Labor legislation in Republican and Democratic states..

[States having Republican legislatures at the present time are regarded as Republican States, those having Democratic legislatures as Democratic States. The stars show the States which have enacted the legislation indicated on the left of the table.]

HON. WILLIAM H. TAFT'S RELATIONS

TO UNION LABOR.

No class of citizens is more deeply interested in the records of presidential candidates than union workmen. They want the simple facts with regard to each man, and it is especially incumbent upon them not to form opinions on insufficient evidence, and to consider whether a candidate's record is one of achievement or only of promise. Actions may not be more eloquent than words, but they are more convincing. Trade unionists, like other people, will never know their friends until they put them upon trial; and when a man is tried he should be judged by his whole course of action, and not by one isolated event over which there may be a difference of opinion even among trade unionists. If the candidate has had opportunity to do things, has he done them? And in the doing, has he been fearless and fair towards all classes of citizens? For trade unionists want neither charity nor favor; they want opportunity and justice.

Next to the churches and the schools, trade unionism has done much to raise the standard of American citizenship. It has said: "Suffer little children to come into the school house and the church and not into the factory and mine," and it has given to their progenitors higher wages, shorter hours, more sanitary conditions of living and greater security to life and limb-all of which have been shared by union and non-union workers; that is to say, the union workers have fought the battles, carried the burdens and made the sacrifices, and society as a whole has benefitted. It has said: "The laborer is worthy of his hire, even though the laborer be a woman." It has at times been led by bad men, but the organization that is composed of saints has not yet taken out its charter. It has made mistakes, but the man or the institution that does not make mistakes does not make anything. This is no argument, however, in favor of the making of heedless blunders, and a blunder would be made if one who has successfully met many public trusts and discharged duties of a high national and international significance, and who has ever been prompted by motives of the highest regard for the welfare of the producing people of this nation, should be credited by organized labor as being now, or ever having been, inimical to thefr interests. Secretary Taft's whole public career, and it is an extensive one, contains no incident in which he has ever, by word or act, arrayed himself against the principles of trade unionism. On the contrary, he has been its consistent friend and advocate. His record shows that not only were his sympathies with the organization, but that his actions were those of a friend many years before either he or the American people had thought of him as a Presidential posibility.

Misquoted and Unjustly Judged.

Probably no judge has ever been more misquoted and unjustly judged by trades unionists than Judge Taft. His many decisions in favor of labor organizations have been minimized to such an extent that one is prompted to inquire if those who have exploited his record before labor organizations were not more interested in the welfare of some political party than in the interests of their labor organizations. Trade unionists should stand together, without regard to party, in contending for everything that will legitimately advance their principles, and should credit an honest judge with doing his duty, even though his decisions be adverse to them, so long as they are in accordance with the law of the land. His decisions, of course, may not voice the opinion of the judge; he does not make the law. On the other hand, there is no decision by Judge Taft that can be cited that indicates personal antipathy or a personal unfriendliness on his part to labor organizations.

Some of the Public Actions of William H. Taft Especially Helpful to Organized Labor.

The words of Judge Taft in the Arthur and Phelan casos, in 1893-4, setting forth the rights of labor organisations under the law, were invoked and applied in favor of labor unions in the case of the strike on the Wabash Railroad in 1903, and an injunction against the union dissolved.

In 1894, in adjudging Phelan guilty of contempt for dis obeying the injunction secured to prevent interference with the operation of the Cincinnati-Southern Railway and to keep open interstate commerce, Judge Taft, in determining the limits of labor organizations, made a notable statement of the extent of the rights of labor which has since been frequently and successfully quoted by those contending in the interests of union labor.

In 1999 Judge Taft became the champion of the cause of union labor in the Narramore case, and as a judge of the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reversed the decision of the court below and wrote an opinion that has finally become, in spirit and in letter, the established law not only Ohio, but of the nation. He took an impregnable position against precedents and numerous decisions which had declared, in effect, that, where an employer was violating the law with regard to the use of safety appliances, an injured workman could not recover damages because he was supposed to know of the violation, and to assume all risks consequent thereto.

As Governor-General of the Philippines, he encouraged the organisation of workmen into unions that should be organized on American lines, and pardoned a labor leader who had been convicted under an old Spanish law for "conspiring to raise the wages of labor."

