Indentured labor

“ There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society against it because of these patent faults, and closes the hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the Gradgrinds—"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."
Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults. These faults spring largely out of the defective social conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed. ”

“ The sale of labor involves the obeying of orders during certain hours specified in the contract. Here again the evil is greatest in the lowest grades of work, while the great majority of wage-earners are left a large measure of choice in the time and manner of their work. Where labor is severe and without joy to the worker, it appears to be little better than a form of slavery. Contrast the condition of the section hand, cursed and beaten by a brutal foreman, with that of the wage-earner in the locomotive-cab, self-respecting, self-directing, and trusted with the safety of property and lives. ”

“ Many workers objected to what was called the waste of labor. It was pointed out that under the Socialistic rule, the product of labor had to go to labor, and as the building of the flying machine factory was not producing food or clothing, and the workers on it had to be supported by the labor of the whole community, it was making a distinct class of them, which was illegal. ”

“ First shoemakers, then carpenters and railroad men, and stone-masons, and iron-molders, and hod-carriers—all wanting higher wages. Where does the happiness and content come in? I heard you say, yourself, the other day, that the disorganized system of labor was such in this country, that it was degenerating into socialism and anarchy and was ruining every branch of business. ”

“ This is not a plea of free workmen, but of slaves begging to be better fed.
(b) They may complain of too many hours of labor; but the number of hours of labor is arbitrarily fixed. There is no valid constant reason why one should wish to work less. In the management of one's own work, and the collection of his own earnings, there are times when long hours, of the strain of labor, are necessary, and there are other times when ease can be taken. With no standard of earnings or time, it is impossible to arrive at a just and satisfactory settlement. ”

“ The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. ”

“ What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. ”

“ Question—Is it right to speak of wage-slavery, for instance, in cases where the hours of labor are so prolonged as to leave no time for higher interests, or where the relations of the laborer to his employer are such as to impair his moral independence? ”

“ It is therefore a consequence of this inexorable and cruel law that you (and for this reason in my pamphlet on the working class to which you refer in your letter I have called you the class of the disinherited) are forever necessarily excluded from the productiveness which increases in amount through the progress of civilization, i.e., from the increased product of industry, from the increased earning power of your own work! For you there remain forever the bare necessities of life, for the employer everything produced by labor beyond this amount. ”

“ Labor has awakened the state to a sense of responsibility for its great sins of neglect and has made it conscious of its social duties. Labor, like other elements of society, has often been selfish, narrow, vindictive ”

“ Another deplorable consequence of this inorganization is the disgust which workmen feel for their employment, in addition to the insufficiency of their wages. And this is quite conceivable, for nothing is done to render their labor attractive, either by variety of occupations, or by honorary rewards, or by proper care, or by remuneration proportionate to the benefits which their toil provides, or by the hope of rest after long years of industry. No—the country thinks not, cares not, either for their wants or their rights. ”

“ There is nothing strange in the fact that, in spite of the enormous increase in productive power which this century has witnessed, and which is still going on, the wages of labor in the lower and wider strata of industry should everywhere tend to the wages of slavery—just enough to keep the laborer in working condition. ”

“ The degradation of the idea of labor, which results inevitably from enslaving the working class, operates to a great extent in preventing respectable working men of the middling classes from settling or remaining in slave states. ”

“ The proletariat has arisen; and wherever the struggle of the laborers has taken definite form, the bourgeois codes have been convicted of falsehood. Written judgment has shown itself powerless to save the wage-workers from the oscillations of the market, to guarantee women and children against the oppressive hours of the factories, or to find an expedient to solve the problem of forced idleness. The partial limitation of the hours of labor has, itself alone, been the subject and the occasion of a gigantic struggle. ”

“ In periods of commercial revulsion and distress, like the present, the distress, in countries of free labor, falls principally on the laborers. In those of slave labor, it falls almost exclusively on the employer. ”

“ Everywhere you hear the laborer, the artisan, the clerk complain of his position and his occupation, while they long for the time when they can retire from work imposed upon them by necessity. To be repugnant, to have for its motive and pivot nothing but the fear of starvation, is the great, the fatal, characteristic of civilised labor. The civilised workman is condemned to penal servitude. So long as productive labor is so organized that instead of being associated with pleasure it is associated with pain, weariness and dislike, it will always happen that all will avoid it who are able. ”

“ We now approach a yet more thorny subject than the organisation of the workers. What should be the remuneration of labor—what the share of the product taken respectively by the individual, the municipality, and the State?
The answer depends on the answer to a previous question. Is the organisation of the unemployed to be undertaken in order to transform them into self-supporting, self-respecting citizens; or is it to be carried on as a form of exploitation, utilising pauper labor for the production of profit for non-paupers? ”

