Ethics · John Dewey
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.
(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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.