A Business Man's Views of Public Matters (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

Excerpt from A Business Man's Views of Public Matters

I am opposed to Labor Strikes. I believe their results are injurious to the strikers and useless to the community. I grant the abstract right of workmen to demand increased pay for their work, but deny their right to force any person into combinations for that purpose. Such force is injurious to the forced ones, by depriving them of a chance to work for their living, and compelling them either to subsist on charity or consume in idleness the savings of former labor. Combined strikes and trades unions do this, when they require their members to stop work, because in creased wages are demanded. This was the case at Lynn, where the Scabs (those who would work for what they could get being thus called) were daily visited by the strikers' committee, and coaxed and threatened to desist from work. This is wrong. Strikes can never permanently benefit the strikers. Why? Because they are not based on correct principles. The price of labor, like that of all other saleable articles, must be regulated by supply and demand. This is proved by the fact that the same labor commands more pay in one place than in another. California furnishes proofs of this. When the first rush took place to that State, in 1847, day laborers commanded five times as much for their services as they now get. Why Simply because that in 1847 the demand was in excess of the supply, and as the supply increased, as it is always sure to do under high wages, the wages were correspondingly reduced.

This must ever be so; were it different, two very great injuries would result: First, the maintenance of high prices must, of necessity, be at the cost of the consumer of labor products; and secondly, if competition be not allowed in the labor market (as it could not be if supply and demand did not regulate prices) injustice, must be done to those who would compete for the labor; and this injustice deprives these parties of the work they would be glad to do. So we must come back to letting supply and de mand regulate prices, and this law can never be set aside by strikes.

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