SOME TRADE CONDITIONS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 12, 1902

SOME TRADE CONDITIONS.

RECENTLY in discussing what it terms “a crisis in British industry,” the London Times makes some startling statements, one of which is that “a man who wants to do honest work is subjected to bullying and persecution. Sometimes a foreman is compelled to dismiss a good workman because he is good, under penalty of seeing four or five hundred men refuse to work at all. Any man more capable or more willing than his fellows is a ‘scab’ or a ‘black-leg’ or something equally disagreeable, and if he persists, in spite of petty persecution, he is fined by his union. If he does not pay the fines, he is

ejected from the union, and all the money he has paid in as a provision for old age or sickness is confiscated.

“Thirty years ago,” says the Times, “a brick-layer would lay 1,000 to 1,200 bricks in a day. Now, by an unwritten but mercilessly enforced trade-union law, a man must not lay more than 400, and if he works for the London County Council—that is to say, for the rate-payers—he must not lay more than 330. Our correspondent quotes a case of a building put up for the school board, in which the average output of the bricklayers was 70 bricks a day. Yet these are men receiving the highest current rate of wages, a rate very greatly in excess of what was paid when 1,000 bricks were laid per day.”

These statements may be more or less exaggerated, but in some places in this country, and in some trades, similar conditions prevail. Such facts are as much a sign of the times as are the immense aggregations of capital, about which so much is said.—Gospel Herald.