Most of this legislative output has been strictly protective of union interests.Labor, like all other interests that aim to use the power of government, has not been wholly altruistic, in its motives, especially since in recent years it has found itself matched against such powerful organizations of employers as the Manufacturers' Association, the National Erectors' Association, and the Metal Trades Association.In fact, in nearly every important industry the employers have organized for defensive and offensive purposes.These organizations match committee with committee, lobby with lobby, add espionage to open warfare, and issue effective literature in behalf of their open shop propaganda.
The voluminous labor codes of such great manufacturing communities as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, reflect a new and enlarged conception of the modern State.Labor has generally favored measures that extend the inquisitional and regulative functions of the State, excepting where this extension seemed to interfere with the autonomy of labor itself.Workshops, mines, factories, and other places of employment are now minutely inspected, and innumerable sanitary and safety provisions are enforced.A workman's compensation law removes from the employee's mind his anxiety for the fate of his family if he should be disabled.The labor contract, long extolled as the aegis of economic liberty, is no longer free from state vigilance.The time and method of paying wages are ordered by the State, and in certain industries the hours of labor are fixed by law.Women and children are the special proteges of this new State, and great care is taken that they shall be engaged only in employment suitable to their strength and under an environment that will not ruin their health.
The growing social control of the individual is significant, for it is not only the immediate conditions of labor that have come under public surveillance.Where and how the workman lives is no longer a matter of indifference to the public, nor what sort of schooling his children get, what games they play, and what motion pictures they see.The city, in cooperation with the State, now provides nurses, dentists, oculists, and surgeons, as well as teachers for the children.This local paternalism increases yearly in its solicitude and receives the eager sanction of the labor members of city councils.The State has also set up elaborate machinery for observing all phases of the labor situation and for gathering statistics and other information that should be helpful in framing labor laws, and has also established state employment agencies and boards of conciliation and arbitration.
This machinery of mediation is significant not because of what it has already accomplished but as evidence of the realization on the part of the State that labor disputes are not merely the concern of the two parties to the labor contract.Society has finally come to realize that, in the complex of the modern State, it also is vitally concerned, and, in despair at thousands of strikes every year, with their wastage and their aftermath of bitterness, it has attempted to interpose its good offices as mediator.
The modern labor laws cannot be credited, however, to labor activity alone.The new social atmosphere has provided a congenial milieu for this vast extension of state functions.The philanthropist, the statistician, and the sociologist have become potent allies of the labor legislator; and such non-labor organizations, as the American Association for Labor Legislation, have added their momentum to the movement.New ideals of social cooperation have been established, and new conceptions of the responsibilities of private ownership have been evolved.
While labor organizations have succeeded rather readily in bending the legislative power to their wishes, the military arm of the executive and the judiciary which ultimately enforce the command of the State have been beyond their reach.To bend these branches of the government to its will, organized labor has fought a persistent and aggressive warfare.Decisions of the courts which do not sustain union contentions are received with great disfavor.The open shop decisions of the United States Supreme Court are characterized as unfair and partisan and are vigorously opposed in all the labor journals.It is not, however, until the sanction of public opinion eventually backs the attitude of the unions that the laws and their interpretation can conform entirely to the desires of labor.
The chief grievance of organized labor against the courts is their use of the injunction to prevent boycotts and strikes.
"Government by injunction" is the complaint of the unions and it is based upon the common, even reckless, use of a writ which was in origin and intent a high and rarely used prerogative of the Court of Chancery.What was in early times a powerful weapon in the hands of the Crown against riotous assemblies and threatened lawlessness was invoked in 1868 by an English court as a remedy against industrial disturbances.* Since the Civil War the American courts in rapidly increasing numbers have used this weapon, and the Damascus blade of equity has been transformed into a bludgeon in the hands even of magistrates of inferior courts.
Springfield Spinning Company vs.Riley, L.R.6 Eq.551.
