776 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
right or freedom of one's fellows, and that numbers do not affect the moral quality of an act. What each may do individually, say the labor leaders constantly, all may do in concert. And vehemently do they protest against the traditional, common-law view that an agreement of several persons to do a thing lawful in individuals may be a conspiracy, a wrong properly punishable. Bills have been introduced in Congress (and reported favorably by judiciary committees, by the way) to relieve unions from the burden of the conspiracy law, and to legalize collective boycott- ing and similar practices.
It is unfortunate that the opponents of trade unionism do not differentiate between such abuses as are indefensible from any non-revolutionary point of view (violence, rioting, intimidation, etc.), and alleged abuses which may be, and are, justified on debatable grounds. Indiscriminate, wholesale denunciation does not promote peace. The truth is that employers and spokesmen of the employing class freely and unhesitatingly employ the very arguments which they condemn as utterly unsound and danger- ous when union leaders advance them. At bottom there is no clear issue between employers and unions.
Do not employers form defensive and offensive combinations ? They do not call them trade unions, but things, not names, mat- ter. Some of these employers' unions, alliances, and combina- tions are secret, and workmen regard them as " conspiracies against labor." Employers do not picket union headquarters or homes, but they boycott objectionable unionists. Their boycott- ing is called blacklisting, but neither morally nor legally does an employer's blacklist differ from a unionist "unfair list."
And how do employers defend blacklisting? The pleas made in their behalf in the courts read like the pro-boycott argu- ments of labor leaders. May not an employer discharge a work- man, in the absence of a contract, for any reason whatsoever ? May he not keep a list of men so discharged ? May he not send this list to a fellow-employer ? May not a number of employers maintain and publish a common list of undesirable workmen ? Courts have upheld the blacklist on these grounds, without realizing that the same reasoning sustains collective boy- cotting !
