LABOR AND CO-OPERATION.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume IV, Issue 505, 11 September 1890, Page 2

LABOR AND CO-OPERATION.

The thoughtful letter from Mr Rees j which we published in our last issue, conveys an idea which other writers have now come to appreciate. In a late number of the Sydney Bulletin there is an excellent article on the labor question. It considers that the only bright star of hope is Co-operation. “ The strikes of the past,’> says the Bulletin, ‘f whichever way they went, are valueless as contributions to a solution of the wages question, They only show where the strength of numbers won or the power of gold won, and neither involves the principle on wbteh to stake a sense of right. Inasmuch as the general tendency has been in favor of Labor, Democracy rejoices, but it does so, not because it accepts the methods employed in the respective battles of the various trades, but because, seeing behind it gene rations of blind toilers who stumbled, Starved, to paupers’ graves, it is ready to help Labor to put an end to its cycle of misery by any means—even by the morally-worthless argument of numbers, The wages question IS; tlieiij still there,

and its obscuration by that of affiliation is merely temporary. Labor has, although a winner of victories in some trades, been a loser of battles in others, and observing the methods which won the victories, it desires to apply these to contests of the future. A particular guild forced its employers to the wall and wrested from them a surrender ; an amalgamation of all guilds, one vast guild. Labor personified, proposes now to do with all employers what successful guilds occasionally succeeded in doing with some. On the other hand, employers have been observant. They saw where they lost, they saw where they won, and have not alone profited by past experience, but have taken in the plan of campaign now devised by Labor. They not alone group themselves together, but impede where they can the affiliation of their economic foes. This case of the steamship-owners and their officers illustrates the latter phase. In the eye of Labor every man who gives up his weeks and his years to do the work of another as that other directs is as much a laborer as a man who builds a wall or digs a ditch. His wearing better clothes makes no difference. Whether he walks before the mast or behind the mast matters not one jot. He gives the work of his life for the pay of his employers, and the permanent interests of his class lie not with the capitalists, but with those who also, have to give up their lives for pay. A writer in one of the daily papers puts forward the plea that officers are, or should be, ‘ gentlemen,’ and their affiliation with the seamen they direct or with labor societies generally would detract from their dignity and shorten the atm of their authority. Possibly this would in some cases result. , But labor has in its, latter years been confronted with prospects of greater calamities than these and has passed on, and no disaster has occurred to stay her absorption of a class of men because some of them wholly rely on adventitious circumstances to support ‘ dignity ’ ,or wield authority. Steamshipowners and other employers who try to impede the march of events by considerations of dignity and the exercise of a I verbal authority, are doing worse than trying to stop the incoming tide with a 1 broom. Labor’s citadel stands bold and high ; every man whose hands are hard or whose brain is tried with, the work of

another sees that his post is there. To that citadel he will go ; it’is a mere question of time. . And when capital finds that tricks of speech will not prevail, back to its citadel it will rush with all its speed, and then the battle of the world begins. The gold of the world will be on the one side, the labor of the world on the other ; the universal trust against the universal boycott. And what wil happen ? In the exercise of its power of numbers Labor will commit excesses which will excite mutiny in its ranks, for among its soldiers will be some who own capital j the Trust, too, will develop mutinies, for much of the gold with which it wages war will be drawn from the pockets of shareholders who are poor. With mutinies oh both sides, both sides will be forced to pause. Then •will come rhe day for a new social philosophy or for the practical application of the philosophy of Co-operation at present so imperfectly understood. It may—it will—be found that work ,can never be adequately paid for by wages, and that the only solution of that Asses’ Bridge of economies will be, like the Gordian knot’s, its final abolition. But the conditions precedent must be that Capital will have realised that human sinews and human brains have more right to rule the world than gold has, and that Labor will have recognised that its share in the profits of work is not to be wholly determined by how much it can wrest from employers by the mere strength of numbers in organisation. To this issue Capital and Labor now quickly move.”