Australasian Cures for Coal Wars

EVERY once in a while the New Zealand newspapers print paragraphs of labor news from the American press. These pictures of street-car passengers riding through explosions of dynamite, of merchants in their doorways and children in the street shot by soldiers of the National Guard, of famine displacing industry, of mines run by martial law, grown familiar to us, look out with a ghastly stare when viewed against the tranquil surfaces of Australasian journalism. Such things set in that peaceful print regain by contrast the hue of their proper horror. For a moment the American eye, to which the sight of blood on its daily bread has become a daily matter of course, realizes the nightmare wherein it lives, and from which the Australasians are escaping.

Such a social, economic, political, and moral peril as the coal war that labor and capital have been fighting over the bodies of the American people has been made impossible in New Zealand. That country too has its coal trust. It also has a democracy who know more about the powers of combination than even a trust does. The trust casting its net over the whole of Australasia charged the New Zealanders extravagant and erratic prices for the product of their own mines, and closed against them the inexhaustible deposits of New South Wales, where they could have obtained otherwise a competitive supply. But it discovered that it was not dealing with a people incompetent to meet such an attack on their lives and their industries.

As checkmate, the New Zealanders, as a people, have gone into the coal business on their own account. Appropriations have been passed and powers delegated to enable the general government to establish state coal mines. These will supply first the needs of the state, as for its railroads, navy, and government buildings, and then the needs of the public. And this political economy of all by all for all puts it into the law that as rapidly as the net receipts increase above five per cent, the price of coal to the public shall be lowered. Here, as in its railroad service, in the loans of public money to farmers and artisans, and in the subdivision among the landless of great estates resumed for the people, this democracy eschews profit-mongering, and does business on the plane of a social exchange of service for service at cost.

The state coal mines are so new a venture that they have nothing as yet to exhibit more tangible than the prompt determination of the people to use their common powers in this way for their common defense. Theirs is a public opinion which knows how to take to itself all it needs of the public force, — a public opinion plus a public policy, plus the public power. In the financial statement just submitted to the New Zealand Parliament by the Colonial Treasurer is the following relative to the state coal mines: —

“In accordance with the decision of Parliament at its last session to establish state coal mines, prospecting operations have been carried out on a portion of the land formerly held under lease by the late Westport Cardiff Coal Company (Limited) at Seddonville. It affords me pleasure to state that these operations have so far proved satisfactory. The coal leases formerly held by the Greymouth Point Elizabeth Railway and Coal Company, and the partially constructed railway, have been acquired by the government. Prospecting operations for the purpose of furnishing data for the development of this property have been commenced.

“In the laying out and working of the state collieries due consideration will be given to safety, economy, and the efficient extraction of the coal with the least possible waste. To insure this, it is absolutely necessary for the mines to be opened out on a systematic and comprehensive plan.”

And in the law itself the government is authorized in these sections to go into the coal business even though it involve competition with other coal producers : —

“It shall be lawful for the minister, on behalf of His Majesty, to open and work coal mines, . . . and generally to carry on the business of coal mining in all its branches, . . . after state requirements have been provided for, to sell, supply, and deliver coal and other products the result of coal mining operations ; and enter into and enforce contracts and engagements; and generally ... do anything that the owner of a coal mine might lawfully do in the working of the mine.”

Our coal capitalists have found it perfectly safe to flout laborers, consumers, dealers, officials, press, clergy, the public generally, and the President of the United States, during these bitter weeks of their manufacture of artificial winter. Individuals and volunteer committees, however distinguished, seeking to make peace have been rebuffed with an assured conviction that the public had no business with the business of those “to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country. ”

But a very weak imagination is powerful enough to picture what would have been the behavior of the same gentlemen had there been such sentiments as the above in the last report of our Secretary of the Treasury, and a section in some Federal law giving similar powers to the national government concerning the public’s coal on the public lands, to say nothing of the assumption of private mines. The coal companies of New Zealand never say, “ There is nothing to arbitrate. ”

The nervousness with which our coal mine owners protest that “no politics ” must be brought in reveals their vulnerable heel and their consciousness of it. “Politics ” and the use by the people of their irresistible weapon, public coöperation, have made lambs of the coal monopolists on the other side of the globe.

This is only one of many Australasian cures for labor wars. That the novel and successful policy of Newest England in finding work for the workless, and land for the landless, and credit for all who have or will create security must directly and indirectly lessen labor wars goes without saying. A country in which the unemployed class found everywhere else has practically ceased to exist is not one in which the laborer can be starved into a contract.

