Consumers and Wage-Earners: The Ethics of Buying Cheap
Our little boy and over-worked girl are not, probably, typical Consumers and Producers. Still they represent large numbers of the economic world, and the solidarity of industry is such that one could not exist without the other. In a way, the country lad is a shadow of President Taft pressing a button to start the machinery of a world's fair. The child, with wonderful effect on others, furnishes a portion of the nation's industrial mechanism. In the satisfaction of his own desires, he is all unconscious of this, and unconscious, too of the responsibilities of power that modern social workers would thrust upon him.
It was once, indeed, the object of reformers to excite a sense of wrong in the oppressed. The fashion found expression in Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man." Now their purpose is also to arouse a sense of obligation in the powerful, and the change of front is indicated by Mazzini's "Duties of Man." One duty after another has been forced upon the race's conscience, and to-day the attempt is made to com[Pg 6]pel the final, and some say the most powerful, element of the industrial world,—the Consumer,—to shoulder his share of responsibility.
Briefly, the line of argument is this: Laborers have a right to "a fair wage for a fair day's work." If employers fail in their duty of meeting this right, then the obligation neglected by the employers must be assumed by those who also benefit by the laborers' work,—by the Consuming Class. At first, the obligation is made abstract and hypothetical in this way because of difficulties in establishing the concrete content of the workman's right to a fair wage, and just what line of conduct is incumbent upon the individual Consumer confronted by this situation. Persons who readily agree that the laborer has a right to a fair wage, and that if this right is violated the Consumer ought to do something, will wrangle unendingly as to just what is a fair wage and just what a Consumer ought to do.
After fixing this general obligation upon the Consuming Class, however, the other question as to whether the employers are actually neglecting their duties towards their employees, and what the individual Consumer can and should do, will be considered.
The fixing of an abstract, hypothetical obligation for a whole class, rather than a concrete duty for a particular individual, is not useless. If it is proved, that, provided employers neglect their duties and the Consuming Class can do anything to fulfill them, there is an obligation upon the Consuming Class to carry out these duties—if this is established, it is only necessary when a particular case presents itself to ask: Have the men through whose labor this Consumer is benefiting been unjustly treated by their employers, and can this Consumer, without a disproportionately grave inconvenience, do anything to help them?
Unless both questions are answered in the affirmative, this particular individual Consumer can have no duty of fulfilling the abstract obligation. This is much easier than working out the principle anew for each case. It is the difference between blowing bottles and molding them.