Labour movement

“ Amongst these means the Labour movement stands first, and we should be wrong to neglect it. In this movement we find numbers of workers who struggle for the amelioration of their conditions. They may be mistaken as to the aim they have in view and as to the means of attaining it, and in our view they generally are. ”

“ Connected as this development was with poor relief, one of its chief aims was to prevent future unemployment and vagrancy by training in habits and knowledge of industry, but not unavowed was another motive: “from children thus trained up to constant labour we may venture to hope the lowering of its price.” [5] The evils and excesses which lay enfolded within such a movement gave the first impulse to the new ventures in labour legislation which are specially the work of the 19th century. ”

“ In the hurry of the Industrial Revolution, invention proceeded at an accelerating pace, and the introduction of some new appliance into a single industry might reduce the demand for labour by a quarter, or a half, or even three-quarters, and almost depopulate a town at a single blow. ”

“ But the constant contact with the factory operatives, the pressure of the great capitalists, which is much more felt than that of the small employer p. 209to whom the apprentice still stood in a more or less personal relation, the influences of life in towns, and the fall of wages, have made nearly all the handicraftsmen active participators in labour movements. ”

“ We do not look upon the labour union as an ultimate conception of labour, but we believe that whatever progress has been made in the lot of the labourer has been due wholly to the organization of the wage-workers! ”

“ We have already noted how the industrial revolution had split the manufacturing class, which had hitherto been a middling and various sort of class, into two sections, the employers, who became rich enough to mingle with the financial, merchandizing, and landowning classes, and the employees, who drifted to a status closer and closer to that of mere gang and agricultural labour. ”

“ As I hinted before, in the new order of things all branches of labour will be organised in a similar way to the arrangements we see to-day in large factories, large estates, or institutions of the Government. Unnecessary work will be avoided, and the reward for work done will be greater. Labour will not be wasted in making luxuries for the idle, but will be usefully employed in making the necessaries of life for other workers. ”

“ When the reader comes to consider this,—which is the great industrial object lesson of modern times,—when he sees what the share is which Labour has appropriated so triumphantly, he will see how the conclusions we have here arrived at, with regard to the causes of production, afford a foundation for the hopes and claims of Labour, as broad and solid as that by which they support the rights of Ability. ”

“ The poverty and destitution of the working-classes as compared with the wealthier section of the community led to dissemination among the workers of revolutionary ideas, political and socialistic. One can read in the newspapers of the time, even as far back as 1829, familiar doctrines—that Labour is the only source of wealth—that the [47] working-men are the support of the middle and upper classes, the nerves and soul of production, the foundation of the nation. ”

“ The forces that are going to help, apparently, in this evolution will be the labour exchange—the centre for the mobilization of labour, the produce exchange, the inventor's spirit in the labour unions and employers' associations, and the gradual organization by inventors of the common vision of all men, and setting it at work on the supreme task of modern life—the task of drawing out, evoking each particular man in the world, and in behalf of all, freeing him for his own particular place. ”

“ If all the workmen of the world to-morrow morning knew what Frederick Taylor (the American engineer) knows about planning workmen's work so that they receive, for the same expenditure of strength, a third more wages every day, the whole attitude of labour in every nation and of the trades unions of the world—the attitude of doing as little work as possible, of labouring and studying and slaving away to discover ways of not being of any use to employers—would face about in a day. ”

“ The emancipation of the working class demands the transformation of the instruments of labour into the common property of society and the co-operative control of the total labour, with application of the product of labour to the common good, and just distribution of the same. ”

“ In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. ”

“ With the outbreak of industrialism in the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the institution and introduction of "labour-saving" machinery and the consequent division of labour, the factory system, the joint-stock company and capitalism, this new slavery was extended to industrial workers, and with its establishment disappeared the element of joy in labour. ”

“ The nature of most work, the conditions under which it was done, and the payment for it, were determined by the employer in all mechanized industries, and a new proletariat came into existence, divorced alike from all personal control of other factors of production than labour, and devoted to the performance of some single narrow action contributing to a complex co-operative process of production which had no human concern for the great mass of wage-earners. ”

“ The labor union movement, unlike the political socialist revolutionary movement, undertakes in its operation to supply labor with a certain working content, which the administrative scheme of industry has excluded from the experience of its workers. ”

“ From the great central rallying places of industry the Labor Movement has proceeded, which within a few decades has spread from England over France, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, and has attained power and definite form in the foundation of the International Workingmen's Association. ”

“ Finally, that all so-called "immediate demands" of the workers, such as the eight hour work day, employers' liability, limitation of child labor, protection of machinery, etc., can be obtained and made effective only through the action of a united and powerful movement of the working class on the industrial field. ”

“ That type of employer has never recognized that capital, [286] brains and manual labour fill separate and distinct rôles in industry. He looks upon himself as the all-dominant personality and Labour as his feudal and dependent hireling. ”

