Part 7 (1/2)
Arteries of traffic had thus extended from the Eastern coast to the Mississippi Valley. Local markets had widened to embrace half a continent. Compet.i.tive menaces had become more serious and threatened from a distance. Local unionism no longer sufficed. Consequently, as we saw, in the labor movement of the sixties the national trade union was supreme.
There were four distinct sets of causes which operated during the sixties to bring about nationalization; two grew out of the changes in transportation, already alluded to, and two were largely independent of such changes.
The first and most far-reaching cause, as ill.u.s.trated by the stove molders, was the compet.i.tion of the products of different localities side by side in the same market. Stoves manufactured in Albany, New York, were now displayed in St. Louis by the side of stoves made in Detroit. No longer could the molder in Albany be indifferent to the fate of his fellow craftsman in Louisville. With the molders the nationalization of the organization was destined to proceed to its utmost length. In order that union conditions should be maintained even in the best organized centers, it became necessary to equalize compet.i.tive conditions in the various localities. That led to a well-knit national organization to control working conditions, trade rules, and strikes. In other trades, where the compet.i.tive area of the product was still restricted to the locality, the paramount nationalizing influence was a more intensive compet.i.tion for employment between migratory out-of-town journeymen and the locally organized mechanics. This describes the situation in the printing trade, where the bulk of work was newspaper and not book and job printing. Accordingly, the printers did not need to entrust their national officers with anything more than the control of the traveling journeymen and the result was that the local unions remained practically independent.
The third cause of concerted national action in a trade union was the organization of employers. Where the power of a local union began to be threatened by an employers' a.s.sociation, the next logical step was to combine in a national union.
The fourth cause was the application of machinery and the introduction of division of labor, which split up the established trades and laid industry open to invasion by ”green hands.” The shoemaking industry, which during the sixties had reached the factory stage, ill.u.s.trates this in a most striking manner. Few other industries experienced anything like a similar change during this period.
Of course, none of the causes of nationalization here enumerated operated in entire isolation. In some trades one cause, in other trades other causes, had the predominating influence. Consequently, in some trades the national union resembled an agglomeration of loosely allied states, each one reserving the right to engage in independent action and expecting from its allies no more than a benevolent neutrality. In other trades, on the contrary, the national union was supreme in declaring industrial war and in making peace, and even claimed absolute right to formulate the civil laws of the trade for times of industrial peace.
The national trade union was, therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity. However slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited. Not so with the next step, namely the national federation of trades. In the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the National Labor Union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism. In 1873 the same national unions a.s.serted their rejection of ”panaceas” and politics by attempting to create in the National Labor Congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character. The panic and depression nipped that in the bud. When trade unionism revived in 1879 the national trade unions returned to the idea of a national federation of labor, but this time they followed the model of the British Trades Union Congress, the organization which cares for the legislative interests of British labor. This was the ”Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada,”
which was set up in 1881.
It is easy to understand why the unions of the early eighties did not feel the need of a federation on economic lines. The trade unions of today look to the American Federation of Labor for the discharge of important economic functions, therefore it is primarily an economic organization. These functions are the a.s.sistance of national trade unions in organizing their trades, the adjustment of disputes between unions claiming the same ”jurisdiction,” and concerted action in matters of especial importance such as shorter hours, the ”open-shop,” or boycotts. None of these functions would have been of material importance to the trade unions of the early eighties. Existing in well-defined trades, which were not affected by technical changes, they had no ”jurisdictional” disputes; operating at a period of prosperity with full employment and rising wages, they did not realize a necessity for concerted action; the era of the boycotts had not yet begun. As for having a common agency to do the work of organizing, the trade unions of the early eighties had no keen desire to organize any but the skilled workmen; and, since the compet.i.tion of workmen in small towns had not yet made itself felt, each national trade union strove to organize primarily the workmen of its trade in the larger cities, a function for which its own means were adequate.
