All legislative measures in labor law refer to a conflict of interests between employees and employers and organize this. The interest of the employer exists in the profit that he can reach with his business. The interest of the employees, pleasant working conditions and wages with which to satisfy their own needs, becomes apparent to the employer as a deduction from his profit. Wages, like a decrease in the injurious character of the work for those who do it, emerges in business calculations only on the side of costs.
This conflict makes the intervention of the state necessary.
In order to put into practice their interest against that of the employer, the employees united in trade unions. This enabled them to turn the entrepreneur’s dependence on them against him. That dependence exists to the extent that his ambition is to make more capital out of his utilized capital, towards which the use of the manpower of others is directed. Through refusal of work, the profit creation stops, and in extreme cases even depreciates the utilized capital. Strikes are thereby the means for employees to implement their interests. However, they disturb the continuity of the national economy and therefore endanger its competitive power. In the beginning phase of bourgeois rule in the 19th century, when the state still denied the right to vote to the lower layers, strikes were usually considered anarchy, forbidden and smashed by means of state violence. It is different nowadays. Strikes are permitted. However, they are posed under conditions. This is the most important content of the right to strike.
The legal regulations indicate what steps must be taken leading up to a strike (negotiations, mediation, etc.), when a strike can begin, who may proclaim it, formulates requirements for the objective (“socially responsible”, not set on the destruction of the social partner, i.e. his property) and under what circumstances and how it is to end.
Not the prohibition of strikes but their permission is the problem. Permission is equivalent to control because it sets the possibility for prohibition in advance. The regulated permission of the union fight serves to make it innocuous for the national economy.
The damages to employees that happen as part of the normal work process (by accidents or unhealthy conditions of work) endanger the continuity of the local economy overall. The extensive body of law issued to prevent this defines the normal working day and the normal workweek (and the circumstances under which they may be exceeded), rules for the prevention of accidents, and limit values for different harmful effects on the job.
These regulations do not have the purpose of preventing endangerment – they have no effect on their reason, the above-described clash of interests. They press down the damage to a degree that makes possible a durable usefulness of the employees, to permit further profitable business with them. (This is the content, for example, of limit values for harmful materials at the workplace. They by no means prevent a slowly creeping poisoning, but only define its magnitude.) Despite the positive consequences of this legislation for the employer, it contradicts their direct interest. - Accordingly, cases become well known again and again in which these regulations were not abided by. The industrial safety regulations are not evidence of a reconciliation of the opposing interests, on the contrary: “What could possibly show better the character of the capitalist mode of production, than the necessity that exists for forcing upon it, by Acts of Parliament, the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health?” (A quote from Marx: Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 15).
Whether a business becomes an economic venture is decided by whether an owner of capital sees a promise for his money to increase. Whether jobs are created depends on this computation; this is not considered by the workers' delegates in the trade unions as something to be criticized, but as natural. That jobs are also eliminated (by rationalizations) for the success of this calculation, and that this calculation pays off even better if the workers can be bought more cheaply, is understood as due to the sharp competition in which the enterprise is in, out of its own free will. Here a trade union likes to follow the logic that even though many jobs were eliminated, all the others were thereby “secured” (at least until the next rationalization). However, on the basis of this fundamental agreement with the calculation procedure of the capitalists, one must be very sharp eyed to see a limit to the justifiable profit. The question becomes how much rationalization must take place in order to be more competitive, how much wage sacrifice is necessary in order to be able to keep up with the unit cost prices of the competitors, and in the long run, how high must the rise of the profit be to attain success? Here a rather skillful and extraordinarily moral separation between the interest of the entrepreneur and that of the business is carried out. Since the business is realized only and insofar as the entrepreneur increases his capital, a separation is therefore absurd. It is impossible to determine a fair size for profit, as every participant in the capitalistic competition, including its victims, advances the competition and forces others to also cut costs. Everyone is reprimanded to let the profit become as large as possible, in order to challenge the next round of rationalization ahead of the competitors and even winners of the competition and not to be its loser.
This description of the unpleasant consequences that labor law has for the wage earning part of the population is not a call not to use that which allows them to pursue their own interests. It is a call to discover that rights have nothing to do with a benefit that one has from them. Rights are not a means for people to pursue their interests, but a means of the state for making them innocuous.