HOW STRIKES ARE PROVOKED.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 21, 14 September 1883, Page 13

HOW STRIKES ARE PROVOKED.

Not only have strikes done incalculable mischief, but much of the benefits to labourers, which seemed to have attended their existence and which are commonly imputed to them by the unthinking is in no sense due to strikes. The price of labour, like all other prices, is subject to the control of law. Men who admit the prevalence of law in every other part of the universe, in the movement of the planets, in tUe beaving of the tide in the functional activity of every other existence, animal and vegetable, accept with reluctance, if they do not actually reject all laws of trade. The rise and fall of the price of labour, as of all prices, are controlled by natural laws. As artificial heat or shade may advance or delay vegetable growth, so a strike may sometimes hasten a rise or retard a fall, though usually without real profit in either case. But, obedient to the laws of trade, wages will ris a without strikes, and fall in spite of strikes. Have not wages risen in those vocations in which strikes are unknown ? Compare the present wages of farm hands, of clerks and salesmen, of" firemen, of house-servants and others, with the wages of these classes, respectively, a hundred years ago, or fifty, or even twenty-five. In all these cases the laws of trade, operating -upon changing facts and relations, have changed the price of labour they have changed the price of draft horses, wheat, butter other articles. It is worth while to add that tbe laws of trade, which are laws of nature, are wiser sometimes than men. The servant girl of to-day gets better wages than the servant girl of 1782, without knowing why, or, perhaps, even without knowing the fact. Not her volitions, not even her knowledge, but natural law brings her the increase. Hence we are not surprised to find that strikers have made sometimes lamentable and even ludicrous mistakes to their cost. Assuming to be wiser than nature, they have demonstrated their folly and have eaten its bitter fruit. An amusing illustration was the strike of the miners in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania in 1870. The preceding winter had been mild ; as a consequence, the corporations and speculators found in the spring a surplus on hand of about 700,000 tons. To lose a few cents a bushel on this would be ruin. To. make a few additional cents a bushel would be wealth. They saw that the mere existence of a strike would enable them to dispose of their enormous surplus at a handsome profit; They instituted ingenious modes of provoking a strike. The poor miners fell into the trap, bringing millions to their employers and distress to themselves.— From H. J. Spannhorst's " Report of the Missouri Bureau of Labour Statistics."