“ There is too commonly as little sense of identity with the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent in work should be rendered for the pay received. In forms irritating beyond expression employers are made to feel that their employees do not in the least mind wasting their material, injuring their property, and blocking their business in the most critical moments. Under what possible system, save in a grievous dearth of laborers, can such labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw high wages? ”

“ Irregularities in the conduct of industry and in the method of employing labor are evident in dock work, in the unskilled work in iron and steel, and in slaughtering and meat packing; in the competitive conditions in industries which force employers to cut labor cost down to the utmost and to close down in order to save operating expenses ”

“ Prosperity and contentment can only be found where all industrial pursuits prove remunerative; where manual labor not only supports the laborer, but enables him to acquire a competence in process of time. That division of labor and capital which compels the laborer to toil daily to keep want from his door, and is so inflexible that the sickness of a single day entails the loss of necessaries to his family, is a species of slavery. ”

“ Active labor men have all the dice loaded against them. All labor is on trial with Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It is bound up with all the fight that is going on for the closed shop and the determinations of the employers to smash the worker’s organizations. ”

“ Honest labor, continued through reasonable hours, paid at a rate which assures a wholesome support, is ennobling; but overwork, that is hopeless of comfortable reward, is degrading in the extreme. On the continent of Europe, where men and women work in the factories for fourteen and sixteen hours in a day, the laborers are reduced simply to machines. ”

“ Never before did labor do these things. After the Great Plague in England, labor, finding itself in demand and innocently obeying the economic law, asked higher wages. But the masters set a maximum wage, restrained workingmen from moving about from place to place, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal methods punished those who disobeyed. But labor is accorded greater respect today. ”

“ As an illustration of the kind of hyperbole characteristic of labor-management strife, this 'libel' is hardly incendiary. To the experienced eye, it is pale and anemic when compared with the rich and colorful charges freely exchanged in the heat of many labor disputes. ”

“ That the economic subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence ”

“ The million menial workers among us include 300,000 upper servants,—skilled men and women of character, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks, who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movement to lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to define their duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personal largess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food. ”

“ It was at this point that the convict labor problem began and it has steadily expanded from that time to this and while there have been some temporary modifications of the evil, it is still an unmitigated curse from which there can be no escape while an economic system endures in which labor, that is to say the laborer, man, woman and child, is sold to the lowest bidder in the markets of the world. ”

“ It is you, deprived of all political or other privileged powers—you, with nothing but a precarious starvation wage—who are to create from yourselves both the power and the wealth necessary for your emancipation. Now you know that every time you work under the present system, you give your employer nearly the whole of your product, simply because he is your employer. That great philosopher, Adam Smith, tells you that the natural wages of labor are the whole product of labor ”

“ The sum and essence of every wrong and injustice that can hedge about the worker is found at this point, and remains a problem to every worker among the poor, the solving of which will mean the solution of the whole labor question. ”

“ But provided each one furnishes the quantity of labor demanded of him, whatever be the time he employs, they are entitled to equal wages.
Shall the laborer who is capable of finishing his task in six hours have the right, on the ground of superior strength and activity, to usurp the task of the less skilful laborer, and thus rob him of his labor and bread? Who dares maintain such a proposition? He who finishes before the others may rest, if he chooses ”

“ “There is this difference— where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages anyhow—they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.” ”

“ The task is far beyond our present opportunity. It is worth while, however, for present purposes, to delimit the task sharply, and to attempt a brief enumeration of the most important of the conditions which determine, on the one hand, the need of the productive system for labor, and, on the other hand, the supply of labor—that is, of the relative plenty or scarcity of labor. ”

“ When we come to questions between labor and its employers, more than this is true. The employers of labor as a class are closely in sympathy with the honest desire of their men to better themselves, and the constant increase in the employment of arbitration to settle difficulties, the experiments in co-operation and profit-sharing, and the furnishing of cheap and good houses to the workers are all evidences of this fact. ”

“ The philanthropological demand for it is founded on the thought that work is a dreadful thing, imposed by capitalistic task masters, that ought to be escaped whenever and however possible. The labor union principle is parasitic. ”

“ The field is too great, the problem too complicated, for the human mind to grasp.
To fix the value of labor is to fix all values—labor being the foundation of all values. The value of labor cannot be fixed unless we understand the relations that all things bear to each other and to man. If labor were a legal tender—if a judgment for so many dollars could be discharged by so many days of labor,—and the law was that twelve hours of work should be reckoned as one day, then the law could change the hours to ten or eight, and the judgments could be paid in the shortened days. ”