The new organization of 1881 was a loose federation of trade and labor unions with a legislative committee at the head, with Samuel Gompers of the cigar makers as a member. The platform was purely legislative and demanded legal incorporation for trade unions,[22] compulsory education for children, the prohibition of child labor under fourteen, uniform apprentice laws, the enforcement of the national eight-hour law, prison labor reform, abolition of the ”truck” and ”order” system, mechanics'
lien, abolition of conspiracy laws as applied to labor organizations, a national bureau of labor statistics, a protective tariff for American labor, an anti-contract immigrant law, and recommended ”all trade and labor organizations to secure proper representation in all law-making bodies by means of the ballot, and to use all honorable measures by which this result can be accomplished.” Although closely related to the present American Federation of Labor in point of time and personnel of leaders.h.i.+p, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada was in reality the precursor of the present state federations of labor, which as specialized parts of the national federation now look after labor legislation.
Two or three years later it became evident that the Federation as a legislative organization proved a failure.[23] Manifestly the trade unions felt no great interest in national legislation. The indifference can be measured by the fact that the annual income of the Federation never exceeded $700 and that, excepting in 1881, none of its conventions represented more than one-fourth of the trade union members.h.i.+p of the country. Under such conditions the legislative influence of the Federation naturally was infinitesimal. The legislative committee carried out the instructions of the 1883 convention and communicated to the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties the request that they should define their position upon the enforcement of the eight-hour law and other measures. The letters were not even answered. A subcommittee of the legislative committee appeared before the two political conventions, but received no greater attention.
It was not until the majority of the national trade unions came under the menace of becoming forcibly absorbed by the Order of the Knights of Labor that a basis appeared for a vigorous federation.
The Knights of Labor were built on an opposite principle from the national trade unions. Whereas the latter started with independent crafts and then with hesitating hands tried, as we saw, to erect some sort of a common superstructure that should express a higher solidarity of labor, the former was built from the beginning upon a denial of craft lines and upon an absolute unity of all cla.s.ses of labor under one guiding head. The subdivision was territorial instead of occupational and the government centralized.
The const.i.tution of the Knights of Labor was drawn in 1878 when the Order laid aside the veil of secrecy to which it had clung since its foundation in 1869. The lowest unit of organization was the local a.s.sembly of ten or more, at least three-fourths of whom had to be wage earners at any trade. Above the local a.s.sembly was the ”district a.s.sembly” and above it the ”General a.s.sembly.” The district a.s.sembly had absolute power over its local a.s.semblies and the General a.s.sembly was given ”full and final jurisdiction” as ”the highest tribunal” of the Order.[24] Between sessions of the General a.s.sembly the power was vested in a General Executive Board, presided over by a Grand Master Workman.
The Order of the Knights of Labor in practice carried out the idea which is now advocated so fervently by revolutionary unionists, namely the ”One Big Union,” since it avowedly aimed to bring into one organization ”all productive labor.” This idea in organization was aided by the weakness of the trade unions during the long depression of the seventies, which led many to hope for better things from a general pooling of labor strength. But its main appeal rested on a view that machine technique tends to do away with all distinctions of trades by reducing all workers to the level of unskilled machine tenders. To its protagonists therefore the ”one big union” stood for an adjustment to the new technique.
First to face the problem of adjustment to the machine technique of the factory system were the shoemakers. They organized in 1867 the Order of the Knights of St. Crispin, mainly for the purpose of suppressing the compet.i.tive menace of ”green hands,” that is unskilled workers put to work on shoe machines. At its height in 1872, the Crispins numbered about 50,000, perhaps the largest union in the whole world at that time.
The coopers began to be menaced by machinery about the middle of the sixties, and about the same time the machinists and blacksmiths, too, saw their trade broken up by the introduction of the principle of standardized parts and quant.i.ty production in the making of machinery.
From these trades came the national leaders of the Knights of Labor and the strongest advocates of the new principle in labor organization and of the interests of the unskilled workers in general. The conflict between the trade unions and the Knights of Labor turned on the question of the unskilled workers.
The conflict was held in abeyance during the early eighties. The trade unions were by far the strongest organizations in the field and scented no particular danger when here or there the Knights formed an a.s.sembly either contiguous to the sphere of a trade union or even at times encroaching upon it.
