The Labor Policy of the Free Society

I repeat the definition of a primitive society given before. It has for its units, not individuals, but groups of men.

—Sir Henry Maine

The fundamental goals and problems in labor relations are the goals and problems of life in society. Well-being, stability, security, leisure, opportunity, rewards, freedom to do what one wishes to do and to try to be what one hopes to be—these represent the goals and raise the problems in labor relations, as they do in life generally. It could not be otherwise. For labor relations are human relations, an aspect of the single, complex category of human action. This being so, sound techniques of social relations must necessarily apply also in labor relations. A few may need to be adjusted and expanded for their most effective application in labor relations. But, aside from such adjustments, the problems in labor relations must be dealt with in largely the same way that problems in other areas of social life are met.

The Goals of Men

Much industry and some learning, as a great social scientist has said of another effort, have gone into analyzing the “worker.” The findings and conclusions have not been startling. The worker turns out to be a human being, even as you and I, with largely the same instincts, desires, ideas, and habits. The worker wants more money, meaning more things, usually; but he would also like to work fewer hours and have better and longer vacations. He would like to have a secured income. He wants cleaner, safer, and, when he thinks about it, more attractive conditions of work.

Some workers feel more comfortable in group activity, and ill at ease and uncertain where group conflicts exist or the stability of their group’s position or their individual position within the group is threatened. New methods, new tools, new techniques are often resisted where they involve an effort at adjustment, or where they threaten the going state of things. A group of unorganized workers once quit work because their employer asked them to use larger and more powerful machines even though the only difference, it later appeared, was that less physical effort was required to operate the new machines than the old. If new tools clearly make a job easier, can be readily handled, and do not threaten one’s job or livelihood, workers usually welcome them or at least accept them ultimately. There should be nothing very revealing about these facts to anyone who has been around, anywhere.

Workers tend to prefer stability and security to instability and insecurity. They will often prefer a relatively low-paying job with higher security to a relatively high-paying job with lower security. Still, not all workers are trying to be mail carriers. Many workers give up “secure” jobs in order to take more insecure work at higher wages or to go into business for themselves.

For the truth is that the opportunity to improve one’s position represents at least as fundamental and widespread a desire as the wish for security and stability. And an equally pertinent truth is that these concurrent desires, like so many others, tend to rub against each other at certain points. The security of the corner grocer, as such, can sometimes be bought only at the expense of stifling the opportunity of the laborer who wishes to open up a store himself. Often, too, the security of the corner grocer is at odds with the universal desire to have one’s money go further, to get more of the goods of life per unit of expenditure. Where the corner grocer’s security depends upon preventing the growth of chain stores, the conflict is clear.

In the current state of the world the desires of all workers, of all men, women, and children, for material things may be taken as infinite. The problem in satisfying these desires is one of production. There is a great and as yet unsatisfied desire for new automobiles. If they could be produced and sold at costs and prices substantially lower than those now prevailing, many more buyers would enter the market. Production is adequately meeting the actual demand at current prices; but there can be no doubt of the existence of a vast reservoir of unsatisfied desire. The problem is one of producing more cars at lower costs, to be sold at lower prices.

One way or another, real costs and prices must be reduced if production is to be increased. Unit costs and prices can be brought down in various ways: through harder work by everyone engaged in production (probably the least promising as well as least appealing method); through more efficient arrangement of the production unit (substituting more efficient working arrangements for less efficient ones); by replacing men with machines, where machines are more efficient and more economical; or by building up demand for the product to the point where the economies of larger-scale production come into play.

Each of these methods of reducing costs, and every other method ever described, involves change—change which at one point or another, in one way or another conflicts with the universally shared desire for security and stability. And this is true even of the method of reducing costs by larger-scale production. An immediate result of an increase in the production and purchase of automobiles is a reduction in the production and purchase of something else. Some other person or firm will feel the effects.

There will be resistance if the automobile manufacturer asks for faster and harder work. His workers, and their union, will complain if the manufacturer gives to a more efficient producer work which was formerly performed in his own plant, or if he revises job assignments and production teams. As illustrated by the controversy over “automation,” a large-scale effort to increase mechanization, this method of reducing costs likewise does not by any means meet with universal acceptance.

Yet here we are, all of us, wishing material goods, plus freedom, plus opportunity; and at the same time strongly desiring personal security and stability. These concurrent desires, pervading all of individual and social life, pose the central problems in labor relations also. The social structure must resolve these problems and harmonize the ineradicable, sometimes competing interests, in labor relations as in every other aspect of the infinite variety of human action.

