The Iron Man and the Job

I

IN The Bronze Woman the plutocrat’s wife says: ‘Social unrest! Indeed, if the laboring classes want more rest, why don’t they take it?’ Escorting a more charming, but equally sheltered, representative of the fortunate class to luncheon, I once met a picket line of cooks and waiters at their moment of impact with the police.

‘What are they fighting for?’ asked my companion.

‘Their jobs,’ I replied. ‘Cooks’ and waiters’ strike.’

‘Strange,’ she observed, ‘that any one should fight for the chance to stand over a cookstove.’

Later, in a ‘serve-self,’ I tried to enlighten her; but it was love’s labor lost. Indeed, I am sure the job is something of a mystery to most of us — an impenetrable mystery to those who never have known insecurity, and hardly better understood by those who live by and for their jobs every day of their lives.

In a list of the things men fight for, the job ranks well toward the top. Many a man who must be drafted to fight for his country rushes to the defense of his job with clenched fists. Tame men, who have to be spurred by oratory and propaganda to throw themselves into great causes, come up bristling like terriers for the job’s sake. Men who actually hate their jobs nevertheless fight for those jobs, risking broken heads and jail sentences. No fiercer hatred can be roused in human breast than that which flares in the heart of the common man against his enemy on the job — the ‘scab.’ I once heard a union leader give his complete opinion of the scab, and, for searing hate, it outdid war profanity.

A man will leave his job on strike, for reasons which appear absurd to the calm observer; and yet will rage like mad at whoever steps into his shoes. In his calm moments he may subscribe to the theory that every man has a right to work; but he never concedes to anyone else the right to work at a job that he considers his, by reason of recent occupancy and willingness to return under certain conditions.

He who depends upon a job vests himself with a proprietary interest therein. Instincts remaining immune to legal distinctions, he speaks of ‘my job,’ when he may be tossed out of it within the hour. No ordinary human ever doubts that he is entitled to the means of life; therefore, the wage-employee instinctively assumes proprietorship over that which is essential to his life. In industrial civilization the job is essential to the common man. His defense of his job, his reaction against the invader who comes between him and his job, is as instant as his defense of his life, his home, or his woman. His job, indeed, is the first line of home-defense. Job gone, the home is in sore danger; unless another job can be found before the savings go, the home is ruined.

Moreover, unless he can keep the job up to standard, he cannot keep his home or himself up to standard. The job is the measure of his social fitness, of his standing in the community; by it the common man rises and by it he falls. Hence the apparent anomaly of a man fighting for that niche in the workaday world which he walked out of is no anomaly at all. The striker leaves the job not of his own free will, but impelled by a conviction that the job needs improving. It is still, in his view, his job; but not worth keeping on existing terms, except as a last resort, under pressure of necessity. When he strikes, he expects to return.

Carleton Parker goes the whole way to accepting the job-man’s point of view. The job, he says, is the worker’s property, because the latter has nothing else. That is sophistry; property is based on possession, not lack. And the jobless worker has something else: his time, his arms and legs, muscles, nerves, powers of will and mind, all of which may be taken into the market and sold, as preliminary to the setting-up of another job on such terms as the market offers. Property, on the contrary, is tangible, transferable. Two men can trade properties without the consent of a third; they cannot so trade their jobs. The job in short, is not property, but is, instead, a personal relationship, which, like so many others, is fast becoming a social relationship.

In a time of depression, large numbers of jobs vanish into thin air. Within a week, a thousand jobs may depart from a community, because of the market’s unwillingness to take the produce of the jobs at the terms offered. The employer must retrench; to delay brings danger of bankruptcy. The men so laid off have n’t their jobs, and the employer has n’t them, and cannot hope to recreate them until he can induce the market to take his accumulated stocks. He would much prefer to have his plant working full time; each slack day costs him, or his corporation, dearly for depreciation, interest charges, and overhead expense. But for the life of him he cannot revive those jobs until the market, properly courted, comes to his rescue. Until then, all he possesses is the mere shell of the vanished jobs — the work-places, standing-room, and the tools of production upon which the market of consumers enforces temporary idleness.

So the job, having departed from both employer and employee, awaits the commanding touch of the market before it can live again. What, pray, is the market? Nothing other than society— the totality of persons and institutions in the trading area. The job depends, therefore, upon consumption; if jobs belong to anyone, they belong to society. Which is equivalent to repeating, in another way, that jobs are not property, because society owns nothing. Individuals, and their various associations of record, own everything appropriable that is worth appropriating. The state, our most inclusive association of record, is held loosely accountable by society for order and general well-being; but until the state can force folk to live according to regimen, consuming thus and so, and not otherwise, the job remains at loose ends — in the air.