The demand for the nine hours day and the recognition of the union of the men were among the principal causes of war in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Such disputes about hours do not take place in New Zealand. That state first enacted that its coal miners should work no more than an average of eight hours a day, as Utah has done; and then, at the session of the Colonial Parliament last year, passed a general eight hours a day law for all working men and a shorter day for working women and working children, —New Zealand, like the rest of Christendom, being still unchristian enough to rob many of its children to enrich a few of its men. New Zealand is the first state of modern times to bring its legislative regulation of men’s hours of labor out from its cowardly refuge behind the petticoats and bibs and tuckers of their women and children. Other states have furtively limited the hours of men by the device of limiting the hours of the women and children who are working by their side. In the interdependent complexity of modern factories when any stop all must stop. But our antipodal democracy has eyes to see that adult men, too, are helpless to protect themselves from the oppressions of those who can give or take away that opportunity of employment which is life. First of all states New Zealand has decreed that capital shall not exact more than eight hours for a day’s work. The coal miners of Pennsylvania who struck for a nine hours day, had they been citizens of New Zealand, would have had the eight hours day without even the effort of asking their employers for it. It is the New Zealanders’ civic right. They got it by a strike, but it was a strike at the ballot box.

If some of the most distinguished apologists for the coal mine owners may be followed, all other causes of the war sink into nothingness compared with the danger of recognizing the union of the men. To do this we are told would make their leader so powerful that he could name the next President of the United States and become dictator to this President and all the rest of us. The New Zealand democracy sees no danger of dictatorships from the recognition of trades unions. It has made the encouragement and recognition of trades unions part of the public policy of the state. Indeed, the workingmen are bribed to organize themselves into unions. They have been given powers to hold property, and to sue members, not possessed by unions in other countries. Greatest of all these inducements is that if so organized the workingman gets as a right that arbitration of disputes with employers for which elsewhere he has to beg or fight, and usually in vain. New Zealand prevents labor wars by a multitude of democratic interventions to forbid economic violence by the strong upon the weak, like those just mentioned, which make it unnecessary to surrender for the chance to work, or to strike for hours and recognition of unions. Crowning all these interventions is this guarantee of arbitration.

The statement given out by the president of the miners’ organization shows that the real cause of the labor war in the coal country was the refusal of the employers — the railroads and coal mining corporations — to arbitrate. The miners made no hard and fast demands. They do not insist upon the nine hours day, nor the recognition of the unions, nor twenty per cent more pay. They ask for only such advantages in these particulars as they may be found entitled to by disinterested referees. If one might be pardoned the word, their terms are not arbitrary but arbitrationary. Because the mine owners will have no compromise, nothing but their own will, the workmen must starve, we must freeze, industry must be converted into a desert of cold chimneys and idle men, our bright American cities must take the veil of London smoke, and the public peace be broken. In New Zealand it is as out of the question that one side of a labor dispute should say, “There is nothing to arbitrate, ” as that a man accused of violation of law or breach of contract should say to public prosecutor or private claimant, “There is nothing to litigate.” Only slaves have ears for either phrase.

This struggle which has agitated and injured the whole of our country for so many weeks would have been known to the public of the southern hemisphere probably only by a newspaper paragraph if by so much. In its provision for “ the common welfare ” Parliament in New Zealand has so far safeguarded the miners by laws against overwork, accidents, dangers, payment in store orders, refusal to recognize their unions, swindling in the weighing of their coal, in deductions for slate and impurities, in charges for powder, and like familiar grievances, that practically nothing is left to differ about save the rate of pay.

How dramatic the contrast between what happens among us and that which there would follow such a difference about wages if it arose! A private conference might be all; that failing, reference to the district Board of Conciliation ; if either party were still dissatisfied, an appeal to the one national Court of Arbitration. A few weeks’ work of committees ; a few days in court for the witnesses and the representatives of the unions of the workmen and the capitalists ; a few hours’ deliberation for the five members of some Board of Conciliation and the three members of the Arbitration Court. No riots, no troops, no agitation of capitalists, press, or philanthropists. Above all, no famine among the people, and no famine of industry, for, most beneficent provision of all, pending this appeal to arbitration, work must go on. Laborers are forbidden to strike, employers to lock out, for the purpose of evading arbitration, though they may cease for any other reason. The peaceful New Zealand court-room of arbitration, with its table, about which the judges, the contestants, the witnesses, and interested citizens are grouped, is a lens through which we Americans can look, with what satisfaction we may, at the spectacle we make of ourselves as “practical” men.

