Labor And Its Rights
Performed by William H. Taft
Recorded August 5, 1908
We come now to the question
of labor. One important phase of the policies of the
present administration has been an anxiety to secure
for the wage earner an equality of opportunity and
such positive statutory protection as to place him
on the level in dealing with his employer. The interests
of the employer and the employee never differ except
when it comes to a division of the joint profit of
labor and capital into dividends and wages. This must
be a constant source of periodical discussion between
the employer and the employee, as indeed are the other
terms of the employment. To give to employees their
proper position in such a controversy, to enable them
to maintain themselves against employers having great
capital, they may well unite because in union there
is strength and without it each individual laborer
and employee would be helpless. The promotion of industrial
peace through the instrumentality of the trade agreement
is often one of the results of such unions when intelligently
conducted. There is a large body of laborers, however,
skilled and unskilled, who are not organized into
unions - their rights before the law are exactly the
same as those of the union men and are to be protected
with the same care and watchfulness. In order to induce
their employer into a compliance with their request
for changed terms of employment, all workmen have
the right to strike in a body. They have a right to
use such persuasion as they may, provided it does
not reach the point of duress, to lead their reluctant
co-laborers to join them in their union against their
employer, and they have a right if they choose, to
accumulate funds to support those engaged in a strike,
to delegate to officers the power to direct the action
of the union, and to withdraw themselves from their
associates from dealings with or giving custom to
those with whom they are in controversy. What they
have not the right to do is to injure their employers
property, to injure their employers business
by use of threats or methods of physical duress against
those who would work for him or deal with him, or
by carrying on what is sometimes known as a secondary
boycott against his customers or those with whom he
deals in business. All those who sympathize with them
may unite to aid them in their struggle but they may
not through the instrumentality of a threatened or
actual boycott, compel third persons against their
will; and having no interest in their controversy,
to come to their assistance. These principles have
for a great many years been settled by the courts
of this country.