The Right To Work

C.O. Steele

[Reprinted from The Freeman, March, 1942]

We hear much of the four freedoms -- freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. The war in which we are now engaged is being fought to preserve those freedoms -- and they are worth fighting for. Our post-war plans are built around these freedoms -- which is as it should be.

But the right to work is infinitely more precious than any or all of the four freedoms, for the right to work is the right to live. We can live without the freedoms, much as we should hate to. We cannot live without work, much as we should like to.

It is of the highest importance, therefore, that in this new and better America that we are determined to have after the war, the right to work shall be assured to all. But before we can proceed with intelligent planning to that end, we must have a clear understanding of what it is that stands between the worker and his job. We must be able to refute the oft-heard statement that a large army of permanently unemployed is a post-war inevitability. We must know why it is that of all creatures that roam the earth, man, and man alone, is unable to employ himself, unable to avail himself of the bounties of nature. We must find out what it is in our present economic setup that operates as a denial of the right to work.

Some will say that it is organized labor, with its avowed objective of compelling every worker to join its ranks. They will point to the heavy gains in union membership in recent years, to the large and ever growing number of plants and industries from which non-union workers are barred, and to the threat, which they profess to see in the situation, of enforced idleness as the eventual condition of all unwilling to pay tribute to unions.

They will recall Mrs. Roosevelt's pronouncement that every worker should belong to a union.

They will cite strike after strike in defense industries for no other purpose than to enforce a closed shop. They will bring up the case of the cantonment job in the South where the union could furnish only a dozen or so of the hundreds of glass setters needed, but refused to permit the employment of non-union glass setters except on condition that the Government take $2 a day out of each non-union worker's pay and turn it over to the union.

They will mention the practice of charging exorbitant initiation fees in order to create an artificial scarcity of labor, and they will certainly tell you that right now, when the armament program is desperately in need of die makers, the die makers union is refusing to permit the use of additional apprentice helpers unless the Government guarantees that they will not be allowed to continue m the trade after the war.

Finally, they will want to know by what authority, in this time of crisis, American citizens are refused work in the construction, say, of an army camp, unless they first pay tribute to a union. They will insist that this is a free country and that no worker should be compelled to join a union in order to obtain work from his government. By this time they will be wandering away from the argument, and you will have to stop them, but they will have the last word by asking, if all these things don't add up to a denial of the right to work, what does? They will make a swell case -- but they will be wrong.

The real denial of the right to work inheres in the institution of private ownership in land. Organized labor is only a superficial irritant. Give a man access to land and he will soon find himself a job, and a good one. Moreover, it won't be long before he will have half a dozen other good jobs up his sleeve. Other people will be bidding for his services. When that happy condition comes about -- as it will when land is made of equal access to all -- no labor union is going to tell the worker what to do or stand between him and a job. It is the worker, and not the union, that will do the dictating.