PROFESSOR EATE ON TRADES UNIONS.*
IT is curious to note how much more dogmatic and pedantic is the tone of popular science—how much further removed from the impres- sions of practical men—than the calm insight of thorough scientific knowledge. There was a stage in the history of political economy when it really was the insufferable thing Mr. Carlyle always thought it—when it smiled superciliously at all the supposed results of experience, and demonstrated, not that they were only partially true, but that they were wholly false—when it affected to confute common sense on all subjects connected with labour and capital as completely as Copernicus had confuted the special senses in affirming that the earth moved, while the sun was stationary. There are still a few pedants of this class, who hold up to obloquy as unscientific bun- gling all attempts to modify in any respect the "necessary laws" of wealth, who try to make you believe that human wills and efforts have no more effect on the production or distribution of wealth than on the production or distribution of the fixed stars, and yet very inconsistently,arraign as mischievous what they have proved to be absolutely inefficient. But though the species survives, it is rather among the ranks of half-educated volunteers,—of capitalists who have just dipped into the subject to arm themselves with a few formulte, and who go forth proclaiming to the world their gospel that slop- sellers and sweaters are the great benefactors of the working classes, —than among real economists that such pedantry remains. Mr. John Stuart Mill may be said to have swept away this nonsense from among the ranks of genuine economists, and to have made clear the limits within which common sense may still modify with effect those tendencies which half-educated political economists regard as neces- sary and universal forces.
Mr. Neate is a thoughtful disciple of Mr. J. S. Mill, and these two lectures are exceedingly good specimens of the attitude in which true science deals with those half-social and half-economical problems winch are so pretentiously solved or mis-solved by the dismal econo- mical cant of the day--a cant which is almost as far removed from true science, as the obscure sentimentalisms of Mr. Ruskin on the op- posite side. Mr. Neste recognizes, frankly enough, the purpose of com- bination among the working classes, strives to define the limits within which those purposes are socially and economically advantageous, and the means which may be regarded as legitimate for obtaining those ends. Mr. Neate admits three legitimate purposes for combination: 1. To keep up the rate of wages, so far as profit and wages are dis- putingthe propoinion in which they shall divide themargin which almost always exists between a barely remunerative profit and a highly remu- nerative one—an object in which is included any customary limitation of the number of apprentices, which keeps them from degenerating into under-paid, ill-taught labourers. 2. To enforce sanitary regula- tions tending to the health and comfort of the labourers in the work- shop. 3. To regulate, within given limits, the hours of customary labour. He rejects, as inadmissible, the object of resisting the intro. duction of machinery on the ground that it displaces human labour. As regards the legitimate means by which these objects are to be enforced, he admits as legitimate the combination to desist from labour, with, of course, in the ultimate resort, the actual strike ;—and
Two Lectures on Trades Unions, delivered in the University of Oxford in the Year foie By Charles Neste, M.A., Pelle* of Oriel College, and Professor of Political
Economy in the University of Oxford. John, Henry, and James Parker.
the expulsion of nonconforming members from unions, to whose. decisions they have promised absolute confbrmity ; while he rejects as illegitimate the refusal to work with non-union men, as, in fact, en attempt to exercise a tyranny without any show of right.
