Salaried Regime

SALARIED REGIME. - It is the social regime characterized by the predominance, in the world of labor, of the wage form of remuneration over the other contractual forms, and therefore of the condition of wage-earner among workers (v. SALARIO). In contrast to a very small number of entrepreneurs and capitalists, who respectively organize and finance the work, dividing the profits among themselves, and to a few technical and administrative managers whose positions are sufficiently stable and commensurate with output, there exists in this regime a multitude of material executors of the work, paid by time or by output, without any guarantee of employment.

I. CRISIS OF THE SALARIED REGIME

This regime, because it is precarious, is morally unsatisfactory for the worker who, as he rises in professional preparation and social awareness, feels it an offense to remain a stranger to the life of the firm, in which he participates with a growing sum of intelligence, industriousness and initiative. Even more than from economic hardship, immediately felt and easily expressed, the salaried regime is therefore characterized by a dull spiritual unease, less precisely perceived and more difficult to express; it is for this reason that the social question takes on a virulence or explodes in vindictive forms that are generally not in proportion to the declared economic causes: insufficient wages or other such. The discontent, even of the best paid among the workers, derives precisely from the impossible satisfaction of spiritual needs by merely economic means, and above all from the lack of security regarding the future. Employers and capitalists, in the century of materialism and economic liberalism, did not foresee or did not understand the rapid maturing of these demands, and thus allowed the levers of social progress to be wrested from their hands (v. PROGRESS). The workers for their part, obeying political agitators, children of the same century, were at fault in placing the question on a universal revolutionary plane which stiffened the employer class in defense, multiplying its reasons for resistance: whence some ask themselves whether the agitations that followed one another over a century accelerated or retarded the evolution of relations among the elements of production: enterprise, capital and labor. Certainly the problem was posed in too radical a manner, tending toward reforms of the internal structure of firms which cannot possibly succeed if implemented in an overheated atmosphere of struggle: and which, in any case, are not achievable to the same degree and according to an equal model for all the vastly varied types and sizes of firm, for all situations and for all countries.

This intrinsic difficulty has in fact acted as a brake on the adoption of reforms by now universally desired: the threat of implementing them through trade-union or political impositions, always of scant objectivity or tainted by demagoguery, has needlessly alarmed the class of employers, already convinced in principle of the opportuneness and advisability of reforms, but also convinced of their dangerousness if carried out by violence, and not accompanied by other measures of an economic nature capable of making the general conditions of industry and agriculture tranquil and normal as well, and productive labor and commerce less difficult and risky.

The professional and moral maturity of the workers must also be gradually raised to the level of the new tasks and the new responsibilities.

II. TOWARD NEW SOLUTIONS

Faced with the threat of an authoritarian and therefore crude solution, and of insidious political-union solutions current today that go under the name of co-management, whereby the new structures would be born tainted by hatreds and errors, a prompt, voluntary, intelligent initiative on the part of individual entrepreneurs is put forward as necessary, to the extent of the real possibilities offered by each firm; it appearing that different forms and degrees of collaboration, association and co-ownership can coexist, in the very way in which the progress of the means of transport still leaves them all coexisting, from the most ancient to the most modern, opportunely selecting the work among them.

The deadlock can and must be overcome, and already in Italy and abroad there is no lack of happy examples of such courageous entrepreneurial initiatives. The Christian spirit and solidarity among entrepreneurs constitute the best disposition for such a work: as proof, the success of the «Union internationale des patrons catholiques»: UNIAPAC (v.), whose purpose is precisely the study, encouragement and realization of similar initiatives. The evolution of the salarial regime toward the forms mentioned above has in fact been presented as a conflict between capital and labor, that is, between capitalists and workers, forgetting the preeminent figure and the social function of the entrepreneur (v.): to him, as the one who calls capital and labor to collaborate with the idea and the initiative, belongs the privilege of preserving, or re-establishing when it is disturbed, the harmony between the two factors, through the harmony between each of them and the enterprise with which they collaborate. If the figure of the entrepreneur has often been confused with that of the capitalist, this is perhaps due to the abuse of joint-stock companies, in which the one who lends the capital is also co-owner of the firm, but does not exercise its functions. Social justice is realized by placing the three factors of production on the same level, without privileges, distributing profit in proportion to merit. This proportion, however, is not constant, either with respect to the various types of industry or with respect to time: for the entrepreneur and the capitalist, for example, it is generally at its maximum in the initial period of the enterprise, when risks and uncertainties reach their highest level, but it can also become high again for the most solid enterprises, in determined political, economic and social contingencies. Just as the entrepreneur can free himself from superfluous labor, so he should be able to free himself from capital that has become too costly in the phase of normal and secure life of the firm, replacing it with cheaper capital.

