A History of Trade Unionism in the United States Part 15

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 establishing "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 fashioned 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 membership 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 shift 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.

Both the steel and coal strikes furnished occasions for considerable anti-union propaganda in the press. Public sentiment long favorable to labor became definitely hostile.[90] In Kansas the legislature pa.s.sed a compulsory arbitration law and created an Industrial Relations Court to adjudicate trade disputes. Simultaneously an "anti-Red" campaign inaugurated by Attorney-General Palmer contributed its share to the public excitement and helped to prejudice the cause of labor more by implication than by making direct charges. It was in an atmosphere thus surcharged with suspicion and fear that a group of employers, led by the National a.s.sociation of Manufacturers and several local employers'

organizations, launched an open-shop movement with the slogan of an "American plan" for shops and industries. Many employers, normally opposed to unionism, who in War-time had permitted unionism to acquire scope, were now trying to reconquer their lost positions. The example of the steel industry and the fiasco of the President's Industrial Conference crystallized this reviving anti-union sentiment into action.

Meanwhile the railway labor situation remained unsettled and fraught with danger. The problem was bound up with the general problem as to what to do with the railways. Many plans were presented to Congress, from an immediate return to private owners to permanent government ownership and management. The railway labor organizations, that is, the four brotherhoods of the train service personnel and the twelve unions united in the Railway Employes' Department of the American Federation of Labor, came before Congress with the so-called Plumb Plan, worked out by Glenn E. Plumb, the legal representative of the brotherhoods. This plan proposed that the government take over the railways for good, paying a compensation to the owners, and then entrust their operation to a board composed of government officials, union representatives, and representatives of the technical staffs.[91] So much for ultimate plans.

On the more immediate wage problem proper, the government had clearly fallen down on its promise made to the shopmen in August 1919, when their demands for higher wages were refused and a promise was made that the cost of living would be reduced. Early in 1920 President Wilson notified Congress that he would return the roads to the owners on March 1, 1920. A few days before that date the Esch-c.u.mmins bill was pa.s.sed under the name of the Transportation Act of 1920. Strong efforts were made to incorporate in the bill a prohibition against strikes and lockouts. In that form it had indeed pa.s.sed the Senate. In the House bill, however, the compulsory arbitration feature was absent and the final law contained a provision for a Railroad Labor Board, of railway, union, and public representatives, to be appointed by the President, with the power of conducting investigations and issuing awards, but with the right to strike or lockout unimpaired either before, during, or after the investigation. It was the first appointed board of this description which was to pa.s.s on the clamorous demands by the railway employes for higher wages.[92]

No sooner had the roads been returned under the new law, and before the board was even appointed, than a strike broke out among the switchmen and yardmen, whose patience had apparently been exhausted. The strike was an "outlaw" strike, undertaken against the wishes of national leaders and organized and led by "rebel" leaders risen up for the occasion. For a time it threatened not only to paralyze the country's railway system but to wreck the railway men's organizations as well. It was finally brought to an end through the efforts of the national leaders, and a telling effect on the situation was produced by an announcement by the newly const.i.tuted Railroad Labor Board that no "outlaw" organization would have standing before it. The Board issued an award on July 20, retroactive to May 1, increasing the total annual wage bill of the railways by $600,000,000. The award failed to satisfy the union, but they acquiesced.

When the increase in wages was granted to the railway employes, industry in general and the railways in particular were already entering a period of slump. With the depression the open-shop movement took on a greater vigor. With unemployment rapidly increasing employers saw their chance to regain freedom from union control. A few months later the tide also turned in the movement of wages. Inside of a year the steel industry reduced wages thirty percent, in three like installments; and the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week, which had figured among the chief causes of the strike of 1919 and for which the United States Steel Corporation was severely condemned by a report of a Committee of the Interchurch World Movement,[93] has largely continued as before. In the New York "market" of the men's clothing industry, where the union faces the most complex and least stable condition mainly owing to the heterogeneous character of the employing group, the latter grasped the opportunity to break with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union. By the end of the spring of 1921 the clothing workers won their struggle, showing that a union built along new lines was at least as efficient a fighting machine as any of the older unions. It was this union also and several local branches of the related union in the ladies' garment industry, which realized the need of a.s.suring to the employer at least a minimum of labor efficiency if the newly established level of wages was not to be materially lowered. Hence the acceptance of the principle of "standards of production" fixed with the aid of scientific managers employed jointly by the employers and the union.

