Let Strikes Be Abolished!

In the transportation business, and in the building industries, the public has an exceptional stake, and it can no longer tolerate the strike methods. For that matter, strikes are fast become as obsolete a mode of regulating wages and securing the welfare of workmen as are wars in establishment of just relations between the governments and peoples of the earth. When one looks beneath the surface, it becomes fortunately evident, in this country, that the strong tendency is toward the use of reasonable and conciliatory methods. The agency of such bodies as the Civic Federation, quietly exerting their influence for industrial peace, is steadily bringing about the hoped-for period when labor wars will be at an end. Mr. Carnegie, in a very felicitous speech, on May 7, as president of the British Iron and Steel Institute, urged the advantage of a closer partnership relation between employers and men, and pointed out the value of sliding-scale wage arrangements and analogous devices. A week later, Mr. Oscar S. Strauss, as president of the American Social Science Association, made a notable address on industrial peace, at Boston. In many manufacturing industries, it has been found possible to justify high wages by bringing about a remarkable increase in the efficiency of labor. One of the great difficulties in the building trades, as in less skilled employments, is the tendency to keep everything on a dead level, and not only to prevent the exceptionally able man from deriving any advantage from rendering valuable services, but to bring the average of efficiency down somewhere near the level of the comparatively slow and ineffective workman. This is not in accordance with the American spirit: and although remedies are not easy, some way must be found to give incentive to mechanics and ordinary workmen to improve results both in quantity and quality. - From "The Progress of the World," in the American Monthly Review of Reviews for June.