Connecticut and Massachusetts have laws to facilitate profit-sharing by corporations.  Such statutes would seem hardly necessary, as profits may be shared or stock distributed or sold without a law to that effect; if it be regarded as part of the reward of wages, no injunction would be granted to protesting stockholders.  Fifteen States and Territories, including Porto Rico, have laws for the protection of employees as members of labor unions, and five as members of the national guard or militia, similar to the New York statute just mentioned.  Nearly all the States have laws for the protection of employees as voters, as by requiring half holidays or reasonable time to vote, or that their pay should not be given them in envelopes upon which is printed any request to vote or other political material.

Nearly all the States require seats for female employees, and New Jersey requires seats for horse-car drivers.  Five States have general provisions regulating the employment of women; ten forbid their employment in bar-rooms (see page 226 above); three regulate their hours of labor to an inequality with men; and most of the States forbid females to be employed in mines or underground generally, or, as we have noted above, in night labor.  California, Illinois, and Washington provide that sex shall be no disqualification for employment.  Four States, among them Illinois, require employers seeking labor by advertisement to mention (if such be the case) that there is a strike in their establishment; twelve States (see above, page 231) have so far tackled the sweat-shop problem, while practically every State in the Union makes wages a preferred claim in cases of death or insolvency of the employer.

There is, however, one matter we have reserved for the last, because it is one of the two or three points about which the immediate contest before us is to rage.  That is the case of individual discharge.  It is elementary that just as an employee may leave with cause or without cause, so an employer may discharge without cause or with cause, nor is he bound to state his reasons, and certain statutes requiring him to do so with the object of avoiding a blacklist have been declared unconstitutional in Southern States.  But organized labor is naturally very desirous of resenting the discharge of anybody for no other reason than that of being a union man.  In fact it is not too much to say that this, with the legalization of the boycott, are the two great demands the unions are now making upon society.  Therefore, statutes have been passed in many States making it unlawful for the employer to make it a condition of employment that the employee should not be a member of a union; or to discharge a person for the reason that he is a member of a union.  And closely connected with this is the combination of union employees to force an employer to discharge a man because he is not a member of a union.  This last will come logically under the next chapter covering combinations and is