the generation to come. Take away from the practical art of medicine the theoretical truths of physiology, and you would have left a crowd of busy idlers in full strife over fantastic ideas. ”

“ Our mechanics have so far become machines, that, like clocks, as clocks ought to be, they are all striking together.
Should this mania spread, we shall have Striking become what might be called the order, but that it will be the disorder, of the day. The professions will strike; you will send for your lawyer to make your will, and your messenger will return with non est inventus—struck; or should you ask the legal gentleman a six-and-eightpenny question, you will discover that he has struck for 13s. 4d. The physicians and surgeons will strike for two-guinea fees ”

“ We can see plainly enough why it is (in the lowest sense) the interest of medical men to exclude women from their profession,—though, thank God, there are hundreds of medical men who would scorn to put their interests in one scale when justice weighed down the other,—but it is not the interest of the public or of the nation to sanction any such monopoly; [119] —it is their interest {135}to throw open the gates of competition as widely as possible, insisting only on a uniform standard of attainment for all, of either sex, who would enter them ”

“ Is it not simply shameful that all that I have now been relating should be possible in this country, and possible because of a law which appoints but one door to the medical profession,—that of Registration,—limits Registration to those who have passed through certain definite Schools, and satisfied certain definite Boards, and yet allows those Schools and Boards absolute power to shut their doors on one-half of the human race, and that even in the case of Universities largely subsidised from public funds, and at a time when the public are positively clamouring for women doctors for women? ”

“ Perhaps you think we should take medicine for this sickness, but we can find none of any use. The white men of God have tried many kinds of medicine: medicine to drink, and also the kind which they put into one’s arm with a needle; but these only did good for a little while, and then the sickness was as bad as ever. Our own people have tried their own medicines, our witch-doctors also have tried to cure it by means of their fetishes; but all alike are useless. We often ask the white men if their doctors have found the medicine ”

“ To draw around the whole nation the strength of the general government, as a barrier against foreign foes, to watch the borders of every State, that no external hand may intrude, or disturb the exercise of self-government reserved to itself, to equalize and moderate the public contributions, that while the requisite services are invited by due remuneration, nothing beyond this may exist to attract the attention of our citizens from the pursuits of useful industry, nor unjustly to burthen those who continue in those pursuits—these are functions of the general government on which you have a right to call. They are in unison with those principles which have met the approbation of the Representatives of Vermont, as announced by myself on the former and recent occasions alluded to. ”

“ The public, therefore, has steadily become more interested in all methods and agencies designed to conserve better relations between employers and wageworkers, and to diminish or, if possible, to do away with strikes when individual and collective bargaining between the two parties fail. ”

“ Still, various reflections should encourage us to go ahead in the search for some policy of wage adjustment for which the necessary general consent can be won. First of all, there is the fact that there is urgent need for industrial peace; that great suffering, and the constant disruption of industry, will be an accompaniment of a continuation of industrial conflict. And it is essential to the settlement of most economic issues, as well as political, that the members of a society do take heed of the needs of the society. It is the origin and justification of the habit of political compromise. ”

“ ¶The first essential in determining how to deal with the great industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts—publicity. In the interest of the public, the Government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations engaged in interstate business. Publicity is the only sure remedy which we can now invoke. What further remedies are needed in the way of governmental regulation, or taxation, can only be determined after publicity has been obtained, by process of law, and in the course of administration. ”

“ And society must continue to suffer from the violence and waste of strikes until it teaches employers and workingmen and itself a higher and better way.
May not it be possible that the outcome will be that associations of wage-earners are to be treated as the equals of the employer? Will not the democratic spirit of the age to come so permeate the industrial as well as the political world that the laborer and the employer will each have a share in the business they together carry on? ”

“ Every important treatise on the subject, appearing at present, admits that the crucial question of the industrial problem is an ethical problem, and every ethical treatise, that every ethical problem is a psychological problem. ”

“ The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of fact in which a man finds himself; the ethical activity is that which, although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to [Pg 313] something that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called individual ends, to the second universal ends; the one gives rise to the judgment concerning the greater or less coherence of the action taken in itself, the other to that concerning its greater or less coherence in respect to the universal end, which transcends the individual. ”

“ Hence, our test of ethical economics is social well-being. Let us subject the working of the strongest economic force to this test.
Industrial competition does not engender a struggle for existence, but rather a struggle for subsistence, and generally a struggle for a subsistence of a particular kind. Where the standard of living is high and the wages of the workingmen correspond to it, it is obvious that, other things being equal, the laborer who is well fed and well clothed will produce more than if under-fed and scantily clothed. ”

“ Wages are abundantly able to take care of themselves in the ordinary way, as goods do, and stocks and bonds; and an enlightened Public Opinion is fast coming to see, that a man's personal service rendered needs no more the oversight of the State in its sale than his horse, or note of hand at interest. Strikes, and lock-outs, and all extraordinary courts or boards to settle quarrels between a labor-giver and a labor-taker as such, since it is a case of ordinary buying and selling, are foredoomed to pass out in the good time coming. ”

“ The working class alone is interested in the removal of industrial inequality, and that can only be accomplished by a revolution of the industrial system. The workers, in their collectivity, must take over and operate all the essential industrial institutions, the means of production and distribution, for the well-being of all the human elements comprising the international nation of wealth-producers. ”

“ But all of these products have more social value when they are transported to places of manufacture and commerce, where they are transformed and converted into commodities for exchange.
The life of human beings will not consist of common drudgery alone when all the good things created are enjoyed by the workers.
For all purposes, present and the future, the functions of the public service institutions have to be defined, and people engaged in their maintenance must be given a place in the industrial organization; the same as those who take care of the sick and disabled. ”