Chapter XXXIX: Appendix: To Chapter XXV

PROFESSOR SEAGER'S PROGRAMME OF SOCIAL LEGISLATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WAGE-EARNERS

In the conviction that in the field of social legislation the United States is behind the more progressive countries of Europe, Professor Henry R. Seager, of Columbia University, presented the following _Outline_ for discussion at a meeting of the American Association for Labor Legislation, December 30, 1907. It is reproduced with his consent as giving concrete expression to several of the principles advocated in the foregoing chapters.

The ends to be aimed at in any programme of social legislation
are:

I. To protect wage-earners in the continued enjoyment of standards
of living to which they are already accustomed.

II. To assist them to attain to higher standards of living.

_I. Measures to protect prevailing standards of living._

The principal contingencies which threaten standards of living
already acquired are: (1) industrial accidents; (2) illness; (3)
invalidity and old age; (4) premature death; (5) unemployment.
These contingencies are not in practice adequately provided
against by wage-earners themselves. In consequence the losses they
entail, in the absence of any social provision against them, fall
with crushing force on the families which suffer from them, and
only too often reduce such families from a position of
independence and self-respect to one of humiliating and
efficiency-destroying social dependency. The following remedies
for the evils resulting from this situation are suggested.

(1) Employers' liability laws fail to provide adequate indemnity
to the victims of industrial accidents because in a large
proportion of cases no legal blame attaches to the employer and
because litigation under them is costly and uncertain in its
outcome. Adequate indemnification must be sought along the line of
workmen's compensation for all industrial accidents at the expense
of the employer (the British system) or of compulsory accident
insurance (the German system). The former seems to accord better
with American ideas and traditions.

(2) The principle of workmen's compensation may be extended to
include indemnity for loss of wages due to trade diseases.
Provision against illness not directly traceable to the employment
must be sought either in compulsory illness insurance or in
subsidized and state-directed sick-insurance clubs. Trade unions
may assume the functions of such clubs in organized trades. The
latter plan seems better suited to present American conditions
than compulsory illness insurance.

(3) Provision against invalidity and old age may be through
compulsory old age insurance, or through state old age pensions.
The latter, though more costly, are believed to be better suited
to American conditions, when hedged about by proper restrictions,
than compulsory old age insurance with the elaborate
administrative machinery which it entails.

(4) Premature death may be provided against by an extension of the
machinery for caring for the victims of industrial accident and of
illness to provide for their families when accident or illness
results fatally.

(5) Provision against losses due to unemployment is attended with
great difficulties because unemployment is so frequently the
consequence of incapacity or of disinclination for continuous
labor. The most promising plan for providing against this evil
appears to be through subsidizing and supervising trade unions
which pay out-of-work benefits to stimulate this side of their
activity. Public employment bureaus and industrial colonies for
the unemployed may also help to alleviate the evil of
unemployment.

* * * * *

Adequate social provision against these five contingencies along
the lines suggested, would, it is believed, go a long way towards
solving the problem of social dependency. If these concessions
were made to the demands of social justice, a more drastic policy
towards social dependents than public opinion will now sanction
might be inaugurated with good prospect of confining social
dependency to the physically, mentally, and morally defective.

_II. Measures to elevate standards of living._

The primary conditions essential to rising standards of living are
energy and enterprise on the part of wage-earners and
opportunities to make energy and enterprise count in the form of
higher earnings. The principal contributions which social
legislation may make to advancing standards of living in the
United States are believed to be: (1) measures serving to
encourage saving for future needs on the part of wage-earners by
providing safe investments for savings; (2) measures protecting
wage-earners from the debilitating effects of an unregulated
competition; (3) measures serving to bring within the reach of all
opportunities for industrial training. Standards of living will
also be advanced, of course, by nearly all measures calculated to
promote the general well-being, such as tax and tariff-reform
legislation, laws safeguarding the national domain, the public
regulation of corporations, especially those with monopolistic
powers, etc., but these are not usually classed under the head of
social legislation.

(1) The greatest present need under this head is for a postal
savings bank like those of European countries. The advantages of a
postal savings bank over privately managed banks are the wider
distribution of places of deposit, post-offices being located in
every section of the country, and the greater confidence
depositors would feel in such a bank. Once established the postal
savings bank might enter the insurance field, as has the British
postal savings bank, not as a rival of privately managed insurance
companies, but to bring to every wage-earner the opportunity to
secure safe insurance. Next to providing itself opportunities for
safe investment and insurance, the government has an important
duty to perform in supervising the business of privately managed
savings banks and insurance companies. Notwithstanding the
progress made in recent years in the United States in this field,
there is still something left for social legislation to
accomplish.

(2) If energy and enterprise are to be kept at a maximum,
wage-earners must be protected from exhausting toil under
unhealthful conditions. Skilled wage-earners can usually protect
themselves through trade unions, but unskilled workers, women and
children, require legal protection. Under this head belong,
therefore, the familiar types of protective labor laws. The
following may be specified:

(a) Laws prohibiting the employment of children below fourteen in
all gainful pursuits. Such laws should be uniform throughout the
United States and rigidly enforced by means of employment
certificates based on convincing evidence of age and physical
examination to determine fitness. As provision for free public
education is made more adequate to present needs the minimum age
may be advanced perhaps to sixteen.

(b) Laws limiting the hours of labor of young persons over
fourteen. Protection here should extend to eighteen, at least in
factory employments, and employment certificates should be
required of all under that age.

(c) Laws limiting the hours of labor of women. In the regulation
of women's work in the United States the principal needs are
uniformity and machinery for efficient enforcement. The last is
facilitated by the plan of specifying in the law the working
period for the protected classes, and American courts must be
brought to see the reasonableness (administratively) of such
prescriptions. The nine-hour day and prohibition of night work set
a high enough standard until greater uniformity and more efficient
enforcement shall have been secured.

(d) Prescriptions in regard to sanitation and safety appliances.
General prescriptions in regard to ventilation, etc., need to be
made more exact, and much more attention needs to be given to the
special regulation of dangerous trades, the existence of which has
been largely ignored thus far in American legislation.

(3) The chief reason for restricting the labor of children and
young persons is to permit the physical and mental development of
childhood and youth to proceed unhampered and to ripen into
strong, vigorous, and efficient manhood and womanhood. To attain
this end, it is necessary to provide not only for wholesome living
conditions and general free public education, but also for special
industrial training for older children superior to the training
afforded in modern factories and workshops. The apprenticeship
system now fails as a method of industrial training, even in those
few trades which retain the forms of apprenticeship. There is
urgent social need for comprehensive provision for industrial
training as a part of the public school system, not to take the
place of the training now given to children under fourteen, but to
hold those between fourteen and sixteen in school. As this need is
supplied the period of compulsory school attendance may gradually
be extended up to the sixteenth year. The guiding principle of
such industrial training should be that it is the function of
free public education in the United States not only to prepare
children to lead useful, well-rounded and happy lives, but to
command the earnings without which such lives are impossible.

The above programme of social legislation is urged as a step
towards realizing that canon of social justice which demands for
all equal industrial opportunities. It is believed that it will
also help to raise the standard of citizenship in the country by
making both wage-earners and employers more intelligent, more
efficient, and more truly democratic. Thus it will serve to
prepare the way for such further industrial reorganization as may
be found desirable.