The General Features of an Enduring Society

The most successful social structure is the one which promotes all these interests most satisfactorily, the one which, in doing so, sacrifices to the least possible extent any of the great, central, human desires for well-being, freedom, and security. An enduring society may be described, then, as one which provides the environment for a maximum fulfillment of human desires and a minimum of frustrations—a system in which the means of achieving the deepest wishes of men are in smooth, effective working order. For societies which do not serve the abiding interests of their members are failures, and are rejected as soon as conditions are propitious.

The enduring society will not deal in exactly the same way with, or give equal emphasis to, every human desire. Desires differ; they fall into different categories and orders of importance; they find their fulfillment in different ways. Therefore there is no reason in the nature of things which dictates that society should deal with every desire in precisely the same way.

An institution or a method well designed for the achievement of one end is not necessarily well designed for reaching all ends. An army and a police force subject to political controls may be the best available means of maintaining the physical security of persons. But other forms of human activity may be more serviceable in the creation, testing, and propagation of ideas and other human productions. The great society will accordingly develop many institutions of varying character, and the method of natural selection will determine the success of each. Arbitrary compulsion to certain modes of operation will be eschewed for the single reason that such compulsion is unintelligent and unserviceable in determining the best available method of reaching an objective. Institutions and methods of operation, well adapted either singly or in combination to the promotion of fundamental objectives, will be permitted a free and natural course of development. There will be church and state, and areas in which neither institution is appropriate.

In order to endure, a society must attend effectively and in due proportion to all the central, vital desires of mankind. It must order itself coherently and intelligently, and it must maintain inherent integrity. The enduring society will accept or reject proposals and institutions in accordance with their usefulness to the fundamentally important human objectives. Such a society will have no taboos, no irrational, arbitrary delimitations on human action; it will maintain integrity by refusing to sanction or to condone inherently inconsistent means and programs.

Thus the great society will make a fetish of neither “freedom” nor “security.” It will be aware that the interests of society, being the interests of persons, are exceedingly complicated; that societies, like persons, must order their internal complexities into coherence; that societies, like persons, must be well balanced if they are to be healthy and vigorous. It will, in short, refuse to sacrifice freedom for security, or security for freedom, but will look for and ultimately find a method of promoting both.

There can be no specially privileged persons or groups in the great society. As the mechanism for the maximum achievement of human desires, the great society has no alternative to the view that each person is of equal significance. All persons differ to some degree, in capacities as well as desires; and no one proposes that society erase these differences. But both intelligence and humanity require that society regard the person as its basis of calculation: intelligence, because society is for persons, because society depends upon the willing acquiescence of all in its measures, and because there is no telling in advance whence the great people who carry us forward will come; humanity, because of our common nature, because we are one species, and because, consequently, the subjugation of one leaves all potentially exposed to the same fate.

And so, in the good society, individual, undifferentiated persons count—not “farmers” or “workers” or “businessmen,” but persons—each and every person. A farmer today may be a businessman or an industrial laborer tomorrow; and if not he, almost certainly his sons or his sons’ sons. But always they will remain persons. That being the case, only greed or lack of intelligence can induce men who are currently farmers to seek a special advantage over men who are currently engaged in other kinds of activity. And if farmers nonetheless seek such advantage, the great society will deny it; for it cannot do otherwise and remain great.

The great society will, then, exhibit certain marked, central characteristics. Its fundamental rules will be equally applicable to all men. It will give appropriate attention to all the profound desires and drives of its members so as to realize all to the fullest possible extent. It will have a nonarbitrary method of selecting from available rules, methods, and institutions those best designed to achieve the desired ends.

The Unity and Harmony of General Human Goals

If the job of society is to serve the desires of its members, there must be some more or less generally accepted conception and ordering of the human desires which are to direct the society. These desires may all be comprehended within the elemental want: the desire for life. But we may go further and define the ramifications of the life-want. We desire material well-being, including security and stability; and we desire freedom, including opportunity to better ourselves in every way that appeals to us. We ask society to help us achieve these aims.

There is a magic unity in the central human objectives. If, desiring both material well-being and personal freedom, we give ourselves personal freedom how shall we use it? The probability, of course, is that we shall use it to promote our well-being—something which has proved to be historically true as well as logically probable.

Enduring societies are those which have apprehended these unities and identities; they are those which have known that freedom, well-being, and security are one, and that the neglect of one means the frustration of all. Ephemeral societies are those which have not been built in accordance with these insights. If we are to understand the proper excellence of the free society, careful analysis of the unity and harmony of the concepts of freedom, well-being, and security is indispensable. To such a study we now turn, our aim being to demonstrate that a due proportion must be maintained among these concepts if they are to be realized.