Part 15 (1/2)
When on January 8, 1918, President Wilson enunciated his famous Fourteen Points, the Federation of course gave them an enthusiastic endors.e.m.e.nt.
In the autumn of 1918 Gompers went to Europe and partic.i.p.ated in an Inter-Allied labor conference. He refused, however, to partic.i.p.ate in the first International Labor and Socialist Congress called since the War, which met at Berne, Switzerland, in March 1919, since he would not sit with the Germans while their country was not formally at peace with the United States. The convention of the Federation in June 1919 gave complete endors.e.m.e.nt to the League of Nations Pact worked out at Versailles,--on general grounds and on the ground of its specific provisions for an international regulation of labor conditions designed to equalize labor standards and costs. Contrasting with this was the position of British labor, which regarded the Pact with a critical eye, frankly confessing disillusionment, but was willing to accept it for the sake of its future possibilities, when the Pact might be remodelled by more liberal and more democratic hands.
The contrast in outlook between the mild evolutionism of the American Federation of Labor and the social radicalism of British labor stood out nowhere so strongly as in their respective programs for Reconstruction after the War. The chief claim of the British Labor party for recognition at the hands of the voter at the General Election in December 1918, was its well-thought-out reconstruction program put forth under the telling t.i.tle of ”Labour and the New Social Order.” This program was above all a legislative program. It called for a thoroughgoing governmental control of industry by means of a control of private finance, natural resources, transportation, and international trade. To the workingmen such control would mean the right to steady employment, the right to a living wage, and the appropriation of economic surpluses by the state for the common good--be they in the form of rent, excessive profits, or overlarge personal incomes. Beyond this minimum program loomed the cooperative commonwealth with the private capitalist totally eliminated.
Such was the program of British labor. What of the Reconstruction program of American labor? First of all, American labor thought of Reconstruction as a program to be carried out by the trade union, not by the government. Moreover, it did not see in Reconstruction the great break with the past which that meant to British labor. The American Federation of Labor applied to Reconstruction the same philosophy which lies at the basis of its ordinary, everyday activity. It concerned itself not with any far-reaching plan for social reorganization, but with a rising standard of living and an enlarged freedom for the union.
The American equivalent of a government-guaranteed right to employment and a living wage was the ”right to organize.” a.s.sure to labor that right, free the trade unions of court interference in strikes and boycotts, prevent excessive meddling by the government in industrial relations--and the stimulated activities of the ”legitimate”
organizations of labor, which will result therefrom, will achieve a far better Reconstruction than a thousand paper programs however beautiful.
So reasoned the leaders of the American Federation of Labor. During the period of War, they of course gladly accepted directly from the government the basic eight-hour day and the high wages, which under other circ.u.mstances they could have got only by prolonged and bitter striking. But even more acceptable than these directly bestowed boons was the indirect one of the right to organize free from anti-union discriminations by employers. Having been arrested in its expansion, as we saw, by anti-union employers and especially ”trusts,” the American Federation of Labor took advantage of the War situation to overflow new territory. Once entrenched and the organization well in hand, it thought it could look to the future with confidence.
FOOTNOTES:
[84] For the developments which led up to this joint move see above, 182-184.
[85] Congress ignored the last-named recommendation which would have introduced in the United States the Canadian system of ”Compulsory Investigation.”
[86] See below, 283-287.
[87] See below, 238-240.
[88] The unions again lost their hold upon the packing industry in the autumn of 1921.
CHAPTER 11
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
The Armistice with Germany came suddenly and unexpectedly. To the organized workers the news was as welcome as to other citizens. But, had they looked at the matter from a special trade union standpoint, they would probably have found a longer duration of the War not entirely amiss. For coal had been unionized already before the War, the railways first during the War, but the third basic industry, steel, was not touched either before or during the War. However, it was precisely in the steel industry that opposition to unionism has found its chief seat, not only to unionism in that industry alone but to unionism in related or subsidiary industries as well.
