RESTRICTION OF OUTPUT. The preceding section makes it plain that trade unions do restrict the industrial output openly and systematieally. The restriction of the output of individual work ers is accomplished in several ways: by adopting a normal day and discouraging or prohibiting overtime; by limiting the daily task or the earn ings of piece-workers; by discouraging or pro hibiting the grading of time-workers, and thus leveling wages; by forbidding piece work, time work, contract jobs, or the Inlay system ; and in some cases by encouraging the go-easy system of secret loafing, or 'the adulteration of labor.' A variety of arguments are brought forward in defense of the general policy of the limitation of output. Trade unions claim that this is the only way of preventing over-exertion on the part of workmen, particularly under the piece sys tem: that it tends to prevent unemployment and moderates the destructive competition of the army of the unemployed; and finally that it tends to prevent over-production. There is a large degree of truth in all these contentions. The history of the factory system is one long proof of the truth that, under a regime of free dom of contract in the sale and purchase of labor, wage-earners are driven by the employers and led by the pace of the hardier workmen to impair the health both of themselves and their offspring. It is true also that increased leisure, wisely spent, tends to elevate the standard of life, and that wages are in a measure determined by the standard of life; that collective bargain ing presupposes given rules based upon the aver age efileieney and endurance, thus restraining in its operation the strongest workmen from doing their utmost; that in periods of temporary depression distributive justice sanctions a limitation of the work and income of each, in order that all may have some work and some income.
No judgment upon this subject may, however, be rendered except in concrete eases. When the United Mine Workers demand an eight-hour day in underground mines, the justice of the demand seems unanswerable; when the Window Glass Workers insist on a four months' stop each year, the demand is questionable; but when the Chicago plumbers limit, as they did in 1889, the amount of work in sonic branches to about half as much as could be performed by an able-bodied workman without undue strain, the demand is prima facie inequitable.
The point is even clearer in the limitation of wages as distinct from the limitation of hours. That the Detroit Stove Founders should limit piece earnings per day to $4.50 may seem reason able as a preventive of over-exertion; but that time-workers, like the stone-cutters, carpenters, and coopers, should oppose the payment of more than the standard rate to exceptionally efficient workers, or that the machinists should oppose a classification of their workmen by the War and Navy Departments, thus forcing all workmen to the dead level of the idlest and most incom petent, seems indefensible.