THE PARIS STRIKE. T HE strike of the Paris navvies seems
at first to be merely one of the ordinary disputes between masters and workmen, with a little additional violence derived from the political environment of the workmen. When it is looked at nearer, we see one point of interest which is not shared by strikes generally,—and this, too, a point which is likely to become of more importance hereafter than it has yet been. The facts of the strike are simple. There is no dispute, apparently, as to the state of trade, or as to the ability of the employers to pay higher wages than they pay now. Into these questions the workmen do not enter. The ground of their demand is a more simple one. Down to April last, the navvies employed by the City of Paris were paid the market rate of wages and worked the ordinary number of hours. The wages averaged about 4d. an hour, and were kept at this figure by the large supply of labour, and by the constant influx of foreign workmen. In April, the Municipal Council took into consideration the condition of the labourers in its employ, and came to the conclusion that they were overworked and under-paid. The result of this was a vote reducing the number of hours in the working-day, and raising the payment per hour. For the last four months, the fortunate navvies in the employ of the City of Paris have worked only nine hours out of the twenty-four, and have been paid 6d. an hour. If the City of Paris were the only employer of labour within the municipal boundary, this arrangement would have affected no one but the ratepayers. As it is, the City is merely one employer among many, and the great mass of the Paris labourers have been no better off since the decision of the Municipal Council was taken than they were before. Private employers have been energetically invited to follow the example of the Municipality, and have with equal energy declined to do anything of the sort. They say that the action of the Council is nothing to them, and that the wages of a body which has the rates at its back can be no guide for men who have only their own pockets to dip into. After some delay, the navvies have accepted this answer as final, and since Wednesday week they have been on strike. The accompanying incidents have been of the ordinary kind. There has been a good deal of "molesting" and " picketing," and occasionally, when these processes have been carried to greater lengths than common, police intervention and some street rioting. The Municipal Council was at once appealed to by the men on strike, on the ground that their employers had taken no account of its vote last April, and was asked to take decisive measures to make its decision respected. This demand seems to have been too much even for the strongest spirits on the Council, and under their advice the workmen lowered their tone, and only asked for a grant, for the support of their families, first of twenty and then of ten thousand. francs. The Council, however, seems to have been frightened by the effect on the private labour market of their liberality towards their own work- men, and the grant was refused.
It will be seen that the interest of this strike lies entirely in its relation to the action of the Municipal Council. In this respect, however, it has a very practical significance for ourselves. The drift of affairs is towards making municipal bodies employers of labour on a large scale. There are obvious advantages in the plan. The ratepayers get better gas, better water, better roads, and they take the profits of the middle-man for themselves. But the rate- payers have consciences, and when they become employers, they may easily find these consciences pricked by the condition of their labourers. They are in the position of a benevolent private employer who is tempted to solve the labour problem by raising the wages of his own workmen. But the benevolent private employer is for the most part able to resist this temptation. Higher wages might compel him to forego profits, and if he foregoes profits he cannot live. The ratepayer is in no such dilemma. Higher wages no doubt mean higher rates ; but the rates, even if they do become higher, are only a fraction in each ratepayer's private account, and he may be willing to make this amount of sacrifice for the im- provement of the labourers' condition and the quieting of his own scruples. It is easy to imagine a large Municipal Council, owing its being to popular election— elected, perhaps, in a considerable degree by the workmen themselves—being moved to treat its labourers with a liberality greatly in excess of any that the same men would have shown in the capacity of a private employer. Nor, indeed, is it easy to blame them for doing this. The question is presented to them somewhat in this form. If labourers are suffering, it is the duty of their employer to raise their wages in so far as he can do so without serious loss to himself. But when the Municipality is the em- ployer, the loss is so distributed over the ratepayers that it ceases to be serious to any one of them. Consequently, when the question of wages comes to be decided by the Municipal Council, it may easily happen that a, majority of the members have been returned by electors who are quite willing that it should be decided in the labourers' favour. Each Councillor who votes for raising their wages is only doing what he knows will please his constituents. Each elector who has voted for a Councillor of this way of thinking has only done what he holds to be his duty towards men reduced by competition and numbers to a state of poverty in which it is not for the good of society that any man should live unless through some fault of his own.
Yet the effect on the local labour market of this action of the Municipality may easily be disastrous. The most conspicuous, if not the most important, employers of labour in the district, the representatives of the par- ticular city or county, have fixed a rate of wages. They have declared that a certain minimum of pay— possibly that a certain maximum of hours—must be con- ceded if the labourer is to live and thrive. They have thus made the labourers working for private employers discontented, and have arrayed public opinion on the labourers' side. When the man who is getting 4d. an hour asks for 6d., he is only asking for the official standard for what the municipal authority has decreed to be the labourer's due. It will, of course, be explained to him that his employer has to live by his profits, whereas the ratepayer lives by something else, and that this makes all the difference between the two cases. But he must be a singularly reasonable labourer—especially if he be an unskilled labourer—if he listens to any representations of this kind. It is far more likely that he will watch his oppor- tunity and strike for the same terms that his fellows are paid by the Municipality. The moral of all this is that Muni- cipalities will do well not to become employers of labour on a great scale, since if they do they will run the risk, whenever wages are low, of being confronted with one or other of two evils. If the Municipality does not raise them, the consciences of the ratepayers will be troubled. If the Municipality does raise them, the labour market will be disturbed, and the evils of State intervention between master and workman will be produced on a smaller scale. We doubt whether any gain that can accrue to the public from municipal works will outweigh the inconvenience that is likely to follow from either one of these consequences.
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