II

The free job — free in the sense that it exists as a result of bargaining between free men under the law — is a result of freedom in the larger sphere. It was not present in serfdom, but came into being with freedom; and all efforts to harness it involve a diminution of freedom. The unions, when they try that, encroach upon the liberties of both employers and union members; the employers, when they try it, trespass upon the liberties of individuals; and the state that tries it edges away from liberty. To stabilize the social order, progress in that direction may be necessary; nevertheless, it is an infringement of personal liberty, and every prospective advance in that direction ought to be judged from that point of view — as an invasion of freedom.

The right to work means one thing to John Doe, and something else to his neighbor. Capital and labor—each has its interpretation; the spokesmen of both often talk nonsense; there are rogues and dullards on both sides of the fence. But certain aspects of the case are clear as day. No rights can long remain vested, when the corresponding duties are refused. If labor insists on the right to strike, it cannot logically insist on the right to work. Labor, it seems to me, should cleave to the right to strike, because the exercise of that right has brought the masses real boons; but if it does so, it must cease claiming that work for pay, on the materials and with the tools of others, is a right. Work on such terms is not a right, but a social privilege. Some day it may become a right: there are tendencies working in that direction now; but the process can be completed only by men voiding other rights that they now hold dear, and assuming as duties inhibitions that they now hold to be intolerable.

Both strike and lockout are weapons inevitably called into play when employer and employee contest, to determine the conditions of jobsafter bargaining fails. Use of one cannot be denied fairly, unless the other also is denied; neither, in my opinion, can be dispensed with while men remain free alike to work and to own. However, let it be noted that neither strike nor lockout is used until bargaining has been invoked and has failed, either because one side would not bargain, or because the bargain, once begun, was not completed.

Moreover, neither strike nor lockout is applied unless the applier is convinced that he can win by so doing. No body of men ever yet went on strike for pure principle, in a cause they knew to be hopeless; and no employer ever locked out men simply to make good a point in policy. This is a rough world, but as yet its inhabitants fight for objectives instead of excitement. The railway unions stayed at work in November, 1921, simply because a majority of their leaders became convinced that a strike at the date advertised would be lost. Their eleventh-hour decision not to strike was merely good generalship, with nothing of altruism or accommodation to public needs in it. But better generalship would have been (1) to lie low, like Br’er Rabbit, for a better opportunity; or (2) to say, ‘We yield to save the public inconvenience’; which would have been as untrue as most propaganda, but time-serving and facesaving — a proclamation for political purposes only.

III

Evolution toward industrial security involves inevitably some diminution of industrial freedom for individuals; each generation must choose between having more of the one and less of the other; both cannot be maintained coincidently. The drift now is toward security and away from freedom; the social order gains at the expense of individualism; but thus far the fringe of freedom sheared off has been of small value, because reality departed from it before the knife began to cut. When individuals find it increasingly difficult to produce independently of others; when many are under necessity to toil on materials and at machines owned by a corporation, which, in turn, is owned by numbers of scattered stockholders, there is no paramount advantage in retaining, undisturbed, arrangements effective when individualism in toil was real, and personal independence easily maintained.

To put the case concretely; the laborer who could escape from the pay roll to free land was in a far different situation from his successor, who finds the national domain practically appropriated and farm lands selling above the capitalized value of their earnings. The freedom of the first producer was absolute: he could go or stay; the other’s is relative: he can go only under favoring circumstances not easy to control. The first might resent an interference which the other would welcome, provided it brings compensation in the matter of security. And, likewise, an employer who is keen to defend his right to exploit an expanding market as he sees fit may welcome restraint, when he sees trade slowing down, and realizes that the untrammeled instincts of enterprisers inevitably lead to over-production, which threatens his own security, along with that of his employees. Federal control of credits, which, in the last analysis, means control of business and a more stabilized production, was not badly received by the business world.

The fringe of industrial freedom is now dead tissue, though once tingling with life. The causes of decay in that tissue are many; but prominent among them must be listed the growing influence of automatism, standardization, and interchangeability in fabricating goods. Machinery has increased the insecurity of the common man’s position in the wage-system, by increasing the number of potential competitors for his job. The balance between security and individualism has been destroyed, with the result that personal freedom in work-relations no longer seems worth fighting for, and a new balance must be struck. When personal skill was a prime factor in industry, the individual artisan occupied a fairly safe position, because substitutes were few — a security which had its inevitable offset in the fact that, since shop-practices were not standardized, he had difficulty fitting in elsewhere, and so was more or less tied to the job. The point is that, if he was tied to the job, so likewise was the job tied to him. The management disliked to see him get out of town.