The spring and summer of 1921 were a time of widespread "readjustment"

strikes, or strikes against cuts in wages, especially in the building trades. The building industry went through in 1921 and 1922 one of its periodic upheavals against the tyranny of the "walking delegates" and against the state of moral corruption for which some of the latter shared responsibility together with an unscrupulous element among the employers. In San Francisco, where the grip of the unions upon the industry was strongest, the employers turned on them and installed the "open-shop" after the building trades' council had refused to accept an award by an arbitration committee set up by mutual agreement. The union claimed, however, in self-justification that the Committee, by awarding a _reduction_ in the wages of fifteen crafts while the issue as originally submitted turned on a demand by these crafts for a _raise_ in wages, had gone outside its legitimate scope. In New York City an investigation by a special legislative committee uncovered a state of reeking corruption among the leadership in the building trades' council and among an element in the employing group in connection with a successful attempt to establish a virtual local monopoly in building.

Some of the leading corruptionists on both sides were given court sentences and the building trades' council accepted modifications in the "working rules" formulated by the counsel for the investigating committee. In Chicago a situation developed in many respects similar to the one in San Francisco. In a wage dispute, which was submitted by both sides to Federal Judge K.M. Landis for arbitration, the award authorized not only a wage reduction but a revision of the "working rules" as well.

Most of the unionists refused to abide by the award and the situation developed into literal warfare. In Chicago the employers' side was aggressively upheld by a "citizens' committee" formed to enforce the Landis award. The committee claimed to have imported over 10,000 out-of-town building mechanics to take the places of the strikers.

In the autumn of 1921 the employers in the packing industry discontinued the arrangement whereby industrial relations were administered by an "administrator,"[94] Judge Alschuler of Chicago, whose rulings had materially restricted the employers' control in the shop. Some of the employers put into effect company union plans. This led to a strike, but in the end the unions lost their foothold in the industry, which the War had enabled them to acquire. By that time, however, the open-shop movement seemed already pa.s.sing its peak, without having caused an irreparable breach in the position of organized labor. Evidently, the long years of preparation before the War and the great opportunity during the War itself, if they have failed to give trade unionism the position of a recognized national inst.i.tution, have at least made it immune from destruction by employers, however general or skillfully managed the attack. In 1920 the total organized union membership, including the 871,000 in unions unaffiliated with the American Federation of Labor, was slightly short of 5,000,000, or over four million in the Federation itself. In 1921 the membership of the Federation declined slightly to 3,906,000, and the total organized membership probably in proportion. In 1922 the membership of the Federation declined to about 3,200,000, showing a loss of about 850,000 since the high mark of 1920.

The legal position of trade unions has continued as uncertain and unsatisfactory to the unions, as if no Clayton Act had been pa.s.sed. The closed shop has been condemned as coercion of non-unionists. Yet in the Coppage case[95] the United States Supreme Court found that it is not coercion when an employer threatens discharge unless union membership is renounced. Similarly, it is unlawful for union agents to attempt organization, even by peaceful persuasion, when employes have signed contracts not to join the union as a condition of employment.[96] A decision which arouses strong doubt whether the Clayton Act made any change in the status of trade unions was given by the Supreme Court in the recent Duplex Printing case.[97] In this decision the union rested its defense squarely on the immunities granted by the Clayton Act.

Despite this, the injunction was confirmed and the boycott again declared illegal, the court holding that the words "employer and employes" in the Act restrict its benefits only to "parties standing in proximate relation to a controversy," that is to the employes who are immediately involved in the dispute and not to the national union which undertakes to bring their employer to terms by causing their other members to boycott his goods.

