habits of the fishermen, who are now mainly temperate, thrifty, and ambitious to improve their condition. The most of them now, also, are married men, and are raising families and acquiring property. These men have found no serious difficulty in conducting a business worth about $200,000 a year. They employ the best legal advice regularly, and do not find the brains of other employers superior to their own.
Fishing is a laborious and dangerous business. The trade-mark of the cannery suggests the method. Gill-net fishing is done at night in an open boat, and frequently in stormy weather, and often upon the bar of the Columbia river, in the breakers. Drowning was not uncommon in years past, but more caution is now observed, and much assistance has been rendered from the government life-saving station
Perhaps the history of this labor union and its cannery suggests a way out of labor troubles, which are always present, either patent or latent. Co-operation; yes, co-operation, but quite as much competition. The fishermen are co-operating among themselves, but competing with the capitalistic canners, and thereby have earned their respect.
Competition is no evil, but a necessary element of industry. It seeks only to supply the market with articles made increasingly desirable at a decreasing cost. It does thereby constantly shut off and crowd out inferior or expensive goods, but for these, substitutes better; giving better service at less expense. It is only when the laborer is not able to compete, and has no alternative but starvation, that labor is oppressed. If every laborer, like these Columbia river fishermen, could proceed to work on his own account, and put out a product on the market, and reap his own reward, if wages did not suit him, there could be no oppression.
The industrial sin of the time is the shutting of labor away, mostly through legislative action, or neglect, from opportunity to make use of natural advantages. The problem of industrial legislation is to give labor equitable rights in the resources of nature, and not permit private, or exclusive ownership, in the materials and natural energies that are required to carry on industry.
If the cannerymen had been legally allowed—and this is not to say a word against them—to own the river itself, and all the fish in it, the fishermen would have had no recourse but strikes and violence to prevent reduction of wages. Where labor is shut up to violence to preserve its part in reward of industry, it will use violence. Wherever it has the alternative of inaugurating competition on its own account, and engaging its own energies, it will infallibly resort in the end only to industrial methods of obtaining; its share in proceeds.
