Yesterday I received in the mail a photocopy I had ordered from the New York
Public Library of a lengthy (85 pages) pamphlet published in 1903. The
pamphlet is notable for two reasons: 1. it was written and compiled under
the direction of William Wolff Smith, who, in 1902, was the first public
relations counselor to set up operations in Washington, D.C. and 2. it dealt
with the issue of legislation for the eight hour day. Thus it is a key
source document in the history of corporate public relations in the service
of an organized political lobby on the labor issue. The title of the
pamphlet is "An Arbitrary Workday?"
The pamphlet consists largely of an excruciatingly tedious, tendentious and
rambling account of a 'correspondent's' investigation of the issue through
visits to two shipyards and a steel mill. Of particular interest, though,
are the editor's transparently disingenous disclaimer of reportorial
"impartiality"; the reporter's own conclusion, culminating in an
extraordinarily vile racist digression (which he and his editors must have
viewed as the "clincher" for their case); and a summary of the congressional
testimony of Mr. A.B. Farquhar, of the National Association of
Manufacturers, which obviously drew heavily on the squalid (and equally
tendentious) London Times series from November 1901 on the "Crisis in
British Industry".
In my view, Farquhar's testimony establishes the final link in the chain of
evidence establishing the London Times series and its zealous propagation by
the National Association of Manufacturers as the actual source of the
alleged "lump of labor fallacy" claim against proposals for reduced work
time, repeated ad nauseum as received wisdom by economists, including the
Samuelson textbook. My previous investigation of the spuriousness of the
lump of labor claim as economic doctrine will be published by Routledge next
month in _Working Time: International Trends, Theory and Policy
Perspectives_. The sequel to that work will detail the propaganda campaign.
AN ARBITRARY WORKDAY?
SHALL THE AMERICAN WORKINGMAN BE FETTERED THE TRIUMPHAL PROGRESS OF AMERICAN
ARTS AND INDUSTRIES ARRESTED, THE MANUFACTURING OUTPUT DIMINISHED AND
INDIVIDUAL EFFORT REGULATE BY LAW?
CAPITAL AND LABOR UNITE IN OPPOSITION TO THE PROPOSED LEGISLATION
SOME OF THE OBJECTIONS PRESENTED BY MANUFACTURERS AND MECHANICS WHO WOULD BE
AFFECTED
(Editor's disclaimer)
NOTE. - Mr. Robert H. Watkins, a well-known newspaper correspondent at the
Capitol, was requested by the Editors to visit several industrial
institutions with a view of ascertaining the effect the application of the
eight-hour law now on the Senate Calendar would have on them. He received no
instructions whatever, except to be absolutely impartial. His observations
are embodied in the following article.-Editors.
(Watkins' conclusion)
The passage of the bill would indeed in its clumsy way go far toward
engrafting the system of eight hours a day throughout the United States, but
to contemplate what that would mean is to think of nothing less than a
national folly. In my humble opinion, if the bill should pass and every
manufacturing concern in the country and every employer of labor should
consent to and adopt the eight-hour system, it would instantly mark the
decay of the splendid prestige of the United States as the richest and most
powerful country on earth. As I have already said, I believe the measure an
assault upon the liberty of both the employer and the employee. I do not
wish to see the day when American manufacturers and American workmen should
not have all the chances they desire with the manufacturers and workmen of
the rest of the world. The arbitrary rule of eight hours would make men
machines that would surely rust, and would discourage indivuality of effort
and purpose. It would subject us to a competition with foreign producers
with which we could not possibly cope. Civilization has not yet reached the
period of impossible felicity when multitudes of men may every day, year in
and year out, quit work and go to improving themselves with idleness. The
notion that the employer, finding be can not get as much out of his men by
only eight hours, will be obliged to employ more men to complete the job,
will not do to consider in these days. Under that system manufacturing in
America will go backward and employers grow less. As line after line of
production is abandoned the crowds of idle will be correspondingly increased.
Having lived for some years in a Southern State which has made remarkable
progress in manufacturing, especially in metal production and in mining, I
contemplate with dread the effect there of a possible eight-hour system for
labor. A great proportion of Southern labor is negro labor. To turn loose
every day the hordes of negroes that would be idle so much of the day as the
eight-hour system would give them would visit on the South nothing short of
calamity. The negro problem is grave enough at best. It is vexing the calm
of our greatest statesmen and baffling already the efforts of our most
strenuous intellects. Who is going to provide entertainment, profitable and
wholesome entertainment, for our negroes in their hours of ease? Who is
going to guarantee that the passions of the blacks -- the millions of blacks
-- will conform themselves to the invocations of the lyceum and the library?
It is a matter of record that the towns and urban communities throughout the
South show that there is most crime among negroes on days on which they are
not at work, their few whole holidays and their once-a-week half-holidays.
The eight-hour system would give them some holiday every day and the race
would either degrade every community in the South or have to be exterminated.
The negro is not the only human creature to whom enforced or optional
idleness is a bane. The best gift of our institutions is in the chance of
manful, self-reliant independence. The law should foster it and not hamper
and degrade it.
The eight-hour crusade, once having enlisted the aid of the Congress of the
United States, would be as stupendous and deplorable an absurdity as was the
crusade of the fanatical children of the middle ages.
(Report on Farquhar's testimony)
In his testimony Mr. A. B. Farquhar, a member of the Legislative Committee
of the National Association of Manufacturers, treated the subject in a
philosophical manner from a point of view of a political economist and
doctrinaire. Mr. Farquhar is a well-known writer on these subjects and his
views were heard by the committee with interest. He took the broad ground
that an eight-hour day would not be beneficial to the workers of the country
even if it came about by process of evolution instead of by law. He did not
believe an eight-hour day would make the workingmen better Christians or
better citizens.
Mr. Farquhar pointed out the industrial decadence of England, which writers
on economics maintain has set in, and briefly detailed the causes. The hold
of labor organizations on English industries, he pointed out, was so strong
that it might even be termed a death grip. In England they have secured
their shorter day, "and not only that but have successfully resisted in many
instances the introduction of improved machinery and have seriously cut down
the aggregate productive power of the country by their too-effective
limiting the amount of work that one of their members may do in a given
time." Because of this subservience to labor unions the predominance of
England his fallen to Germany and the United States. " Another sad result, "
he said " is a decline in the wage scale in England. It is an infallible
economic law that labor is paid from what labor produces. Cut down
production and you cut down wages." Mr. Farquhar pointed out that the bill
did not take cognizance of the different kinds of service but reduced all in
its socialistic prescription to one dead level -- the mechanical draughtsman
or designer in his office, the superintendent of a mill, the laborer engaged
in heavy manual work or the mechanic who merely watched a lathe -- all will
be limited to eight hours work a day, regardless of their capacity to do
more. He pointed out the method proposed was a direct attack on the liberty
of the citizen, terming it pure, undisguised paternalism. "The amount of
espionage and arbitrary interferences, involving possibilities of blackmail
which must accompany the operation of such a law, if it is not to remain a
dead letter, " he said, would benefit tin Oriental despotism but it is
utterly foreign to an enlightened Republic."
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