As Governor-General Mr. Taft refused to accede to the demands of corporations and other employers to permit the introduction of cheap Chinese labor into the islands, and unequivocally declared himself against bringing the workmen of our new dependencies or those in our own land, into competition with the cheaper labor of the civilizations lower than our own.

Mr. Taft's Decisions Relative to Labor.

Frederick N. Judson, the attorney for the Railroad Brotherhood in the Wabash case, says:

"There is no foundation, therefore, for the suggestion that the decisions of Judge Taft were in any sense unfriendly to labor."

One should read in the Review of Reviews for August, 1907, what Mr. Judson says of the whole series of Judge Taft's labor decisions. The first of these decisions was delivered by Judge Taft in 1890 in the case of Moores vs. Bricklayers' Union et al. This case involved the application of the law to what is known as a secondary boycott; that is, a boycott not against an employer, but against a third party dealing with an employer, who is a stranger to the controversy between the employer and the employee.

Moores had sold lime to the employer, Parker Brothers, who had been boycotted by the union. Parker Brothers had been boycotted because of their refusal to pay a fine imposed upon one of their employees and to reinstate a discharged apprentice. Moores, the plaintiffs, had been awarded damages by the jury on account of this secondary boycott, and it was this judgment of damages that was affirmed on appeal in an opinion by Judge Taft. This decision has been accepted as the correct exposition of the law; and the secondary boycott, that is, a boycott against a stranger to the trade dispute, has been practically abandoned by intelligent labor unionists as an unreasonable weapon. other words, it has been conceded by the ablest labor leaders that it is not good policy to punish one's friends-employers who are running union shops--for the purpose of defeating one's enemies.

In

The labor decisions of Judge Taft while on the Federal bench related directly to the Federal character of such controversies, involving the power of the Federal Government to protect interstate commerce. There were only two such cases decided by him. The first of these was decided April 3, 1893, and was in the matter of the strike of the engineers of the Toledo and Ann Arbor Railroad. The engineers on strike refused to handle cars from complainants' road as long as the strike of the engineers on that road was unsettled. It is obvious that this action involved a paralysis of the business of interstate commerce. The Toledo

road thereupon applied for an injunction against the connecting roads, alleging a combination violative of the interstate commerce act. The engineers of the defendant company had no grievances of their own; and their refusal to handle the freight of complainant's company was in no sense a strike for the betterment of their own conditions of service. Judge Taft's decision sustaining the injunction was accepted by the Railroad Brotherhood as a fair statement of the law under the peculiar conditions of the railroad service.

In the following year, 1894, came the great railroad strike inspired by the American Railroad Union, growing out of the strike of the Pullman employees at Pullman, Illinois. The offieials of the union demanded all railroads to boycott Pullman cars and to declare a strike of employees on any railroad on their refusal to declare such a boycott. The Cincinnati Southern, an interstate railway, was in the hands of a receiver, and it applied to the court for protection against one Phelan (a Socialist), an official of the American Railway Union, who was engaged in inciting a strike among the employees of the road. There was no complaint by the employees of this road. The demand was that all traffic should be suspended and business paralyzed, union shops closed, and union industries destroyed, if necessary, until all the roads should consent not to carry Pullman cars. The purpose was to starve the public into compelling the Pullman Company to do something which the public had no right to compel it to do, and in the doing of this to inflict irreparable injury upon many industries employing union workmen and working union hours. If the unions had won in this strife, would not the price have been too great for the object attained? Phelan had used language defying the order of the court. After a hearing he was adjudged guilty of contempt in an opinion by Judge Taft, who at the same time emphasized the fact that employees had the right to quit their employment, but that they had no right to combine to injure their employer in order to compel him to withdraw from a mutually profitable relation with a third party for the purpose of injuring the third party, when the relation thus sought to be broken had no effect upon the character or reward of their services. But as the purpose of the combination was to tie up interstate railroads, not as the incidental result of a lawful strike for the betterment of the employees' own condition, but as a means of injuring a third party, it was an unlawful combination violative of the anti-trust act of 1890. Thus, if Phelan had urged a strike for higher wages, or to prevent the lowering of wages, he would not have been liable for contempt, but he had no right to incite men to quit when they had no grievance of their own to redress, for it was then essentially a boycott and not a strike.

