Twin city review. [volume] (Champaign, Ill.) 19??-1929, 1921-12-23
PRESIDENT FAILS
TO UNDERSTAND
WORKERS AIMS

/ oS faSSS7N anu Allat lfaae unions De IN
eorporated:
by SAMUEL GoMPERs)
The presidents message to con-
gress is in most respects an ad-
mirable document, but he, like al
together too many men, fails in his
understanding of the relations be-
tween workers and employers: of the
struggle of the workers throughout
the ages for the tightening of their
burdens, for the improvement of their
standards of life and work and the as
pirations which are in the hearts and
minds of the great mass of our pee
pie.
Indeed, the presidents proposal for
the establishment of a court with le-
gal powers TO decide as to wages and
conditions of employment is nothing
more nor less than a revision back to
the conditions obtaining more than
400 years ago, when the court of
quarter sessions determined the
wages of the workers and prohibited
courts decision, and To condemn men
to compulsory servitude and slavery
ir they resented in any way the de-
cisions of those courts. Surely the
president should have had these facts
in mind when he said il is not desir-
able that the workers "shall be per-
mitted to exact unfair terms of EN-
ployment."
The exactions of corporations are
for private profit; the demand of
the workers for higher wages and
better conditions is an aspiration
for better things, for a better day,
and who is he who would attempt to
curb the aspirations of the great mass
of the people? Higher aspiration
of the masses makes for human pro-
gress, industrially, economically, po-
litically and socially, and be it re-
membered that labor organizations"
do not exact any conditions of en-
ployment for themselves, but for the
workers who are outside the pale of
labor organizations"
1t is quite evident that the presi-
dent has in mind the establishment
of a court or courts to determine
the conditions and wages of the
working people, and evidently with
the aim that those courts can and will
prevent strikes and lockouts. Surely
the experience of such courts in the
Australasian countries, surely the ex-
PCiiCiiSC Will SuNh q SOuit III VIC
State of Kansas, should have a lesson
for us. In New Zealand and in other
Australasian countries they have gone
through the experience of more than
twenty years, and their utter failure
has not only been recognized there,
but they have been abandoned. Ev-
cry observer and student knows these
to be facts and in the state of Kan
sas, where such court has been in
existence for the past two years,
there are today more strikes and a
larger number of men on strike than
at any time in the history of Kansas.
The analogy which the president
makes as between the international
affairs and industrial disputes is far
fetched and unwarranted by facts. Is
it not true that the president and the
senate have stood unalterably against
the covenant of the league of nations,
and for what reason? Because he and
those who have joined him in his view
regard the covenant as a legalistic
machine to enforce and compel obed-
fence of any recalcitrant nation; while
his proposal as presented by Secre-
tary Hughes to the International con-
ference on the limitation of arma-
ments is an offer of voluntary agree
ment. And it is the voluntary agree
ment, the collective bargaining. the
organization of the workers and the
organization of employers to reach
voluntary agreements, so that strikes
lockouts, boycotts, etc., may be avoid
ed, which must solve our industrial
disultes.
Strikes are the expression of dis
content on the part of the workers
with existing conditions of employ
ment as they obtain, and the with
holding of labor and labor power for
while until new terms of employ
ment may be reached and agreed up
on. The workers have nothing but
their power to labor. 1t is the only
thing by which they live and support
those who are dependent upon them.
To secure the best terms under which
that labor and service may be given
is worthy of encouragement rather
than antagonism, and particularly the
antagonism and reastionary spirit
that would undertake to tie men to
their jobs by law and introduce what
was not only abolished by our civil
war, but guaranteed against by the
thirteenth amendment to the constl-
tuition, the enforcement of compul-
sorry labor or involuntary serviture
except as a punishment for crime
of which the party shall have been
adjudged guilty by jury OF his
peers.
No one, no group of our people,
endeavor to avoid strikes quite so
much as do the Observation-Disclosures,
misrepresented labor organizations,
the voluntary associations of the
workers for their common protection,
for the promotion of their rights and
their interests, for the welfare of the
whole people and our republic. The
inconvenience that sometimes occur
in the industrial life of our country
through cessations of labor are COM
parable to the labor pains of our
physical life. They may be minimiz-
ed by higher intellectually. by, a
common concept of reciprocal rights
and self control. Neither race suicide
Il &c industrial CLAW