EDWARD A. FILENE

WHY MEN STRIKE

Edward A. Filene was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1860 and is now president of the well-known Boston house of William Filene's Sons Co. His business success is vividly pictured by Mr. Justice Brandeis in his address on "Business-A Profession," which is printed elsewhere in this volume. "In 1891 the Filenes occupied two tiny retail stores in Boston. The floor space of each was only twenty feet square. . . . Twenty years later their sales were nearly $5,000,000 a year. In September, 1912, they moved into a new building with more than nine acres of floor space." But this great business success was not attained by mere devotion to money-making. As Mr. Brandeis points out, "The Filenes have accepted and applied the principles of industrial democracy and of social justice." Mr. Filene has been prominent in business and civic organizations, and he has often spoken on labor and industrial relations. In this address, "Why Men Strike," he is offering not the remedies of a theorist but those which he has actually tried and found practicable. It was given before the Economic Club of New York, May 3, 1922.

WHY do men strike? Primarily because they instinctively dislike to be bossed. All men dislike to be bossed, employer and employee alike. They dislike it because experience has shown that no man is wise enough to have autocratic power over another man. Being mere mortals, at our best, we make mistakes; and if these mistakes affect other men who have to submit to them, they are liable to exaggerate them and rebel against them. They believe that if the decision had lain with them the mistakes would not have been made.

Constructive criticism of a kindly nature is scarce. But the average man finds it easy to criticize the mistakes and evils in a thing. There is, therefore, a tendency on general principles to criticize and resist the employer. If the major part of

strikes is to be avoided we employers must recognize that the inevitable and normal trend is this way. By careful study of the whole situation and wise, sympathetic organization we must 'meet the tendency.

Men strike because they are injured by real mistakes or because they believe themselves to be injured by the terms of their employment. In such strikes they are often unsuccessful and the grievances remain. For these reasons they sometimes dwell upon the objectionable features of their employment until they become tense and bitter. There grows up in consequence a distrust or hate of the whole present system. Irresponsible leaders who voice and trade on this discontent easily get a following. There is also a reaction toward socialism and communism which are presented as panaceas for the ills that are complained of.

REACTION TO SOCIALISM OR COMMUNISM NO REMEDY

For many years I have studied carefully the relations between employer and employee, under our so-called capitalistic system. I have also studied socialism and communism as proposed substitutes for it. I am forced to the conclusion that as men are constituted at the present time socialism and communism are not practical remedies. I am convinced also that the greater part of the wealth of employers is legitimately gained and that all the world is richer because of their wealth. Henry Ford is not the only man who has become rich through serving the public. Many an employer's wealth has been, as Mr. Henry Holt has well pointed out, "derived from processes and economies of his own devising and directing without which his income would not exist at all and the income of his employees would be less."

But firmly convinced as I am of this truth, I am just as firmly convinced that the present wage system is not infallible or final, but is only a step on the road from serfdom and slavery to improved forms of just and effective coöperation that the experience and wisdom of men will evolve from generation to generation. But as the present system is the road that must

for the present be utilized for the upward march of all of us, employer and employee alike, we employers will do well to study it carefully with the object of understanding its weaknesses and remedying its defects.

My study of industrial relations has convinced me of four things:

1. That in a political democracy such as ours the autocratic control of industry by employers is a fruitful breeder of strikes and is in the long run impractical;

2. That we often pay counterfeit wages when we intend to pay real wages, thus causing discontent, conflict and strikes; 3. That the present so-called capitalistic system has accumulated and is still using, outgrown ideas and customs that are needlessly offensive to our employees, and that it needs to be brought up to date;

4. That the basic remedy for the evils of industrialism and hence for strikes lies in making business a profession-that is, in realizing, in act as well as in thought, that a business has no right to make a profit except as it serves the community. Let us briefly review these four conclusions:

1. INDUSTRIAL AUTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY

All of us employers are believers in the right of private property. Almost all of us translate that faith, consciously or subconsciously, into a conviction that our property is so completely our own that society should keep its hand off of it. We hold that if it must touch our property at all it should do so only to the slightest possible extent, and only after having first recognized and acknowledged, that it was interfering with our rights. Of course any analysis of this position shows that it is not very sound. It amounts to setting up property rights as superior to personal rights; to an appeal to society to safeguard our selfish interests against the common interests of the society to which we appeal; to an insistence at times on the duty of government to protect us in our imagined and artificial rights to the detriment and loss of the whole group of citizens of which we are a part. And this view tends, unfortunately, to develop an autocratic spirit among us.

Applying this idea of property as exclusively our own to our relations with our employees, we probably feel that we have undoubted right to determine the conditions under which these employees shall work, provided we do it lawfully. And here we find one of the reasons why men strike-a source of grievance which can be shown to be the real cause of many strikes where other reasons are put forward. Most of our employees -all of those who have been educated in this country-have been taught from childhood that it is their inalienable right as freemen to have a hand in determining the political laws under which they live. They have heard it reiterated by their teachers in the public schools and by the interpreters of our free institutions on every public occasion. They read it in the daily press.

Men so taught are not going to stop short of applying this axiom, that grows out of the political system under which they are governed, to the industrial system under which they live and labor. Inevitably they are claiming the right to have an effective voice in the determining of conditions under which they work. These economic conditions are even more important to them than the political conditions. They have occasion for the expression of their political views at infrequent intervals. They are conscious of the exactions and burdens of government only now and then. But the urge to have an adequate voice in determining industrial conditions is daily, yes hourly, insistent. Every accident that is costly to labor, every additional expense in their living, every new baby, every new ideal, every new material desire such as an automobile or a house, serves as an occasion for reopening the question whether their wages are justly and generously determined. The result of such questioning is surely a further incentive in their minds to the greater assertion of their rights, as the preponderant human factors in industry, to have a voice in the control of conditions of labor and of the rate of wages. And this assertion of right, if opposed by the employer, often means another strike.

Then to this is added the periodic recurrence of bad times, with its masses out of employment, and the fear of the loss of the job-one of the most terrifying apprehensions of the average workingman with a family. Under these conditions men

feel themselves compelled to fight, by strikes or otherwise, for a greater voice in determining the conditions under which they labor. They are led on by the idea that if they have this greater voice they will so regulate and control production and distribution that not only will there be no fear of loss of the job, but there will also be sufficient wages to satisfy their needs and their desires.

My own life-long experience and study as an employer convinces me that autocratic control by employees would be even worse than autocratic control by employers. There is nothing in democracy that can perform miracles in production and distribution. There is nothing in the democratic principle in industry that in itself will take the place of expert knowledge, technical skill and trained industrial vision. No man in the factory, whether employer or employee, if he were hurt by a machine, would be willing to have a committee of his fellowworkmen meet and vote how badly he was hurt and how he should be cured. They would send for the trained, skilled specialist, the doctor or the surgeon. Likewise, when the business is hurt, it cannot be cured by a vote of management-sharing employees, unless those so voting are mentally and technically trained to know what they are voting about and are basically so interested that they will put their best into their decision.

It all comes to this, that autocratic control whether by employer or employee, is bad-the one almost as objectionable as the other; and that men are striking to-day as a protest against autocratic control by capital, and as the most effective way of expressing their demand for an adequate voice in the conditions under which they work. They are vitally interested. They will continue to strike until provision is made for giving them adequate representation in boards of directors or in those shop committees, by whatever name they may be called, in which employers and employees work hand in hand to advance both the business and the legitimate interests of the human beings who put their lives into it and get their livelihood from it. This is largely recognized by employers now and the growth of these joint committees has for some years been marked.