The Philosophy of Trades-Unionism.
In the early part of the season, the Coast Seamen's Union laid a boycott upon the Spreckles Steamship Company of San Francisco, because John D. Spreckles chose to hire men who suited him best, to do the work which he had to do. As a result of this boycott, the ship owners formed an association so as to better carry out their purpose to employ those whom they should choose to employ. The ship owners then, it seems, obtained the alliance of certain sailor boarding-house keepers. These boarding-house keepers are a sort of sailor brokers who furnish sailors to vessels that want them. And as these boarding-houses were furnishing the ships with men, in spite of the efforts of the Seamen's Union and the boycott, a boycott was then placed upon them, and so the matter went, one boycott bringing on another, and one strike another, until at last, on August 26, all the coast seamen had struck, and all the coast sailing vessels were tied up from Puget Sound to San Diego. September 5, while a meeting of union seamen was being held in a hall in San Francisco, a telegram was received from Eureka, and read, “stating that the wharves there were loaded with lumber, and in four days all available store room would be taken up, then the lumber mills would all have to be shut down, and this would throw out of employment three or four thousand men, all Knights of Labor.” This telegram seemed to be a very joyful piece of news to the six hundred and fifty assembled sailors in San Francisco. Nor does the matter stop here. By the shutting down of these lumber mills and the tying up of these ships by the Seamen's Union, not only these four thousand hands in the lumber mills are thrown out of employment, but building in San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities on the coast, is obliged to stop for want of lumber; and this throws out of employment the union carpenters and builders, the union plasterers, masons, brick-layers, and so on indefinitely, in all these places. Thus, because one steamship company chose to employ a certain man, or perhaps a dozen men, whom the Seamen's Union did not like, thousands upon thousands of men of different trades are thrown out of employment, and their families in many instances obliged to suffer for the necessities of life. This seems to us poor philosophy. But it is the only philosophy that is known to trade-unionism. It is perfectly illustrated by Mr. Simon Newcomb, in the Independent of September 9, in his comment upon a statement made by Mr. T. V. Powderly, grand master workman of the Knights of Labor. Mr. Powderly's statement was this:— “Any bottle brought into my house does not go back. I cannot smash a beer bottle, because I drink ginger ale, but the bottle never goes out alive. This may be a small thing, but if 90,000 men who get bottles were to destroy them it would make a big hole.” Mr. Newcomb, who in late numbers of the Independent has been giving some plain, wholesome talk on the labor question, comments upon this as follows:— “The speaker's opinion evidently was that the greater the destruction of bottles, the better for laborers, and in this, no doubt, he voiced the prevailing sentiment on the subject. “Most fortunately for mankind nobody ever applies this principle in his own individual case; if he did we should all very soon be transformed into a horde of half-starved barbarians. Every sensible man tries to get things as cheaply as possible, whereas all organized action on this theory is directed toward making them cost as much as possible. “We may show this theory to be wrong either by the reasoning of the case, or the facts of the case. In the first place if we admit it, where will we stop? If 90,000 people make work for others by smashing all their bottles when they have used them once, would they not, on the same principle, benefit chair-makers if they should destroy all their chairs after using them a short time, say a month? One man could not do much this way, but 90,000 could make a big hole in the existing supply of chairs. What is true of the chairs would apply also to all the furniture of a house, the plates and the dishes. If 90,000 men should break them up after having them a year, they would make a big hole to be filled up by labor. If a man burned down his new house after living in it a year, would it not on the same principle be good for the house-builders? Then would not everybody be rendering a public benefit by doing the same thing? “Of course you will reply to me that you do not carry your theory so far as this, and do not propose to run it into the ground as I am doing. But where will you stop? If your theory is good for so little a thing as a bottle, why should it not be good for so big a thing as a house? If you claim that there is a turning point, please tell me where it is that waste ceases to be beneficial to the public. When you have done this to your own satisfaction, I will tell you my answer. Waste is of no benefit at all, and the theory that it is beneficial to anybody is founded on not looking at all the facts of the case. Let us see what the facts all come to. “Suppose that Mr. Powderly drinks one bottle of ginger ale a day, and that bottle is worth three cents. This will make, in round numbers, ten dollars worth of bottles a year which he destroys. If he sold the bottles instead of destroying them, he would have just ten dollars more in his pocket at the end of the year. With that ten dollars he would have bought something useful to himself. In so doing he would have given just the same employment to the laborer engaged in making those useful things, that he gave to the glass-makers by breaking the bottles. If he bought a pair of fine boots, as he might well do, there would have been ten dollars more in the pocket of the shoe-maker. So all he does by destroying the bottles is to give employment to bottle-makers at the expense of shoe-makers, or whatever trade makes the goods he would have bought with the money gained by selling the bottles. “Now this is a principle which comes into all these cases. No cheapening processes can diminish the sum total of the demand for labor, for the plain633and simple reason that everybody to whom money is saved by such cheapening is going to employ labor, or buy the products of labor with it. This side of the case is what we are all prone to forget when we discuss the question. “I have written these talks because the singular spectacle was presented to me of a large body of men organizing and contributing money to do themselves all the injury they well could. What suffering they have thus caused themselves you all know. What privation the poor will endure next winter in consequence of the agitation thus brought about, you will see when next winter comes. I hope you will not then forget the cause of the distress.” Mr. Newcomb recommends the saving of the bottles, and the selling of them at three cents apiece. Of course for the purposes of his illustration this is just as good as any other way. But in real practice there is a far better way. That is, don't buy the ginger ale. Thus you will not only save the three cents that you would get for the empty bottle, but you will also save the price of the ale, which is probably five or eight times the price of a bottle, and, which is of more value than all, you will save your manhood. But in introducing this subject of the bottle, the beer, and the ale, Mr. Powderly has betrayed the greatest cause of all the laboring man's troubles. We state it as the literal fact that during the past summer, as we have passed, as occasion demanded, from our office to our home, a distance of but six blocks, time and again have we seen individual working men going from the saloon to the building on which they were at work, and each one with a wooden bucket of beer in his hand; and in most cases the bucket was heaping full. If Mr. Powderly and each one of the workingmen would only put a vigorous boycott upon himself in the matter of the saloon, the bottle, beer, ginger ale, and all their accompaniments, the question of the laborer's troubles would soon be settled, and the occupation of the managers of strikes and boycotts would be gone. We wish the workingmen would do it. But we fear they will not.