Note the contrast with the present. To-day, he who does ordinary work in a plant highly automatized is in potential competition with every idle man in a far-spread labor market; and, unless the task is arduous indeed, with many women, also. The skill-barrier has been trampled down so completely by the Iron Man, that whoever possesses ordinary intelligence and strength can take the machine-tender’s place after short instruction. The common man’s grip on his job has loosened. If he does n’t like the place, let him get out; plenty of persons can fill his shoes, in short order. And if he must be laid off, there is no need to worry about keeping a string on him until happier times. Out with him; and never mind what becomes of him. Let the man, the community, and the state fret over that.

I do not mean to say that all employers, or any considerable proportion of them, are so ruthless; some of them have gone so far as to risk insolvency out of human, non-economic consideration for their help; but that is the power which automatic machinery puts into employers’ hands — power which the less ethical will be prompt to use; power which competition may force even the most ethical to use, in order to keep his corporation solvent.

IV

The increasing influence of automatic machinery promotes industrial insecurity in another way, — by speeding up market-gluts, — as a result of which jobs vanish as if by magic and are gradually reëstablished. The first English factory equipped for interchangeable manufacture — that at Portsmouth, in 1805 — at once multiplied the productivity of the individual producer of ships’ blocks by ten. From that time on, we have gone along multiplying man-power as measured in goods; and there is apparently no limit at which the process, economically, can be stayed. In spite of tremendous efforts to educate backward peoples in wants, and to force goods into use in trading areas not accustomed to them, —efforts which created part of the background of the World War, — market-gluts and their resultant depressions are recurrent phenomena.

I know that plenty means cheapness and extended use; nevertheless, it is apparent that the social, political, and financial fabric of civilization is not sufficiently sensitive to accommodate itself to these increases in production rapidly enough to avoid vast and poignant distress. Recurrently, production runs ahead of consumption; population increases, but not swiftly enough; wants increase, but not fast enough; the standard of living rises, but not far enough. The patient , society, unable to digest such enormous masses of goods, becomes nauseated and needs purging. Doctors rally to the bedside; nevertheless, recovery is slow. All sorts of persons suffer in these fits of social sickness, but those who suffer most are they who customarily labor for wages with the tools of others. Given the ballot, it is inevitable that they should use it to combat such difficulties.

From the standpoint of national economy, a capable and willing man out of a day’s work is a calamity. Multiplied by millions, the situation is a threat against the state. There was a time when England said to her unemployed: ‘Emigrate.’ Then she kept them up out of the rates; now she combines state relief and doles. No one dares to hint that starvation is expected of the unemployed. Some reactionaries may think it; but they dare not say it. In such a pass, the government, torn between threats of insolvency and revolution, must find jobs — a task for which the state is by its nature unfitted, and which America, more favorably situated, may avoid. Not that we would behave differently under like extremity; but, by taking thought, we may escape the extremity, at least until our population becomes considerably more dense than it is to-day.

Fortunately, the automatic machine and public education provide an ameliorating influence. As wages tend toward a common level, and capital gradually loses its entrepreneur function, considerable progress will be made toward a relative equalizing of incomes. There would remain, of course, incomes derivable from rent and interest; but, for all that we can see to the contrary, super-taxes will discourage such accumulations and gradually shred away large wealth-holdings. As wages are leveled, not absolutely but relatively, so also are incomes likely to be leveled relatively. This involves, of course, a reduction in society’s power to produce capital by saving — a serious sacrifice, no doubt, but one which apparently must be made, in order to permit the producer to consume more nearly the equivalent of his product. If production and consumption were exactly equal, there could be neither glut nor dearth; but, even in a static world, capital would be destroyed in use, and must be restored, in order to keep labor effective.

V

This hazily forecasted change involves time, perhaps more than the passions of the post-war era will permit. Meanwhile, the virtues of both strike and lockout will continue to be abused, and government will continue to burn its clumsy fingers in the fires of classdiscord. I detest programmes, and would avoid even the appearance of prescribing definite remedies. But if you insist on a programme, — and the ordinary person will not be content without some positive direction, — then, without any fear of the consequences, I recommend the coöperation of working shareholders in corporations animated by zeal for the group good, but adhering to the sound practice of rewarding workers according to their economic significance in production and their thrift in contributing capital to the enterprise. Where feasible and advantageous, such groups should ensure their continuity by possessing a grip on the land — now, as ever, the source of man’s subsistence and his haven of refuge in all ages. Some, at least, of the millions who now live in fear for their jobs from one day to another, could thus anticipate the day when the further organization of life and industry, by methods impossible to foresee, will combine reasonable security for rankand-file producers with all the freedom compatible with such tenure.

The job is a social grant, as well as a lease on life; and, unless all signs fail, it must eventually gain social guaranties. But whatsoever these guaranties are, they must be bought and paid for at a price. Our bitter quarrel over the job is founded on a false assumption of proprietorship over a relationship which eludes appropriation. Soon or late those vitally concerned are going to realize that truth, cease fighting, and begin to negotiate.