“ As fast as labor has become conscious it has organized. The ambition of these class-conscious men is that the movement shall become general, that all labor shall become conscious of itself and its class interests. And the day that witnesses the solidarity of labor, they triumphantly affirm, will be a day when labor dominates the world. This growing consciousness has led to the organization of two movements, both separate and distinct, but both converging toward a common goal--one, the labor movement, known as Trade Unionism; the other, the political movement, known as Socialism. ”

“ But the passing of such a measure as the above, is nevertheless a proof of the increasing demand for labour, and of the advance of regular industrial employment, which is always an important step in the progress of civilization. ”

“ Only Workers’ Control over capitalist enterprises, cultivating the workers’ conscious attitude toward work, and making clear its social meaning, can create conditions favourable to the development of a firm self-discipline in labour, and the development of all labour’s possible productivity.
6. The impending transformation of industry from a war to a peace basis, and the redistribution of labour all over the country, as well as among the different factories, can be accomplished without great disturbances only by means of the democratic self-government of the workers themselves.... ”

“ The main substance of this immense problem of organising labour, and first of all of managing the working classes, will, it is very clear, have to be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it, by those who themselves work and preside over work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the manifestations of the modern labor movement had appeared, in germ at least, by the time the mid-century was reached: unions, labor leaders, strikes, a labor press, a labor political program, and a labor political party. ”

“ As in early England the various stages of village industrial life, medieval town manufacture, and organization in craft gilds, and the beginnings of the mercantile system, were parallel with a greater or less prevalence of serfdom and even with the presence in part of slavery, so in other ages and civilizations the various methods of organization of labour are found to some extent together. ”

“ Even while it is clear, however, that manual labour, or the application of the bodily forces—with or without mechanical aid—to personal maintenance and the production of goods, remains the common lot of the majority of citizens of the most developed modern communities, still there is much risk of confusion if modern technical terms such as “labour,” “employer,” “labour legislation” are freely applied to conditions in bygone civilizations with wholly different industrial organization and social relationships. ”

“ Then there is the apparently inevitable antagonism between labour and capital, between the employer and employed, which drives the worker to Social Democracy, as offering the prospect of his becoming his own master and enjoying the whole fruits of his labour. ”

“ The division of labour, which has played so great a part in furthering competitive commerce, till it has become a machine with powers both reproductive and destructive, which few dare to resist, and none can control or foresee the result of, has pressed specially hard on that part of the field of human culture in which I was born to labour. ”

“ If, therefore, in our historical sketch, modern industry, on the one hand; the labour of those who are physically and legally minors, on the other, play important parts, the former was to us only a special department, and the latter only a specially striking example of labour exploitation. ”

“ The Political System of Socialism.—The progressive disintegration of the capitalist system, which has been increasingly taking place during the years of war, and not less during the years of peace following the war, makes it ever more urgent that Labour should assume power in society. In the term Labour we include not merely the manual working wage-earners, but also the intellectual workers of all kinds, the independent handicraftsmen and peasant cultivators, and, in short, all those who co-operate by their exertions in the production of utilities of any kind. ”

“ But in that control, as exercised in the ancient world, one element was wanting which is the essence of modern industry. When the masters of ancient labour wished to multiply commodities, or to secure an increase of power for accomplishing some single work, the sole means known to them was to increase the number of labourers; and when one thousand slaves were insufficient, to reinforce them with (let us say) four thousand more. The masters of modern labour pursue a new and essentially opposite course. ”

“ But what reasoning will not do, industrial history will. Industrial history will provide us with an answer of the most striking kind—general, indeed, in its character; but not, for that reason, any the less decided, or less full of instruction. For industrial history, in a way which few people realise, will show us how, during the past hundred years, Labour [244] has actually succeeded in accomplishing the feat we are considering; how, without checking the development and the power of Ability, it has been able to appropriate year by year a certain share of what Ability produces. ”

“ Upon the progressive improvement of the Social Powers of Labour, such as are derived from production on a grand scale, concentration of capital and combination of labour, subdivision of labour, machinery, improved methods appliance of chemical and other natural agencies, shortening of time and space by means of communication and transport, and every other contrivance by which science presses natural agencies into the service of labour, and by which the social or co-operative character of labour is developed. ”

“ Always the struggle for existence itself has been uppermost. No wonder the conclusion can justly be drawn that the American labor movement has not always played a highly productive role in American industry. ”

“ In these two years you will happen on your quota of labor stories to cover. The machinists, the railroaders, the miners, the printers, or some one piece of the trade union movement gets more and more of your interest. Put on overalls, break a bone or two, live lean and fight around inside your fellows' union. Beside observing what they don't read, you will learn what men live for and what little they work for. ”