LABOUR AND CAPITAL

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 59, 7 September 1926, Page 29

LABOUR AND CAPITAL

INTELLIGENT CO-OPERATION

FAIR PLAY AND COMMON SENSE,

To those who have long watched the development of industry in the United States one thing stands out above every other as the secret—if it is to be called a secret —of its amazing growth (writes the New York correspondent of "Tho Times Trade Supplement"). This is the intelligent co-operation of labour with capital. The American Federation of Labour has been the decisive factor in securing that co-operation, not through any domination of labour in general by force of numbers, but through happy leadership made possible by the free play of common sense. It is, to be sure, a big organisation, but relatively it? membership is not large— only about 2,500,000 in a country with a population approaching 120,000,000. It must be remembered, too, that its component parts have a large degree of autonomy, and that, _ geographically, they cover a wide strS'tch of territory with what are superficially, at least, greatly varying physical and economic environments. If they are to be held together, therefore, for the pursuit of a common policy, it must be by a philosophy which has a universal appeal. That philosophy is easily described: fair play and common sense. For more than a generation the American Federation of Labour has exercised an influence on virtually the whole of American labour far out of proportion to its size, tinder tho wise leadership of Mr. Samuel Gompers and his successors it has steadfastly discountenanced the theory of class warfare, and has rejected again and again the arguments of those who insisted that there was an inevitable conflict in the interests of employers and employees. It would have nothing to do with the practice of ca' canny, which for two decades before the advent of the federation kept American, labour at a low standard of living. "If everybody works, there is work for everybody"— that may be said to have been its guiding principle. And it made no difficulty in agreeing with capital in this: the more goods there are to divide, the more there will be coming to me as well as to you; so let us produce as much as we can. Under the guidance of the federation, American labour came to think of labour-saving machinery not as something which robbed men of their jobs but as something which lowered their cost of living. Time proved that they wer» right. Labour-saving machinery increased opportunities everywhere and created new neads for labour, while greatly augmenting labour's command of consumable goods.

UNION LEADER'S VIEW.

Eecently Mr. Matthew "VVoll, vice-pre-sident of the federation, took occasion to urge upon its members still greater co-operation with Capital. In an article in the journal of his own trade union he declared that it was time to bring out a "Monroe Doctrine of American industry." "Industry in America (he said) is passing through a critical period of transformation. Out of the struggle now going on there will arise either an autocratic giant of such stature as humankind has never seen or a new kind of government that will place this modern industrial colossus under the rulership of the people. Throughout America conservative, thoughtful, resourceful, and courageous men and women are planning that latter development. American leaders of modern thought believe that either State ownership or State regulation must eventually develop a political bureaucracy leading straight into State Socialism, strangling to death the finest and fullest possibilities of our almost miraculous industrial plant. American

industry is working out for itself a great body of constructive law. Not all of this is wise law, but its main tendency is constructive and progressive. It is industrial law made by men who know their field and their subject. Political law when it touches industry for the most part fumbles and fails." Eecalling that the fedfirction at its convention last October proposed the summoning of a conference of representatives of organised Labour, organised farmers, and trade associations, under tho direction of the Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Hoover, to consider the elimation ofdifficulties preventing constructive organisation of industry, Mr. Woll went on to state that whenever the conference was called it was safe to say that out of it wouli come a Monroe Doctrine of American in.dustry. That day was to be welcomed and hastened. The world was in need of a new industrial chart.

CASTING OUT COMMUNISM.

Organised Labour in America, he said, believed that it had worked out a philosophy which was democratic—a philosophy which removed the necessity for State control or overlordship of industry, and offered to the hopeful something sound and evolutionary. It believed that this philosophy would cast aside forever the chimera" of Communism, Socialism, and the burden of State regulation, with their blunders and restrictions. If the philosophy of democracy did not work, then there remained either a political domination of industry that could mean only repressed, twisted, and painful industrial life, or an all-powerful domination of industry which could mean only a new autocracy of tighly merged groups, ruling, exploiting, and eventually ruining, through sheer absorption, the life of the people. Labour alone, said Mr. Woll, could not be expected to do alone what must be the evolutionary task of the whole of the industrial organisation. But it had pledged its faith in that philosophy, stated its purpose to assist in its conscious development—and had taken a leading step in the direction of experimentation to see how far it could secure co-operation. ■