The labor journal. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1909-1976, 1917-04-06
SO-CALLED BONUS SYSTEM" Is
BORN IN HYPOCRISY AND DECEIT

ers to get an eight hour day, and
were unanimous in fighting the Sea-
mems Act which made sailors free
men and enabled them to get for
themselves better wages.
1t is shown in all industrial his
tory of the United States in recent
times that bonus system which on
rare occasions gives to favored
number of employees a certain tenn
porary increase in remuneration,
nevertheless enables the employer to
, keep the great mass of its workers
in poverty and in helplessness for
most of the time. For instance when
the Steel Corporation and allied cor
porations in the Pittsburg district,
at the beginning of their boom in
war profits were paying big wages
to some skilled men in their shell
making plants, nearly 70 per cent.
of the workers were working twelve
hour day shifts at wages from $2.4O
to $2.75. And even then those un-
derpaid workers had received two or
three increases in wages over what
they had been paid (when they work.
ed at ally before the war profits be-
gan. 1t was pointed out in report
made to the Committee on Industrial
Relations that from January 1, 1915,
to September Is, 1915, the average
rate of wages paid to 155 men who
had lived in half block in Pittsburg
near a steel trust mill was $10.40
week. Yet small as that rate of pay
was, the average pay actually re-
ceived by each of the 155 men was
only $4.66 a week, as the men were
given employment for only four
ninths of the time. Commenting on
that condition the report to the Com
mittee on Industrial Relations said:
"The wage earners remember the
many millions of wages they did not
get when the masters of the plants
and the tools kept them from work
and forced them to the most miser-
able wages and to the terror of un-
employment. You hear on all sides
from among the workers of Pitts
burg the expressed determination no
longer to permit their lives and their
earning power to be at the mercy of
those whose caprice or selfishness or
incapacity had subjected them to such
degradation and misery"
That illustrates (and it is only one
of the numberless illustrations) the
inherent evil of the bonus system as
it is generally applied, and as it is
so extravagantly praised by the enc
mics of collective bargaining and by
the enemies of liberty among the
working people. Even where the bo-
nus system does give temporary ad-
vantage, it is designed to enable the
powerful employers to keep their
seats on the backs of the workers. 1t
is device, as it is generally applied,
to keep the workers unorganized and
dependent upon the caprice and sell
fishness Of other men. No proof of
this is needed, but if proof were
needed, it is shown in the fact that
those who boast most of the good
that the bonus plan and similar plans
do for workers, are those who are
most ferocious in keeping power out
of the hands of the workers.
All of the bonuses of employers
who openly fight trades unions and
the whole forward labor movement
are the great advocates of the sys-
TENS designed to keep men servile
and helpless against the time of need.
Through the great organization of
labor the workers have managed to
acquire such power that they cannot
now be beaten into submission, and
so those who oppose them are trying
to accomplish by a sort of bribery
and by the sugar coating of an occa-
sional temporary advantage what
they cannot accomplish by direct
attack.
n ~