The first three months after the Armistice the general expectation was for a set-back in business conditions due to the withdrawal of the enormous government War-time demand. Employers and trade unions stood equally undecided. When, however, instead of the expected slump, there came a prosperity unknown even during the War, the trade unions resumed their offensive, now unrestrained by any other but the strictly economic consideration. As a matter of fact, the trade unions were not at all free agents, since their demands, frequent and considerable though they were, barely sufficed to keep wages abreast of the soaring cost of living. Through 1919 and the first half of 1920 profits and wages were going up by leaps and bounds; and the forty-four hour week,--no longer the mere eight-hour day,--became a general slogan and a partial reality.
Success was especially notable in clothing, building, printing, and the metal trades. One cannot say the same, however, of the three basic industries, steel, coal, and railways. In steel the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week continued as before for approximately one-half of the workers and the unions were preparing for a battle with the ”Steel Trust.” While on the railways and in coal mining the unions now began to encounter opposition from an unexpected quarter, namely, the government.
When in the summer of 1919 the railway shopmen demanded an increase in their wages, which had not been raised since the summer of 1918, President Wilson practically refused the demand, urging the need of a general deflation but binding himself to use all the powers of the government immediately to reduce the cost of living. A significant incident in this situation was a spontaneous strike of shopmen on many roads unauthorized by international union officials, which disarranged the movement of trains for a short time but ended with the men returning to work under the combined pressure of their leaders' threats and the President's plea.
In September 1919, the United States Railroad Administration and the shopmen's unions entered into national agreements, which embodied the practices under the Administration as well as those in vogue on the more liberal roads before 1918, including recognition and a large number of ”working rules.” These ”national agreements” became an important issue one year later, when their abolition began to be pressed by the railway executives before the Railroad Labor Board, which was established under the Transportation Act of 1920.
In the summer of 1919 employers in certain industries, like clothing, grew aware of a need of a more ”psychological” handling of their labor force than heretofore in order to reduce a costly high labor turnover and no less costly stoppages of work. This created a veritable Eldorado for ”employment managers” and ”labor managers,” real and spurious.
Universities and colleges, heretofore wholly uninterested in the problem of labor or viewing training in that problem as but a part of a general cultural education, now vied with one another in establis.h.i.+ng ”labor management” and ”labor personnel” courses. One phase of the ”labor personnel” work was a rather wide experimentation with ”industrial democracy” plans. These plans varied in form and content, from simple provision for shop committees for collective dealing, many of which had already been installed during the War under the orders of the War Labor Board, to most elaborate schemes, some modelled upon the Const.i.tution of the United States. The feature which they all had in common was that they attempted to achieve some sort of collective bargaining outside the channels of the established trade unions. The trade unionists termed the new fas.h.i.+oned expressions of industrial democracy ”company unions.” This term one may accept as technically correct without necessarily accepting the sinister connotation imputed to it by labor.
The trade unions, too, were benefiting as organizations. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union firmly established itself by formal agreement on the men's clothing ”markets” of Chicago, Rochester, Baltimore, and New York. The members.h.i.+p of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union rose to 175,000. Employers in general were complaining of increased labor unrest, a falling off of efficiency in the shop, and looked askance at the rapid march of unionization. The trade unions, on their part, were aware of their opportunity and eager for a final recognition as an inst.i.tution in industry. As yet uncertainty prevailed as to whether enough had survived of the War-time spirit of give and take to make a struggle avoidable, or whether the issue must be solved by a bitter conflict of cla.s.ses.
A partial showdown came in the autumn of 1919. Three great events, which came closely together, helped to clear the situation: The steel strike, the President's Industrial Conference, and the strike of the soft coal miners. The great steel strike, prepared and directed by a Committee representing twenty-four national and international unions with William Z. Foster as Secretary and moving spirit, tried in September 1919 to wrest from the owners of the steel mills what the railway shopmen had achieved in 1918 by invitation of the government, namely, ”recognition”
and the eight-hour day. Three hundred thousand men went out on strike at the call of the committee. The industry came to a practical standstill.