The Board of Conciliation and the Arbitration Court have found no more difficulty in settling the questions involved, however intricate, than our courts find in disentangling the complexities of bankruptcies, insurance, railroad receiverships, and the like. The spokesmen of the coal mine owners of Pennsylvania, explaining the points of difference with the men, all referring practically to wages and the recognition of the union, said to the senators of Pennsylvania, “None of these things can be the subject of arbitration.” But we open the volume of awards under the New Zealand arbitration law and find in case after case in the coal industry that the court has settled all “these things,” — and many still more technical, — questions of pay for all variety of work, “mining,” “timbering,” “headings,” in all sorts of places “solid workings,” “wet places,” “hot places,” “places in faulty coal, ” for all classes of labor, and to the satisfaction of owners and miners. The members of the coal companies are prominent among the New Zealand witnesses, quoted by the Royal Commission of New South Wales in support of arbitration. A number of the first cases referred to the Arbitration Court, which only a few weeks ago began its career in Sydney, were issues between coal companies and their miners, and several of these have been already decided and the judgments of the court acquiesced in by “all parties,” — which there include the public. The workingmen and the capitalists find no difficulty in accepting the decisions. The findings are sometimes for the men, sometimes for the master, and both acquiesce, almost without exception. The exceptional rebels have been easily fined or rebuked into submission.

“You cannot make men work by law, ” was the cry against arbitration there as it is here. The law does not attempt it. But Australasian experience is a brilliant demonstration that the law can find the golden mean on which both sides are willing to work. Men must work, capitalist as well as laborer; and the arbitration law can claim to have been more successful in keeping both at work than the violent method of private war. New Zealand has found the way — the only way — “to make men work by law; ” it offers them an escape by law from the deadlocks and conflicts which elsewhere keep them from work.

This arbitration is not “compulsory ” in any sense foreign to that “ Anglo-Saxon liberty ” which exists by such compulsions as taxation, eminent domain, conscription, education, and sanitation. The workingmen of America reject the procedure of Australasia only to submit to something far worse. They have a compulsory arbitration much more odious. The defeat of strikers by injunctions often entailing imprisonment has become their frequent experience. The Australasian workingmen think a judge — even if a “capitalist tool”—who sits in an arbitration court, where by law they are given recognition, hearing, facts, publicity, settlement, and protection, all in full, is better than a judge who sits in a star chamber dispensing government by injunction, with reserves of gatling guns and generals on horseback just outside his door.

No workingmen can be summoned to arbitrate unless they have formed a union and registered under the law to bring themselves within its jurisdiction. If they wish afterwards to withdraw they can do so. The unions must be open to all, and then in New Zealand by the usual practice of the court, and in New South Wales by the law itself, these trades-unionists are given preference of employment over non-unionists.

Employers and employees may, if they wish, establish private arbitration tribunals of their own, and the law makes special provision for this. If they would rather fight than eat, as many men would, they may even agree never to call one another into the Arbitration Court, and then they can strike and lock out to their heart’s content — if the heart has anything to do with such things. The state in New Zealand takes no initiative to compel resort to arbitration, or litigation, as South Australia has done. It provides only the place where and the way how. There is no compulsion on both to arbitrate. But if one party wants to arbitrate, instead of fighting, the other must come into court. New South Wales in following New Zealand has gone farther, and has given the state the right to call the combatants in labor wars into court.

The decisions have not all been in favor of the workmen, though most of them have been so, as the times and wages with them have been steadily improving. Some of the findings have gone heavily against labor, but it has always submitted. This seems to justify the expectation that arbitration will stand the test of hard times, too. But if the new institution should have nothing to its credit but that it succeeded in readjusting the relations of labor and capital to higher and better terms during the past seven years of advancing prices, it would deserve to be considered the best investment the New Zealand democracy has made.

The recent British Trades-Union Congress voted down a resolution for arbitration on the ground that if there were arbitration the need for unions would cease and they would die of inanition. But arbitration has wonderfully stimulated trades unionism in Australasia. By forming a union the workmen can get arbitration as a right. Practically every trade in New Zealand has organized under the law, and in New South Wales unions are now being formed both of capitalists and laborers to enjoy this new right of freedom from economic violence in the labor bargain. The employers are as favorable to arbitration as their men, for by it they alone, of all employers in the world, are free from cutthroat competition by unscrupulous rivals who cut wages in order to cut prices, and they can make contracts ahead without fear of strikes, as the awards are usually made to run for two years, and bind all in the trade. The Australasian colonies are the only countries where the workingmen can have their representatives received, and their case fairly heard, and their living wage enforced as a right. There, only, the supremacy of public opinion, which elsewhere is a boast, has been made a reality, for there only has public opinion clothed itself with the powers by which it can learn all the facts, and enforce itself. Employers, clerks, and even books can be brought into court to furnish the information necessary for a just and practical decision.

