Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/126

 Courts and Legislatures Upon Labor Questions. the good sense of labor unions that they will ultimately take a more enlightened at-. titude on this point, and from the State that it will lend no aid or sanction to this position through its legislation. The same thing may, I believe, be said of the non-union labor question. This is prob ably the next concrete issue to be fought over in this country. But one State (Mis souri) has yet, through its Supreme court, squarely decided both that a strike or boycott against the employment of any particular man or men is a conspiracy, and that a stat ute permitting such a strike, or preventing the employer from employing non-union labor if he prefer it, or discharging union labor if they refuse to work with non-union labor is unconstitutional.1 There are, of course, decisions of nisi prins courts on this subject; notably the recent one of Judge Richardson in Massachusetts. Whether, however, these matters should always be gone into on the equity side, and injunctions employed rather than suits for damages or ordinary police remedies, is a question, as we said above, to be omitted from this article. The intimidation statutes — that is, statutes making it a petty criminal offence for an individual by threats or physical force, if not by discharge or strikes, or boycotts, or blacklists, to prevent another citizen from working, or to impede him in his duties — now exist in nearly half the States, and will and should be enacted in most of the others, even including the South; these statutes being of an individualistic, not a socialistic, nature, and consequently not obnoxious to southern legislators. In short, the absolute freedom of contract, or at least of the labor contract, already vindicated in most of the courts, and by many of the legislatures of the United States, will probably establish itself as a general principle throughout the coun try, submitting, if at all, to such slight restrictions or regulation as police consid1 State v. Julow, 31 S. W. (Mo.) 781.

105

erations may demand, such as the weeklypayment law recently sustained by the Supreme court of Massachusetts. Reasonable factory acts should be adopted throughout the Union, and reasonable regu lations of the hours of labor of minors, women and children employed in commercial and industrial pursuits; but pending some catch ing up by the rest of the procession, Massa chusetts should be content to " mark time." It would be curious to see a map — and if the GREEN Bag had an artist I would print one — of that kind which shows the States upholding the principle in white; States partially adopting it in gray; and States without it entirely in black. Had we such a map, in which the States having a fiftyeight-hour law for women and children in factories were represented in white, those having a sixty-hour per week law in gray, and those having no limitation in black, such a map would show Massachusetts as one white spot with its fifty-eight-hour law; all surrounding New England, the Middle States, Maryland, Ohio and the Northwestern States up to Minnesota, would be gray, while (except Louisiana and Maryland), the entire South beyond Mason and Dixon's line and the far West, including even Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, and among the New England States, Vermont, would be black; while even in Maryland the law only applies to girls under sixteen. South Carolina and Georgia would be very dark, not black, as they do prohibit persons under twenty-one from working any longer day than from sunrise to sunset, or,in certain factories, more than sixtysix hours per week. Instead of devoting their energies to the false position of molesting non-union labor, or denying employers the right to properly reward excellence when they find it, trades-unions would be much better employed in devoting their surplus energies to the bringing of the South and West into line as to some sort of restriction of women and child-labor in factories, and regulation of their health, morals and gen