Note 229 — Chapter XXII · THE ETHICS OF THE ECONOMIC LIFE
Reading edition
The list appended was bulletined at the Chicago Industrial Exhibit of 1906, and reprinted in Charities and The Commons.
"What 'Freedom of Contract' has Meant to Labor:
1. Denial of eight-hour law for women in Illinois.
2. Denial of eight-hour law for city labor or for mechanics and ordinary laborers.
3. Denial of ten-hour law for bakers.
4. Inability to prohibit tenement labor.
5. Inability to prevent by law employer from requiring employee as condition of securing work, to assume all risk from injury while at work.
6. Inability to prohibit employer selling goods to employees at greater profit than to non-employees.
7. Inability to prohibit mine owners screening coal which is mined by weight before crediting same to employees as basis of wages.
8. Inability to legislate against employer using coercion to prevent employee becoming a member of a labor union.
9. Inability to restrict employer in making deductions from wages of employees.
10. Inability to compel by law payment of wages at regular intervals.
12. Inability to provide by law that laborers on public works shall be paid prevailing rate of wages.
13. Inability to compel by law payment of extra compensation for overtime.
14. Inability to prevent by law employer from holding back part of wages.
15. Inability to compel payment of wages in cash; so that employer may pay in truck or scrip not redeemable in lawful money.
16. Inability to forbid alien labor on municipal contracts.
17. Inability to secure by law union label on city printing."
Labor representatives speak of "the ironic manner in which the courts guarantee to workers: The right to be maimed and killed without liability to the employer; the right to be discharged for belonging to a union; the right to work as many hours as employers please and under any considerations which they may impose." The "irony" is, of course, not intended by the courts. It is the irony inherent in a situation when rules designed to secure justice become futile, if not a positive cause of injustice, because of changed conditions.