The Theory and Policy of Labour ProtectionSchäffle, A. (Albert)
General
The Theory and Policy of Labour Protection
Schäffle, A. (Albert)
Labor laws and legislation -- Germany
But although none of these measures of security that we have enumerated
are to be included in Labour Protection, we must on the other hand guard
against mistaken limitations of the term. It would be a mistaken
limitation to include only security against material economic dangers in
and arising from the relations of dependence, and to exclude moral and
personal safeguards in these relations--protection of learning and
instruction, of education, morality and religion, in a word the complete
protection of family life.
Labour Protection does not indeed include the whole moral and personal
security of the wage-earner, but it does include it, and includes it
fully and entirely, in so far as the dangers which threaten this
security arise out of the _condition of dependence of the worker_ either
within or beyond the limits of his business. The whole scope of Labour
Protection embraces all claims for security against inhumane treatment
in service-relations, treatment of the labourer "as a common tool," in
the words of Pope Leo XIII.
(2) Labour Protection does not include the free self-help of the worker,
nor free mutual help, but only a part (cf. 3) of the protection afforded
to wage-earners by the State, if necessary in co-operation with
voluntary effort.
Labour Protection in its modern form is only the outcome of a very old
and on the whole far more important kind of Labour Protection, in the
widest sense of the term, which far from abolishing the old forms of
self-help and mutual help, actually presupposes them, strengthens,
ensures and supplements them wherever the more recent developments of
national industry render this necessary. Labour Protection, properly so
called, only steps in when self-help and mutual help, supplemented by
ordinary State protection, fail to meet the exigencies of the situation,
whether momentarily and on account of special circumstances, or by the
necessities of the case.
This second far-reaching limitation of the meaning needs a little
further explanation.
Labour Protection in its more extended sense always meant and must still
mean, first and foremost, self-help of the workers themselves; in part,
individual self-help to guard against the dangers of service, in part,
united self-help by means of the class organisation of trades-unions.
Side by side with this self-help there has long existed a comprehensive
system of free mutual help.
This assumes the form of family protection exercised by relations and
guardians against harsh employers, and by the father, brother, etc., in
their relation of employers in family industries; also the somewhat
similar form of patriarchal protection extended by the employer to his
workpeople.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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