Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/159

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 143

The Reform of Trade-Union Law. On July 22, 1901, the House of Lords delivered the famous Taff Vale judgment. For over three years trade-unionists have been up in arms against the law. Driven to its last trench, " orthodox " political economy has grappled in the law courts with the encroaching forces of modern collectivism ; now the smoke of battle clears, and over a holocaust of reversed decisions and dissenting judgments the unmoved champions of indi- vidual competition look out, in splendid solitude, upon a world whose face has changed.

Without further digression upon this fascinating theme, it should be said that the present article is limited to a proposal for reforming the law which now governs the civil liability of trade unions to be sued for wrongs committed by their servants. It is no exaggeration to say that the decision of Quinn vs. Leathern has put into the hands of the judges a principle of law which, applied to trade unions, amounts to a denial of their right to exist.

The Taff Vale case, in the first place, constitutes trade unions as " persons " in the law. In the second place, there has been established by the Quinn vs. Leathern cases a new right, giving rise to a whole fresh series of possible wrongs ; this is the right of every man to earn his living in his own way. This is a right entirely inconsistent with trade-unionism, inasmuch as it is unlimited competi- tion over again. For trade-unionism is at bottom a denial, on behalf both of the individual and of the whole trade, of the right of the individual to consider nothing but his own immediate circumstances in deciding how he shall work.

An effective limitation of this right to earn one's living in one's own way, which forms the substratum of the modern law of trade unions, results in practice from the nature and from the universality of the right itself. Its equal existence in everyone must put practical limits to its full enjoyment by anyone. Is a refusal, for instance, to work with another interference with his right of earning his living in his own way, or is it a mere assertion of one's own right?

There are, it may be noted, two things which make it very hard for unionists, harassed by another's right to earn his living in his own way, to set up an equivalent claim of their own as a defense. First, the right is the right to earn one's ou<n living in one's own way. It can only be used to justify action directly concerning one's own wages, hours, and conditions of labor ; the individualism of the law will not allow it to place among the things directly concerning a man's own labor, the wages, hours, and conditions of his fellow-workers, or the description of those fellow-workers. Second, the right of earning one's living in one's own way can be claimed only by a worker. It cannot be claimed by a trade union itself, which, though a separate person, has no living to earn.

Trade-unionism and the law are in conflict all along the line, just because they are developments of two contradictory principles. The rule that in certain respects every man should work, not as seems best to himself, but as is best for the whole trade (represented in the union), cannot live with the individualist denial of any conceivable opposition between " what seems best to the indi- vidual " and " what is best for the trade." The law of civil liability for trade interference is the recent creation of judges who learned their political science, in briefless and impressionable youth, from the apostles of unlimited individualism. It is a pleasing generalization, not too remote from truth, that in England legis- lation is always twenty-five, and judicial decision forty or fifty, years behind the times.

In the teeth of reiterated demonstration that individual bargaining between employer and workman is no bargain at all : with the revelations of the Sweating Committee and the horrors of unorganized trades before them ; with the com- panion picture at hand of the great industries dominated by vast associations, wise according to the measure of their strength ; after a century of factory laws, the House of Lords had full power to decide that among the fundamental prin- ciples upon which our prosperity rests is the absolute right of every man to earn his own living in his own individual way. The effects of this decision must be corrected by express legislation.

The trade-union program which the opposition to these judgments has developed, involves three points : ( i ) protection of the union funds from liability