The Theory and Policy of Labour Protection. Germany. Laws, statutes, etc.

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СКАЧАТЬ the whole moral and personal security of the wage-earner, but it does include it, and includes it fully and entirely, in so far as the dangers which threaten this security arise out of the condition of dependence of the worker either within or beyond the limits of his business. The whole scope of Labour Protection embraces all claims for security against inhumane treatment in service-relations, treatment of the labourer “as a common tool,” in the words of Pope Leo XIII.

      (2) Labour Protection does not include the free self-help of the worker, nor free mutual help, but only a part (cf. 3) of the protection afforded to wage-earners by the State, if necessary in co-operation with voluntary effort.

      Labour Protection in its modern form is only the outcome of a very old and on the whole far more important kind of Labour Protection, in the widest sense of the term, which far from abolishing the old forms of self-help and mutual help, actually presupposes them, strengthens, ensures and supplements them wherever the more recent developments of national industry render this necessary. Labour Protection, properly so called, only steps in when self-help and mutual help, supplemented by ordinary State protection, fail to meet the exigencies of the situation, whether momentarily and on account of special circumstances, or by the necessities of the case.

      This second far-reaching limitation of the meaning needs a little further explanation.

      Labour Protection in its more extended sense always meant and must still mean, first and foremost, self-help of the workers themselves; in part, individual self-help to guard against the dangers of service, in part, united self-help by means of the class organisation of trades-unions.

      Side by side with this self-help there has long existed a comprehensive system of free mutual help.

      This assumes the form of family protection exercised by relations and guardians against harsh employers, and by the father, brother, etc., in their relation of employers in family industries; also the somewhat similar form of patriarchal protection extended by the employer to his workpeople.

      Furthermore it includes that protection afforded by the pressure of religion, the common conscience or public opinion upon the consciences of employers, acting partly through the organs of the press, clubs, and other vehicles of expression, as well as through non-political public institutions, and corporate bodies of various kinds, especially and more directly through the Church, and also indirectly through the schools.

      Without family and patriarchal protection, without the protection afforded by civil morality and religious sentiment, Labour Protection, in its strict sense, working through the State alone, would be able to effect little.

      Family and patriarchal protection outweigh therefore in importance all more modern forms of Labour Protection, and will always continue to be the most efficacious. The protection of the Church has always been powerful from the earliest times.

      Self-help and mutual help, moral and religious, effect much that State-protection could not in general effect, and therefore it is not to be supposed that they could be dispensed with. But they must not be included in Labour Protection, strictly so called, for this only includes protection of labour by the State, and indeed only a part even of this (cf. 3).

      (3) For instance, Labour Protection does not include all judicial and administrative protection extended by the State to the wage-labourer, but only such special or extraordinary protection as is directed against the dangers arising from service relations, and is administered through special, extraordinary organs, judicial, legislative and representative. This special protection has become necessary through the development of the factory system with its merciless exploitation of wage-labour, and through the weakening of the patriarchal relations in workshops and in handicrafts. In this respect Labour Protection is the special modern development of the protection of labour by the State.

      Labourers and employers alike are guaranteed an extensive protection of life, health, morality, freedom, education, culture, and so on, by the ordinary protective agencies of justice and of police, exercised impartially towards all citizens, and claimed by all as their right. Long before there was any talk of Labour Protection, in the modern sense of the term, this kind of protection existed for wage-labour as against employers. But in the strict sense of the term Labour Protection includes only the special protection which extends beyond this ordinary sphere, the special exercise of State activity on behalf of labourers.

      Even where this extraordinary or special Labour Protection is exercised by the regular administrative and judicial authorities, it still takes the form of special regulations of private law, punitive and administrative, directed exclusively or mainly to the protection of labourers in their service-relations. To this extent, at any rate, it has a special and extraordinary character. Very frequently, as for instance in the German Industrial Code, such protection is placed in the hands of the ordinary administrative and judicial authorities, and a portion of it will continue to be so placed for some time to come.

      But the administration of Labour Protection, properly so called, is tending steadily to shift its centre of gravity more and more towards special extraordinary organs. These organs are partly executive (hitherto State-regulated factory inspection and industrial courts of arbitration), but they are also partly representative; the latter may be appointed exclusively for this purpose, or they may also be utilized for other branches of work in the interests of the labourer and for the encouragement of national industry, and they bear in their organisation, or at least to some extent in their action, the character of public institutions.

      (4) Labour Protection is essentially protection of industrial wage-labour, and excludes on the one hand the protection of agricultural workers and those engaged in forestry, as well as of domestic servants, and on the other hand, the protection of State officials and public servants.

      It may no doubt be that special protection is also needed for non-industrial wage-labour and for domestic servants, but the material legal basis, the organisation and methods of procedure, of these further branches of Labour Protection, will demand a special constitution of their own. The regulations of domestic service and the Acts relating to State-service in Germany constitute indeed a kind of Labour Protection, certainly very incomplete, and quite distinct from the rest of Labour Protection, properly so-called. Even if the progress of the Social Democratic movement in this country were to bring on to the platform of practical politics the measure already demanded by the Social Democrats for the protection of agricultural industry3 on a large scale, even then protection of those engaged in agriculture and forestry would need to receive a special constitution, as regards the courts through which it would be administered, the dangers against which it would be directed, and its methods and course of administration. Whilst therefore we readily recognise that both protection of domestic servants and a far-reaching measure of agricultural Labour Protection, in the strict sense of the term, may eventually supervene, we yet maintain that this must be sharply distinguished for purposes of scientific, legislative, and administrative treatment from what we at present understand by Labour Protection.

      Moreover, even now agricultural labour is not entirely lacking in special protection. The regulations for domestic service contain fragments of protection of contract and truck protection. Russia has passed a law for the protection of agricultural labour (June 12, 1886) in Finland and the so-called western provinces, which regulates the peculiar system of individual and plural4 agreements between small holders and their dependents, and is also designed to afford protection of contract to the employer.

      (5) The industrial wage-labour dealt with by the Industrial Code, and the industrial wage-labour dealt with by State Protection, are not entirely identical, though nearly so.

      For on the one hand there are wage-labourers employed in occupations not included in industrial labour in the sense of the Code, who yet stand in need of special protection from the State; while on the other hand there are bodies of industrial СКАЧАТЬ