Case XVI: Occult Compensation

A man working for a railroad company compensated himself secretly to the amount of about one hundred dollars. He did so at the suggestion of fellow-workmen, who convinced him that he was doing more work than his weekly salary paid for. Prior to being advanced to his present position, this man knew the nature of the work that would be required of him, and the long hours necessary to do the work. This happened several years ago. Now, for some months back, this man has been trying to get an increase of wages from the company. The matter has been taken under advisement by his superiors before whom such matters come for consideration, and they seem to have practically admitted that he is entitled to an increase of ten dollars per month. However, they have been procrastinating now for five months, and are not likely to give the increase until spring, because, this man says, they know that the winter is a bad time for a man to quit work, that a man can not well better himself at this time, and therefore he will not give up his present employment. Now, suppose that the time runs on long enough before they increase his wages, and the total amount to which he thinks himself entitled amounts to one hundred dollars, would this man be justified in not restoring the hundred dollars already taken?

Answer.—According to the moralists very definite conditions must be verified before occult compensation or secretly recovering what one believes to be one’s own, can be considered lawful in conscience.

1. Ut debitum sit verum. Our claim must be founded in strict justice, and not merely in gratitude for work well done, or in promises to remember us in one’s will, etc.

2. Ut debitum sit certum. If there be any reasonable doubt whatever that we have no strict claim in justice, then possession is ninetenths of the law, i. e., the party from whom we endeavor to recover is in possession, and law and equity favor him, and he has a right to keep what he has in his possession until it shall be proven beyond reasonable doubt that it belongs to another. If this were not so, hallucinations would prove a prolific mother of thefts.

3. Ut debitum aliter obtineri non possit. The public peace and the welfare of the social structure require that debts be collected through the channels created by custom and law, and only when these are inadequate can recourse be had to secret recovery.

4. Ut damnum debitoris vel tertii caveatur. We may injure the debtor in secretly recovering from him if we expose him to the danger of paying the debt twice, or leave his conscience charged with the debt, when in fact the debt is discharged. A third person may be injured by being suspected of dishonesty, etc., and thereby suffer loss of position or legal prosecution.

In regard to employees the moralists say: Beyond the salary agreed upon, provided it is at least the minimum, it is not lawful for him to compensate himself; for beyond the agreement to which he himself consented, nothing is owed to him.

Where no fraud or deception or force has been employed, and the nature of the work was sufficiently understood, and the employee was not driven by stern necessity to agree to work for a wage that is manifestly unjust, there can be no room for secret compensation. If, in the course of his employment, the work required of him should suddenly become more dangerous than could have been foreseen, or much more arduous, as, for instance, night work instead of day work, and the man could not very well get another position immediately, then he might recover secretly. Applying these conditions to the case before us, we are forced to admit that the hundred dollars that this railroad employee took was not a debitum verum, nor a debitum certum, and that this employee had no strict right, founded in justice, and beyond all reasonable doubt, to the said money. The pay that he was receiving from the railroad company was evidently not infra minimum, and if it were, he was not obliged by extreme necessity to work for it, since he could have found other work to do, and since he knew beforehand the nature of the work that was required of him and the wages he was to receive for it. He agreed to do the work for the wage of his own free will and not being constrained, and with full knowledge both of the labor demanded of him and the recompense promised. That was a contractus onerosus, entered into without fraud or deception or force, and the employee had no right therefore to alter its terms, without the consent of the other party to the contract. The hundred dollars must be restored to the railroad company. It is evidently their property and res clamat domino. This we say in view of the first part of the case. But what of the second part? Before coming to the second part of the case we will call attention to a condition, in connection with this first part of this case, existing in almost every large city of the United States, viz.: the dishonesty of street railway employees. There are 3050 conductors employed on the New York City railway lines. In the year 1904, 3491 were discharged, of whom 3436 were in the service less than a year. In 1905, 3019 conductors were discharged, of whom 2864 had been less than one year in the service. In 1906, 4976 conductors were discharged, of whom 4776 had been less than a year in the service. In the first six months of 1907, 3265 have been discharged, of whom 3144 were in the service less than one year.

The tremendous extent to which these discharges have been for dishonesty or stealing is indicated by the following figures:

In the present year, therefore, if the average for the first six months is carried out, the entire force of conductors on the surface lines will be discharged virtually twice over for dishonesty alone. This means a loss to the surface railway company of New York City, inclusive of fares not collected, of more than ten per cent. of its gross income, or upward of two million dollars a year. Various statements of what this system of self-compensation was worth to individual men have been made up, but only as estimates. One man high up in the councils of the surface railway company said the other day that a former valet who was put in on the road as a motorman found that his share of the daily profit was from $2.00 to $3.00 under normal conditions. Several months ago there was a case in the divorce courts in New York City in which the wife of a city railway conductor was suing for alimony, and in her bill charged that although her husband’s salary from the railway company was only $18.00 a week, he ought to pay alimony on a $50.00 a week basis, as he “knocked down” $35.00 a week on the side. There was a disposition to believe at first that this was an exaggeration, but subsequent investigations bore out the facts. The ordinary reason advanced to justify this dishonesty is that the men are not being paid sufficient wages and therefore are obliged to recover secretly. On the other hand, it has been asserted in the investigation of traffic conditions by the Public Service Commission that the deficit of the New York City railway system in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1907, was over $3,000,000. In other words, although the gross receipts for the year 1906 were $21,937,943, there was a deficit of $2,212,997, two millions of which was caused by dishonest employees. So easy is it for men to persuade themselves that they have a right to recover by secret compensation! (Cf. New York Times, November 17, 1907.) How earnest, therefore, ought not the confessor to be, especially before the fact, in disabusing men of this false conscience.

In regard to the second part of the railway employee’s case, namely, would it be permitted to this man to keep this hundred dollars, or any portion of it, amounting to $10.00 per month, for the time that the railway company acknowledged that his pay ought to be increased $10.00 per month, but nevertheless failed to increase it?

If the railroad company has really acknowledged that the work of this employee is worth $10.00 per month more than he is receiving in wages for it, and if the true reason why the company does not increase his pay at present, is because they feel that he is obliged to work for them anyway, then they are taking advantage of his need to defraud him of what they freely confess in justice belongs to him and which they unjustly keep back from him, and therefore he might be permitted to deduct from the sum he owes the railroad company the sum of $10.00 for every month that the company fails to increase his pay since the time that they acknowledged that his wages ought to be increased to that extent. If the company’s delay covers more than ten months, we would not permit the man to resume recovering secretly, but we would advise him to change his employer if he thought he could not work for the wages he contracted for. If, however, the reason why the railroad company did not at this time wish to increase his pay, was because they could not very well afford to do so economically, owing to the stringency of the money market for the last four or five months, then we do not think that this employee would be allowed to reimburse himself from the money he owes the company. In this case the company would not be taking undue advantage of this employee’s need, but would be simply refusing to pay more wages for a certain kind of work than they could afford to pay and which they could get other men to do just as well for the present wage, which is, we suppose, not infra minimum justum,