The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1897-02-23
WHITE men CAN WORK IN TROPICS
A Plea for the Abolition
of the Penal Contract.
The Condition of the Laborer Must
be Improved-Few Men Do the
Same Work.

MIR. EDITORIAL meeting of the
Social Science Association of this place
| held on the Sth inst, a very interest
| ing and valuable paper upon the sub
ject of labor, read by Mr.. P. c. Jones
merits such criticism as may prove
useful, and wider discussion even,
than the excellent resume and editor
ial review by the Bulletin of the 9th.
To prevent confusion of thought in
this discussion. some careful defini-
ton is first desirable. Cooperation is
the prosecution of any industrial en-
terprise by joint ownership. Profit
Sharing in its last analysis, and exact
ly confined, consists in participation
by all parties contributing to its pro-
duction, in the net remainder of re-
ceipts after the deduction of expenses,
sinking fund generally included. In
a larger sense it includes any such de-
parture from the wages system of labor
as will insure to labor the fruit or pro-
fit of it's greater efficiency. 1t is used
in this larger sense by n. p. Gilman,
the author of the most notable array
of facts on this subject in recent years,
and serves as the title of his book
which is used as authority by Mr..
Jones in the paper named.
Product Sharing is historically the
payment for labor in shares of produce.
This in turn was but the outgrowth
of the custom of rent paying in pro-
duce of barter in kind, and dated back
to primative industrial condition.
AS the freer exchange of money sup
planted barter, Product Sharing came
to mean payment in the determined
value of the given share of product.
1t will be most useful to confine its
definition in modern industrial life to
the last named and it will be so used in
this paper.
In the discussion ensuing upon the
reading of the paper on this subject
on the occasion named, Mr.. H. P. Bald
win gave an interesting sketch of the
attempts in earlier years at ''co-opera-
ton" as it was enormously termed,
and indicated the obstacles causing it's
abandonment. some of which have dis
appeared or have been SurmOunted by
the changed conditions of later years
and larger knowledge of sugar produc-
ton | have called reference to this
former experience as "co-operation"
erroneous because in industrial history
cooperative production involves all or
practically all the laborers interested.
believe this was not generally the
case on the plantation which was the
subject of Mr.. Baldwin's review, but
that a few lessees of land from the
company owning it and the factory as
we'll paid rent in shares Of sugar and
relied upon the same general supply
of fuel and labor as do all other COM
panies, the bulk of such labor probably
being under the usual contract.
Consequently as an experience throw
ing any light upon the problem of labor
here considered it is practically worth
less. If it had been continued success
fully however, it is probable that out
of the smaller expenses of control than
the management of larger plantations
would have been evolved. ere this,
schemes of general participation by the
entire force of Iaborers, practically de-
monstrated by actual operation.
The only instance | now recall of
real cooperation in these islands is
that of the Portuguese Sugar Co. in
Hilo. The controversies of which the
echoes have been audible have doubt
less arisen from the lack of centrali-
zation in management, the rock upon
which cooperation" has generally
split, and in consequence has generally
produced but a record OF failure. [
understand that the company above
named has remedied this defect. If
this is so it should prove a success and
a most valuable example for study.
Cooperation probably represents the
expression of an advanced stage of the
future of labor, stage which will be
the result of the corresponding devel-
opment of general intelligence and the
industrial education of the mass of
laborers. At the present time human
nature in the average laborers seems
to resent the superiority implied in the
possession by one of their own number
of authority to command, while it
seems equally indispensable to the sue
cess of any modern attempt at CO.