III. FORMS OF THE SALARIED REGIME

As to the forms toward which the salarial regime is evolving, the principal ones are mentioned. Piecework, mixed wages and incentive pay can still be improved and organized, to the point of giving rise to small, almost autonomous enterprises within the main enterprise; profit-sharing in the firm (v. PARTECIPAZIONISMO), worker shareholding and the collaboration of workers (including white-collar employees) to varying degrees in management, the decentralization and autonomy of departments or services, the many types of partnership and association contracts, of buy-out and co-ownership both of the product and of the means of production, present a very rich range of possibilities, to which are added emphyteusis (v.) and sharecropping (v.) in the agricultural field; all forms that have always existed sporadically and that, even in the times of integral capitalism, have allowed and still allow notable enrichments and a continuous flow of individuals from the conditions of wage-earner to the independent situations of small, medium and even large entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, merchants and owners.

Cooperative forms, wherever they are also compatible with the productive fact, always constitute a most fertile field open to workers who aim at independent and responsible work: a better professional selection and a more effective organization of credit would undoubtedly permit a much broader development of them, especially in the fields of handicrafts and small industry, of commerce and of transport.

IV. MARXIST AND CATHOLIC APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM

The Marxist position in the face of the evolution of the wage system is well known: the illusion that by abolishing private ownership of the means of production and transferring it to the State in the name of the workers, the latter will no longer be exploited as regards wages, and will feel themselves truly masters of the enterprises, is the principal obstacle to a relaxation of relations among the different factors of production, as well as to an objective examination of the situation and its problems. Moreover, Marxist ideology, while foreseeing the dictatorship of the proletariat, does not contemplate at all the abolition or transformation of the wage system, and in practice repudiates every form of association among enterprise, capital and labor, or of participation in industrial profits.

The error of formulation, and of method, consists in this: that whereas historical and environmental circumstances tied to a certain stage of economic civilization have produced or permitted determinate structures and institutions, today there is a claim to change these structures and institutions without troubling to transform the economic environment that determined them: an environment tied essentially to technical progress in production, transport, communications, exchange, credit and currencies, as well as to morality and to the degree of maturity of culture. If these general problems are not confronted and resolved (by respectively economic or moral means, and not political ones), along with the specifically economic problems of the measurement of value, the insurance of savings, the mobility of capital, the rational financing of enterprises, and the improvement of stock exchanges and markets, any new social structure will find itself having to struggle against the very same difficulties that the old structures generate.

The Catholic Church, by declaring that the wage system is not in itself contrary to justice and morality, has always shown itself favorable to its natural evolution, hastening it with social works and with its study conferences (v. SETTIMANE SOCIALI) according to the formula: Everyone a proprietor! instead of the other which would want everyone a proletarian. And this ever since the common interpretation of the principles of the French Revolution did not permit workers to organize and act in defense of their own interests (v. DOTTRINA SOCIALE CATTOLICA).

In 1889 the Catholic University of Fribourg was organized, which soon became the center of Christian social studies. After two international Catholic congresses of social works (Liège 1887 and 1890), the activities promoted, the aspirations cultivated and the studies matured, together with the suggestions of G. Toniolo (v.) and of Cardinals Manning (v.) of London and Gibbons (v.) of Baltimore, found a concrete outlet and a sovereign seal in the encyclical Rerum Novarum (v.) of Leo XIII (1891), from which dates a worldwide movement of worker rebirth inspired by true integral necessities of a better life in the human and Christian sense.

In the congresses that followed in those same years, the necessity was projected of directing the wage system toward new forms, and even then the family wage, profit-sharing, and worker shareholding were proposed (Congress of Milan, 1894), giving vigorous life to the cooperative movement.

Today the evolution of the wage system toward new forms can be accelerated and made more precise, beyond real progress in the economy, by intelligent social initiatives on the part of entrepreneurs, by professional culture and by the moderation of workers, and finally by the seriousness of purpose of both.

Mario Baronci