But in this case the twenty-four allied unions were not dealing with a government amenable to political pressure, nor with a loosely joined a.s.sociation of employers competing among themselves. Furthermore, the time had pa.s.sed when the government had either the will or the power to interfere and order both sides to arbitrate their dispute. On the contrary, the unions were now dealing unaided with the strongest capitalist aggregation in the world.
At the request of President Wilson, Gompers had urged the strike committee to postpone the strike until after the meeting of the national industrial conference called by the President in October, but the committee claimed that it could not have kept the men back after a summer of agitation and feverish organization had they even tried. The President's conference, modelled upon a similar conference which met earlier in Great Britain, was composed of three groups of representatives equal in number, one for capital, one for labor, and one for the general public. Decisions, to be held effective, had to be adopted by a majority in each group. The labor representation, dominated of course by Gompers, was eager to make the discussion turn on the steel strike. It proposed a resolution to this effect which had the support of the public group, but fearing a certain rejection by the employer group the matter was postponed. The issue upon which the alignment was effected was industrial control and collective bargaining. All three groups, the employer and public groups and of course the labor group, advocated collective bargaining,--but with a difference. The labor group insisted that collective bargaining is doomed to be a farce unless the employes are allowed to choose as their spokesmen representatives of the national trade union. In the absence of a powerful protector in the national union, they argued, the workers in a shop can never feel themselves on a bargaining equality with their employer, nor can they be represented by a spokesman of the necessary ability if their choice be restricted to those working in the same plant. The employers, now no longer dominated by the War-time spirit which caused them in 1917 to tolerate an expansion of unionism, insisted that no employer must be obliged to meet for the purpose of collective bargaining with other than his own employes.[89] After two weeks of uncertainty, when it had become clear that a resolution supported by both labor and public groups, which restated the labor position in a milder form, would be certain to be voted down by the employer group, the labor group withdrew from the conference, and the conference broke up. The period of the cooperation of cla.s.ses had definitely closed.
Meantime the steel strike continued. Federal troops patrolled the steel districts and there was no violence. Nevertheless, a large part of the country's press pictured the strike by the steel workers for union recognition and a normal workday as an American counterpart of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia. Public opinion, unbalanced and excited as it was over the whirlpool of world events, was in no position to resist. The strike failed.
Nothing made so clear to the trade unionists the changed situation since the War ended as the strike of the bituminous coal miners which began November 1. The miners had entered, in October 1917, into a wage agreement with the operators for the duration of the War. The purchasing power of their wages having become greatly reduced by the ever rising cost of living, discontent was general in the union. A further complication arose from the uncertain position of the United States with reference to War and Peace, which had a bearing on the situation. The miners claimed that the Armistice had ended the War. The War having ended, the disadvantageous agreement expired with it. So argued the miners and demanded a sixty percent increase in tonnage rates, a corresponding one for yardmen and others paid by the day or hour, and a thirty-hour week to spread employment through the year. The operators maintained that the agreement was still in force, but intimated a readiness to make concessions if they were permitted to s.h.i.+ft the cost to the consumer. At this point, the Fuel Administration, a War-time government body, already partly in the process of dissolution, intervened and attempted to dictate a settlement at a fourteen percent increase, which was entirely unacceptable to the union. The strike continued and the prospect of a dire coal famine grew nearer. To break the deadlock, on motion of Attorney-General Palmer, Judge Anderson of Indianapolis, under the War-time Lever Act, issued an injunction forbidding the union officials to continue conducting the strike. The strike continued, the strikers refusing to return to work, and a Bituminous Coal Commission appointed by the President finally settled it by an award of an increase of twenty-seven percent. But that the same Administration which had given the unions so many advantages during the War should now have invoked against them a War-time law, which had already been considered practically abrogated, was a clear indication of the change in the times. In a strike by anthracite coal miners in the following year an award was made by a Presidential board of three, representing the employers, the union, and the public. The strikers, however, refused to abide by it and inaugurated a ”vacation-strike,” the individual strikers staying away on a so-called vacation, nominally against the will of the union officers. They finally returned to work.