WILSON URGES OREGON SYSTEM FOR NEW JERSEY
Wilson Urges Oregon System for New Jersey GOVERNOR WOODROW WILSON'S message to the New Jersey legislature, delivered on the 17th, is a well-expressed, earnest demand for a change from corporation...
...It begins to understand the problems to be dealt with...
...I earnestly commend to your careful consideration in this connection the laws in recent years adopted in the state of Oregon whose effect has been to bring government back to the people and to protect it from the control of the representatives of selfish and special interests...
...It is watchful, insistent, suspicious...
...No man who wishes to enjoy the public confidence dare hold back and, if he is wise, he will not resort to subterfuge...
...They were framed for another age, which nobody now living remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life that it would be difficult for many of us to understand it if it were described to us...
...A new economic society has sprung up, and we must effect a new set of adjustments...
...Governor Wilson urges laws to bring corporations more completely under the control of government, to equalize taxation and to prevent seclusion of food stuffs in cold storage...
...the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought togetner, not by individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or another...
...Public opinion," he says, "is at last wide awake...
...It knows what has been going on...
...They seem to me to point the direction which we must also take before we have completed our regeneration of a government which has suffered so seriously and so long as ours has here in New Jersey from private management and organized selfishness...
...We call these questions of employers' liability, questions of workingmen's compensation, but those terms do not suggest quite the whole matter...
...This is the first adjustment needed, because it affects the rights the happiness, the lives and fortunes of the largest number...
...We must not pit power against weakness...
...it begins to see very clearly indeed the objects to be sought...
...It is plain," he continues, "that our laws with regard to the relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly antiquated and impossible...
...There is something very new and very big and very complex about these new relations of capital and labor...
...Wilson Urges Oregon System for New Jersey GOVERNOR WOODROW WILSON'S message to the New Jersey legislature, delivered on the 17th, is a well-expressed, earnest demand for a change from corporation government to popular government...
...They generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and renewal they have no control...
...We must have a workingman's compensation act which will not put upon him the burden of fighting powerful composite employers to obtain his rights, but which will give him his rights without suit, directly, and without contest, by automatic operation of law, as if of a law of insurance...
...The employer is generally in our day, as I have said, not an individual, but a powerful group of individuals, and yet the workingman is still, under our existing law, an individual when dealing with his employer, in case of accident, for example, or of loss or of illness, as well as in every contractual relationship...
...It sees where resistance has come from, whenever efforts at reform have been made, and knows also the means of resistance that have been resorted to...
...The gate of opportunity stands wide open...
...A duty is exacted of him which he must perform simply, directly, immediately...
...And then Governor Wilson adds a warning: "If we are foolish enough to be unwilling to pass through it, the whip of opinion will drive us through...
...Striking at the notorious laxity of New Jersey in the matter of granting charters to great corporations which do business throughout the country, he says, "I would urge, therefore, the imperative obligation of the public policy and of public honesty we are under to effect such changes in the law of as will henceforth effectually prevent the abuse of the privilege of incorporation which has in recent years brought so much discredit upon our state...
...The employer is now generally a corporation or huge company of some kind...
...Urging better primary laws to bring government back into the people's hands he says...
...Work-ingmen are marshalled in great numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline...
Vol. 3 • January 1911 • No. 4
