Labor and Administration

Excerpt from Labor and Administration
The history of labor laws and strikes has this in common to both - laws become dead letters; the victories of strikes are nibbled away. Too much was expected even of those preparatory labor laws, universal suffrage and universal I education. Amateur faith in laws and strikes weakens with experience. A law creates an abstract right - an empty ideal. A strike may be a burst of enthusiasm, then disorganization. Some philosophizers fall back on the individual's moral character. Little, they think, can be done by law or unions. There are others who inquire how to draft and enforce the laws, how to keep the winnings of strikes - in short, how to connect ideals with efficiency.
These are the awakening questions of the past decade, and the subject of this book. Attention is shifting from laws to the means of enforcing them - from strikes to the unions that safeguard the gains - from the rights of labor to the protection of its rights.
Here is a field for the student and economist - not the "friend of labor" who paints an abstract workingman, but the utilitarian idealist, who sees them all as they are; not the curious collector of facts and statistics, but the one who measures the facts and builds them into a foundation and structure.