The words of Judge Taft in the Phelan case, setting forth the rights of labor organizations under the law, were invoked and applied in favor of the labor unions in a notable case, that of a strike on the Wabash Railroad by the Brotherhoods of Railroad Trainmen and Firemen in 1903. The two brotherhoods, after failing to secure the advance wages and betterment of conditions demanded, had called a strike, and thereupon an injunction was filed by the railroad company against the officers of these brotherhoods. The rights of organization and of representation, as set forth by Judge Taft, were made the basis of the argument by the attorney representing the brotherhoods, and the injunction was dissolved. It was said in the opinion rendered by Judge Adams that on the subject of the organization of labor and the rights of labor unions no one had spoken more clearly and acceptably than Judge Taft.

The "Assumed Risk" Decision.

One of the most notable services that Judge Taft rendered to organized labor while presiding over a court was with relation to "assumed risk" and "contributory negligence" on the part of a workman attempting to recover damages from an employer for injuries received while in the service of the latter. In 1895 the Supreme Court of Ohio, consisting of six judges, decided that Morgan, a coal miner, could not recover damages for injuries

received in the explosion of fire damp, notwithstanding the fact that the State required the mine owners to keep their mines free of fire damp; that Morgan knew the company ignored the law, and therefore in accepting service with them he could not recover damages. A similar decision had been made in several other States. Judge Speer, who wrote the opinion in the Morgan case, said:

"One who voluntarily assumes a risk thereby waives the provision of the statute made for his protection."

Not only did this decision place a premium upon lawbreaking, but it rendered nugatory every law, made for the protection of the laboring classes, that was not respected by the employers. Only a law-observing employer was liable to damages. The labor organizations introduced a bill in the General Assembly of Ohio to abolish this infamous doctrine of assumed risk, but through the power of the railroads and other corporations and large employers it was referred to a hostile committee and there buried.

And now we come to the Narramore case, in which Judge Taft became the champion of the injured workman, and wrote a decision that, notwithstanding reversals in the higher courts and the bitter opposition of those who were opposed to abrogating the old doctrines, finally became in spirit and in letter the established law not only of Ohio, but of the nation.

Narramore was a brakeman. His foot became tightly wedged in an unblocked frog, which was left open contrary to the law of the State, and he was run down by a train and left a cripple, with a wife and children to support. The company was indifferent to the sufferings of the man and his family, and a suit was filed. The decision was against him, the railroad basing its defense on the decision in the Morgan case. The court in substance said that Narramore knew that the company violated the law with regard to blocking of frogs; that this violation was so flagrant and open that Narramore was bound to know of it; and that even though he was free from fault himself, still he had no case, as he had assumed the risk of working under the conditions as he saw them. Narramore's case was then carried to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, presided over by Judge William H. Taft. Here at last was a judge who was broad enough to look beyond the moldy precedents of the dark ages. He overthrew the barbarous doctrine of "assumed risk," and gave to the workman in every dangerous vocation the rights that had so long been withheld from him. This decision of Judge Taft was the advance agent of blocked frogs, covered cogwheels, and guarded machinery. It eventually led to the resurrection of all the laws of Ohio that had been enacted for the protection of working men and women and which had been nullified by the action of the Supreme Court in the Morgan case. He said in part:

"The intention of the legislature of Ohio was to protect the employees of railways from injury from a very frequent source of danger by compelling the railway company to adopt a well-known safety device. And although an employeee impliedly waives a compliance with the statute and agrees to assume the risk from unblocked frogs and switches by continuing in the service without complaint, this court will not recognize or enforce such agreement. The imposition of a penalty for the violation of a statute does not exclude other means of enforcement, and to permit the company to avail itself of such an assumption of risk by its employees is, in effect, to enable it to nullify a penal statute, and is against public policy."

Judge Taft was overruled, but the fight based on his opinions was continued until satisfactory statutes were secured.

The Federal Courts and Organized Labor.

As early as August 28, 1895, in an address delivered before the American Bar Association at Detroit, Michigan, he said:

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** Though the law of supply and demand will doubtless, in the end, be the influence of fixing this division (between capital and labor), yet during the gradual adjustment to the changing markets and the varying financial conditions, capital will surely have the advantage, unless labor takes united action. During the betterment of business conditions, organized labor, if acting with reasonable discretion, can secure much greater concessions in the advance of wages than if it were left to the slower operation of natural laws, and, in the same way, as hard times