Popular Law-making. Frederic Jesup Stimson
Читать онлайн книгу.
therefore, we have the much-discussed Standard Wage fixed by law, but in the interest of the employer; not a "living wage" fixed in the interest of the employee, as modern thought requires. The same statute makes it unlawful to give to able-bodied beggars, which is of a piece with the compulsory labor of the able-bodied. Now this first Statute of Laborers, which led to centuries of English law unjust to the laborers, it is interesting to note, was possibly never a valid law, for it was never agreed to by the House of Commons. However that may be, the confirming statute of 1364 was duly enacted by Parliament, and this was not in terms repealed until the year 1869, although labor leaders claim it to have been repealed by general words in the 5th Elizabeth.
Thorold Rogers tells us that those, after all, were the happy days of the laborer—when masons got four pence a day, and the Black Prince, the head of the army, only got twenty shillings—sixty times as much. This is a fair modern proportion, however, for military and other state service; though we pay the president a salary of nearly double that proportion to the yearly pay of a carpenter. But then, these English statutes applied mainly to agricultural labor; and domestic labor was paid considerably less.
This Statute of Laborers was again re-enacted in 1360, with a clause allowing work in gross, and forbidding "alliances and covins between masons, carpenters, and guilds." Work "in gross" means work by contract, piece-work, thus made expressly lawful by statute in England in 1360, but still objected to by many of our labor unions to-day. The provision against alliances and covins was extended to cover trades-unions, their rules and by-laws, as well as strikes, which were also considered combinations in restraint of trade. Now this was never law in this country.
There was a very early case in Pennsylvania, while it was still a colony, and there were others in the States soon after, which held that the Statutes of Laborers were never law in America. Our statutes early authorized trades-unions, but without this there is, I think, no American case where either a trades-union or a simple strike was held to be an unlawful combination. It was these early statutes which gave rise to the law that existed until the nineteenth century in England, that both strikes and unions were unlawful; a strike because it was usually a combination to raise the rate of wages, which was in theory fixed by law. Therefore, a strike was a combination with an unlawful aim, consequently a conspiracy. The logic is simple; and in the same way a trades-union was certainly an alliance between skilled workmen, and as such forbidden under the Statute of Laborers, besides being a combination in restraint of trade.
Now the guild, in so far as it was a combination of a trade in a town, was a perfectly lawful thing; in so far as it bore upon the right of a man to be a freeman, it was a perfectly lawful thing; it was only from the other end, from this statute I read as to combinations, that two or three centuries later they got the notion that a trades-union was an unlawful thing; so you may say that a trades-union in England has a lawful root and an unlawful root, and it is rather important to see from which each class springs. The first case in which the modern strike was considered was a case known as the Journeymen Tailors' case, which happened more than two hundred years ago; and in that case it was definitely held to be an unlawful combination, while the first case on the modern boycott, where an injunction was awarded, is as late as 1868, this being the origin of that process which has evoked so much criticism here, the use of the injunction in labor disputes. The unskilled laborers in England have never combined; the only people who combined were the guilds, the skilled men, and in so far as they combined they did it rather as capitalists, employees, or as freemen, to govern the town; this was a lawful object; and the guilds rapidly grew into little aristocracies. They very soon ceased to be journeyman laborers, and became combinations of employers. Thus, the guild movement didn't amount to much in bringing about the modern trades-union or combinations of laboring men; it began before it occurred to these latter that they also could combine; just as, even now, it is more difficult among women to get them to join trades-unions, or for working women to combine; they have not apparently got into that stage of evolution; and so with the negroes in the South. But about the end of the eighteenth century you begin to find the first strikes and combinations of workingmen; and then what the courts promptly applied to them was not the old line of statutes, the historical common-law growth, deriving from a guild which in its origin was a lawful body and so making the union free and lawful, but naturally—for the magistrates were capitalists and land-owners, and all the courts were in sympathy with that class—they went back to the long series of Statutes of Laborers, and said "this is a combination of workingmen to break the law by getting more than lawful wages," and consequently found both combinations unlawful, trades-unions and strikes, as well as when they were combinations to injure somebody, what we should now call a boycott.
The great Statute of Laborers which was for centuries supposed to settle the law of England is that of Elizabeth in 1562. Meantime, agricultural labor as well as industrial was getting to be free. A statute of 1377, which requires villeins refusing to labor to be committed to prison on complaint of the landlord, without bail, itself recognizes that villeins fleeing to a town are made free after a year and day's habitation therein. In 1383 came Wat Tyler's rising; the villeins demanded a commutation of agricultural labor to a money rent (four pence) and full freedom of trade and labor in all the market towns; and about this time was great growth of small freeholders.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.