With the Great Upheaval, which began in 1884, and the inrus.h.i.+ng of hundreds of thousands of semi-skilled and unskilled workers into the Order, a new situation was created. The leaders of the Knights realized that mere numbers were not sufficient to defeat the employers and that control over the skilled, and consequently the more strategic occupations, was required before the unskilled and semi-skilled could expect to march to victory. Hence, parallel to the tremendous growth of the Knights in 1886, there was a constantly growing effort to absorb the existing trade unions for the purpose of making them subservient to the interests of the less skilled elements. It was mainly that which produced the bitter conflict between the Knights and the trade unions during 1886 and 1887. Neither the jealousy aroused by the success of the unions nor the opposite aims of labor solidarity and trade separatism gives an adequate explanation of this conflict. The one, of course, aggravated the situation by introducing a feeling of personal bitterness, and the other furnished an appealing argument to each side.
But the struggle was one between groups within the working cla.s.s, in which the small but more skilled group fought for independence of the larger but weaker group of the unskilled and semi-skilled. The skilled men stood for the right to use their advantage of skill and efficient organization in order to wrest the maximum amount of concessions for themselves. The Knights of Labor endeavored to annex the skilled men in order that the advantage from their exceptional fighting strength might lift up the unskilled and semi-skilled. From the point of view of a struggle between principles, this was indeed a clash between the principle of solidarity of labor and that of trade separatism, but, in reality, each of the principles reflected only the special interest of a certain portion of the working cla.s.s. Just as the trade unions, when they fought for trade autonomy, really refused to consider the unskilled men, so the Knights of Labor overlooked the fact that their scheme would r.e.t.a.r.d the progress of the skilled trades.
The Knights were in nearly every case the aggressors, and it is significant that among the local organizations of the Knights inimical to trade unions, District a.s.sembly 49, of New York, should prove the most relentless. It was this a.s.sembly which conducted the longsh.o.r.emen's and coal miners' strike in New York in 1887 and which, as we saw,[25]
did not hesitate to tie up the industries of the entire city for the sake of securing the demands of several hundred unskilled workingmen.
Though District a.s.sembly 49, New York, came into conflict with not a few of the trade unions in that city, its battle royal was fought with the cigar makers' unions. There were at the time two factions among the cigar makers, one upholding the International Cigar Makers' Union with Adolph Stra.s.ser and Samuel Gompers as leaders, the other calling itself the Progressive Union, which was more socialistic in nature and composed of more recent immigrants and less skilled workers. District a.s.sembly 49 of the Knights of Labor took a hand in the struggle to support the Progressive Union and by skillful management brought the situation to the point where the latter had to allow itself to be absorbed into the Knights of Labor.
The events in the cigar making trade in New York brought to a climax the sporadic struggles that had been going on between the Order and the trade unions. The trade unions demanded that the Knights of Labor respect their ”jurisdiction” and proposed a ”treaty of peace” with such drastic terms that had they been accepted the trade unions would have been left in the sole possession of the field. The Order was at first more conciliatory. It would not of course cease to take part in industrial disputes and industrial matters, but it proposed a _modus vivendi_ on a basis of an interchange of ”working cards” and common action against employers. At the same time it addressed separately to each national trade union a gentle admonition to think of the unskilled workers as well as of themselves. The address said: ”In the use of the wonderful inventions, your organization plays a most important part.
Naturally it embraces within its ranks a very large proportion of laborers of a high grade of skill and intelligence. With this skill of hand, guided by intelligent thought, comes the right to demand that excess of compensation paid to skilled above the unskilled labor. But the unskilled labor must receive attention, or in the hour of difficulty the employer will not hesitate to use it to depress the compensation you now receive. That skilled or unskilled labor may no longer be found unorganized, we ask of you to annex your grand and powerful corps to the main army that we may fight the battle under one flag.”
But the trade unions, who had formerly declared that their purpose was ”to protect the skilled trades of America from being reduced to beggary,” evinced no desire to be pressed into the service of lifting up the unskilled and voted down with practical unanimity the proposal.
Thereupon the Order declared open war by commanding all its members who were also members of the cigar makers' union to withdraw from the latter on the penalty of expulsion.
Later events proved that the a.s.sumption of the aggressive was the beginning of the undoing of the Order. It was, moreover, an event of first significance in the labor movement since it forced the trade unions to draw closer together and led to the founding in the same year, 1886, of the American Federation of Labor.