Mr, Neate is unquestionably right in asserting that combination can, and often does, affect the rate of the labourer's wages favourably, without in any way reacting unfavourably—as it is common to assert —on the general labour market. The fiction of supposing that the minimum rate which might be established, if there were no such thing as union amongst the labourer, is the " natural rate," is sufficiently refuted by the consideration, to which Mr. Neate refers, that therein almost always a real margin of debatable ground in profit between the capitalist and the labourer. Nay, apart from this consideration, and granting for a moment that the minimum rate of profit in a pare ticular trade has been reached, so that the real struggle now•is not between the labourer and the capitalist, but between one species of production and another for the highest relative exchange-value of the relative products, it may, we think, be maintained that even then union to check reduction of wages in such a trade may still have a salu- tary general effect. While unskilled agricultural labour is worth only from 9s. to 12s. a week, and equally unskilled labour in manufactures. is worth 18s. to 21s. a week, what would be the effect of taking away all the customary checks to the reduction of wages in the latter class, so that wages might attain a common intermediate level in both employments, through that greater demand for manufacturing labourers, to be recruited from the country, which would follow its reduction in price ? The effect would simply be to postpone in- definitely the growth of a healthy standard of ambition in the labour- ing class, by breaking down the barriers of all the smaller groups within which such ambitions grow most rapidly. Just what the influence of professions and defined social circles is to the middle classes, that is the influence of specific trade-standards of ilrecedent and respectability to the working classes. If you break up these, and, throwing down all the specific division lines, merge the working class into one uniform and indistinguishable mass, you sap. half (he motive force of thrift and prudence which economists profess. themselves so anxious to increase. By swamping the better paid class of labourers in the worse, you destroy half their motives for self-denial and forethought and upward struggle, without sowing any defined ambition in the minds of the temporary gainers. It is. through the local and specific influence of class combinations that those principles of self-respect grow quickest, which a short-sighted philosophy attributes to mere individualprudence. The agricultural labourers are far more likely to win their way up to a higher relative standard of comfort, by learning to appreciate the advantages of class- standards and combinations, than by so swamping the operative class above them as to cause the latter to drop all class-standards. There- fore, we say that so far as the operatives can keep up their rate of wages (without exercising any tyranny over others) by wise combina- tions, so as to leave less spare capital for tempting cheaper labour out of worse-paid employments into the field, the better probably for all parties. The distinct customs of distinct trades do far more to stimulate healthy ambitions, than could be possible if the working classes were really the homogeneous mass which is supposed in that abstract formula, the labour-market. In other words, the limitations rendering it to a certain extent difficult for labour of one kind to find employment in another field, though they press hardly enough when- ever a sudden and violent change takes place in the proportions of different kinds of consumption, are, under ordinary circumstances,. the best safeguards against degeneration in a labourer's standard of comfort ; and the philanthropy which would erase such influences,. by sweeping away all the machinery of specific trade opinions, very shallow one.
But we think Mr. Neste has scarcely made sufficient protest against the practice of mingling the semi-political objects of a trades- union with the purely individual one of an insurance and benefit society. It is all very well to say that men enter them knowing very well that they must bow to the rules of the society in everything, or else forfeit all its benefits. That does not diminish the injurious effect of hampering considerations of one class with fears directed to an entirely different point. While maintaining resolutely the advantage of trade combinations within given limits, we hold nothing to be more preju- dicial to their influence than the mixture of objects which prevent the members of unions from leavin„e them fearlessly when they take a wrong course. Which of us would not be hampered in our social politics if the validity of our policy of life insurance depended on the course we took ? That men ought to foresee the inconvenience of this may be true, lint it is none the less a grievous evil that their independence should be practically fettered by the fear of forfeiting family wealth, which they could in no other way secure.
Mr. Neate's parallels between the practical restrictions put on the educated labour-market in the learned professions by virtual trades- union regulations, and those which are so fiercely denounced in the uneducated labour-market, is exceedingly temperate, and discriminate very clearly the cases in which they are more, and those in which they are less, justifiable than the ordinary trades-union rules. Custom has so much more of' an intellectual and refined aspect in these cases, that we are apt to be blind to the real analogy. Those who justly and severely condemn the selfishness of requinng a capitalist to pay a skilled labourer full wages for doing what a perfectly unskilled labourer could do quite as well, will often be found to defend with acrimony the custom which requires a client to pay a barrister for doing at a high rate that which an attorney could do as well, or perhaps far better, at a lower rate. We heartily recommend these two thoughtful lectures to the attentive study of our readers.
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