The social and economic success of this cure for labor wars is beyond question. During his recent coronation journey Premier Seddon, of New Zealand, has contradicted in England and elsewhere the countless canards of failure set afloat by the Irreconcilables of his country, the Tories of industry. “Capital is satisfied, labor is satisfied,” he says. The London Times, which never conceals its dislike of the antipodal democracy which casts so searching a light on aristocratic policy at home, has had to say recently in an editorial: —

“It is fair to the authors of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act to own that all the evil consequences which its adversaries predicted have not come to pass, and that employers have not withdrawn their capital in order to escape what it was said would soon become intolerable tyranny. ”

A Royal Commission from New South Wales in 1901 and another Royal Commission from Victoria in 1902 have made reports speaking of the results in the highest terms. The Minister for Labor reports that the demand for labor in 1902 and the growth of industry are larger than ever, and the statistics show that in revenue, manufactures, commerce, everything the statesman counts, New Zealand is more prosperous than before, is in fact the most prosperous country in the world.

The cost of all this up to date has been $20,000 for the maintenance of the Boards of Conciliation and the Arbitration Court. This is the price of seven years of peace. On every day of these seven years the country has saved the whole cost of the entire period.

From New Zealand arbitration by courts with powers of settlement has spread to New South Wales and Western Australia, and in the modified form of Wages Boards to Victoria, which is likely to adopt it fully as a result of the favorable verdict of its recent Royal Commission. A bill for an arbitration court has also been introduced into the Tasmanian Parliament. South Australia was the first colony to attempt arbitration, but its law has been inoperative for reasons which have been avoided by the other colonies.

New South Wales has been a bloody ground of labor wars. It is the richest and most important of the Australasian colonies, antagonistic to New Zealand as to federation, tariff, and general policy. It is city governed, New Zealand is country governed. New South Wales is free trade, New Zealand protectionist. All the prepossessions of New South Wales would be against any imitation of its humble island neighbor. Its decision to follow New Zealand’s lead in arbitration is the strongest possible indorsement this could have from practical men. The statesmen of New South Wales expect to see arbitration succeed as well in the great metropolis of Sydney as in the more modest towns of New Zealand. In the expansion of this institution from one commonwealth to another of the most progressive democracy of our race, and in the universal scrutiny of its results by all civilized peoples, the social observer can hardly doubt that he is witnessing the evolution of a new, but permanent, organ of our social life.

Had such a system been in force in the United States we would have saved besides much else the thousands of children and of old people who will die this winter in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and in all our Northern cities, because of dear coal. The prevention of the coal mine war would have been only a minor item in the inventory of benefits. It would have made impossible something we can see coming, which will be infinitely more disastrous and will work its mischief all through our life for many years. There is more than one sign that this coal strike has been forced as part of a still greater strike against the public, — a combination of hard and soft coal interests, to accustom the public through strike scarcity to a higher price for anthracite, which will never again be as cheap as before; to force bituminous into wider use, at the sacrifice of individual health and municipal beauty, enhancing its price, also, permanently; levying many additional millions a year more for tribute to the coal monopolists, and adding many hundreds of millions in stock exchange valuations to the fortunes of a few devotees of this kind of “coöperation.” There was no such “ loot ” in the descent of the allied Christian powers on China as in the conspiracy against the life, property, and industry of us all, masked behind this attack on the coal miners of Pennsylvania. These Poles, Lithuanians, and other Slavs in Anthracite were the pickets of your firesides, as well as of their own, and of your liberties in the markets, and all your other liberties, — for the liberties are all near relatives. You forgot it, but for the contributions you did not make to their strike funds, for the help you did not give their plea for just settlement, you will be fined in generations to come on every fire in your homes and factories, and on every right. Had the American democracy but the wit and virtue of its brothers of Australasia to protect the right of the miners to arbitration, it would have protected itself from the impending possibility of as absolute a monopoly of its fuel as that which it already suffers in oil and steel, a greater calamity than any other that could befall except a monopoly of our food, — and that is already well under way as every housekeeper knows.

For peace in the world of labor, which is the whole world, we of America are building armories and monopolies; our antipodal brothers of New Zealand, New South Wales, Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, are building courtrooms. Which is the easier and wiser way — and the wealthier?

Henry Demdrest Lloyd.