The Dominion. TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 1911. "THE RIGHT TO WORK."

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1104, 18 April 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. TUESDAY, APRIL 18, 1911. "THE RIGHT TO WORK."

Although there are few Radical or Socialist fallacies so easily demonstrable as such as that which masquerades under the title of "the right to work," Labour agitators and Socialists everywhere are unwearyingly persistent in seeking to give it life in the statute law. Most . of our Labour leaders in New Zealand, and the one trade union rcprei sentative in the House of lteprescn- . tat-ives, are advocates of this "right," which is more accurately de- ■ scribed as the "right" to be supported by the community. In Great Britain "the right to work" is one of the principal planks in the Labour platform, for the Socialists who have captured the trades unions appreciate tho truth of the statement of Proudhon, the famous State Socialist : "Give me 'the right to work,' and I will concede to you all the other rights of property and beat you." The principle was affirmed in an amendment to the Addrcss-in-Reply moved by the Labour party in the House of Commons in February, and was rejected, we arc glad to say, by a majority of about six to one, only the Labour men, apparently, voting for it. The arguments of the supporters of the amendment followed the familiar lines, but were so framed as to show almost more clearly than the speeches of the opponents of it the hopeless fallacy underlying this Socialist nostrum. Mn. O'Geady, who moved the amendment, said that "the principle was that the State should undertake the responsibility of directly providing employment or maintenance for the genuine unemployed." How the State is to do this neither Mr. O'Grady nor anybody else gave a hint. The State could easily, of course, give employment to all the unemployed in Britain by deciding to build a brick wall ten feet high and ten feet thick all round the- .coast of Britain, but an almost immediate result would be the creation of a still greater army of unemployed and a still greater mass of misery and hunger; for the scheme would have to ba financed, the workers on it would have to be supported in comfort, out of the sweat of the rest of the people. Everybody, of course, deplores the existence of masses of unemployed workers; even Mr. O'Grady, to his great credit, admitted that. But the suggested remedy would only intensify the evil, as Mn. John Burns showed in a powerful and convincing contribution to the debate. The amendment, he said, asked that the State should provide employment or maintenance to all genuine unemployed who applied to it, and "the meaning Of that, first and last, was the provision of relief works": Everybody condemned relief works; tho intelligent unemployed avoided them wherever they could, and the casual unemployed were made more casual by tho process of demoralisation that 'relief works invariably set up among those who ■ availed of them. Relief works were like opiates, the more one took of them tho more one ivantcd, and the patient died of the remedy as quickly of the disease. As one who had been consulting physician for I! 20,000 unemployed men for tho last four years he knew of no advantage to the unemployed—on the. contrary, he knew of nothing but serious disaster, moral and economic, that would ensue if it was. sought to deal with this problem by relief works. Mb. Burks went on to say, that the advocates of the right to work proposed nothing definite. Ignoring all precedents, avoiding all references to rccent. attempts to carry the principle into effect, they left to sentimental speculation such points as cost, consequences, effects upon industry. The only trade which could bo used for municipal or State relief works was the building trade, and the right-to-work principle would only make that trade more fluctuating. The rates and taxes, through relief works, would, he said, he "a dole to lower wages and a premium upon thriftlessncss and improvidence.". Employers would no longer bo willing, as they are at present, to keep men on when the actual conditions of trade warranted their dismissal. Mr..Burns did not deal with the root principle that when you "make" -work for one man.out of employment you cannot avoid doing it excepting by taking tho bread out of the mouth of some other man already employed—unless, indeed, you borrow the money, as Nov/ Zealand does, a practicc that will bear its evil fruit on the clay of reckoning. He confined himself to the quite sufficient fact that relief works would lower the level of wages and make loafers and paupers of industrious workers, as they did when France, established the national workshops in 1848. "It was,'.' he concluded, "because he believed it would be industrially a blunder for the unemployed, would break down, and be economically a disaster to the nation, that he asked the Hous-3 to reject the amendment, and allow this and succeeding Governments to go on gradually and with certainty in work for reducing casual labour and unemployment without affecting the industrial, moral, and independent character of our workmen." We have said that "the right to work" is really the . "right" to be supported by the community. The London Post describes it as, "not a right to do useful work and receive a just reward in wages, but tho right to do work for which nobody is prepared to pay and to receive wages not in accordance with the value of the work, but on a scale determined by the supposed requirements of the worker." Put in this way, of course, and it is as fair and accurate as the Socialists' own phrase is unfair and misleading,' the absurdity and the evil of the principle must be manifest to everybody. But because a proposal, when fairly stated, is manifestly undesirable is no reason at all in this stage for expecting that it will never be embodied in a statute. There is much reason, therefore, for reminding the public every now and then that the "right to work" principle is, to quote ,Mr. Burns, "clangorous to individuals and disastrous to the nation."