The prevailing judicial interpretation of unlawful union methods is briefly as follows: Strikes are illegal when they involve defamation, fraud, actual physical violence, threats of physical violence, or inducement of breach of contract. Boycotts are illegal when they bring third parties into the dispute by threats of strikes, or loss of business, publication of "unfair lists,"[98] or by interference with Interstate commerce. Picketing is illegal when accompanied by violence, threats, intimidation, and coercion. In December 1921 the Supreme Court declared mere numbers in groups const.i.tuted intimidation and, while admitting that circ.u.mstances may alter cases, limited peaceful picketing to one picket at each point of ingress or egress of the plant.[99] In another case the Court held unconst.i.tutional an Arizona statute, which reproduced _verbatim_ the labor clauses of the Clayton Act;[100] this on the ground that concerted action by the union would be illegal if the means used were illegal and therefore the law which operated to make them legal deprived the plaintiff of his property without due process of law. In June 1922, in the Coronado case, the Court held that unions, although unincorporated, are in every respect like corporations and are liable for damages in their corporate capacity, including triple damages under the Sherman Anti-Trust law, and which may be collected from their funds.

We have already pointed out that since the War ended the American labor movement has in the popular mind become linked with radicalism. The steel strike and the coal miners' strike in 1919, the revolt against the national leaders and "outlaw" strikes in the printing industry and on the railways in 1920, the advocacy by the organizations of the railway men of the Plumb Plan for nationalization of railways and its repeated endors.e.m.e.nt by the conventions of the American Federation of Labor, the resolutions in favor of the nationalization of coal mines pa.s.sed at the conventions of the United Mine Workers, the "vacation" strike by the anthracite coal miners in defiance of a government wage award, the sympathy expressed for Soviet Russia in a number of unions, notably of the clothing industry, have led many to see, despite the a.s.sertions of the leaders of the American Federation of Labor to the contrary, an apparent drift in the labor movement towards radicalism, or even the probability of a radical majority in the Federation in the not distant future.

The most startling shift has been, of course, in the railway men's organizations, which have changed from a p.r.o.nounced conservatism to an advocacy of a socialistic plan of railway nationalization under the Plumb Plan. The Plumb Plan raises the issue of socialism in its American form. In bare outline the Plan proposes government acquisition of the railroads at a value which excludes rights and privileges not specifically granted to the roads in their charters from the States. The government would then lease the roads to a private operating corporation governed by a tri-part.i.te board of directors equally representing the consuming public, the managerial employes, and the cla.s.sified employes.

An automatic economy-sharing scheme was designed to a.s.sure efficient service at low rates calculated to yield a fixed return on a value shorn of capitalized privileges.

The purpose of the Plumb Plan is to equalize the opportunities of labor and capital in using economic power to obtain just rewards for services rendered to the public. In this respect it resembles many of the land reform and other "panaceas" which are scattered through labor history.

Wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized representatives of producers' interests ent.i.tled to partic.i.p.ate in the direct management of industry. An ideal of copartnership and self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties.

But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism.

The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the _sine qua non_ of the American labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of 1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was reelected and again reelected. And in obeying instructions to cooperate with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune to press Plumb Plan legislation actively. So far as the railway men themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under the Esch-c.u.mmins act had begun to pa.s.s decisions actually affecting wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided.

Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of employment.

The drift towards independent labor politics, which many antic.i.p.ate, also remains quite inconclusive. A Farmer-Labor party, launched in 1920 by influential labor leaders of Chicago (to be sure, against the wishes of the national leaders), polled not more than 350,000 votes. And in the same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the change in the government's att.i.tude after the pa.s.sage of the War emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for President fell below a million, that is behind the vote of 1912, notwithstanding a doubling of the electorate with women's suffrage. Finally, the same convention of the American Federation of Labor, which showed so much sympathy for the ideas of the Plumb Plan League, approved a rupture with the International Trade Union Federation, with headquarters in Amsterdam, Holland, mainly on account of the revolutionary character of the addresses issued by the latter.

FOOTNOTES:

[89] The most plausible argument in favor of the position taken by the employing group is that no employer should be forced to decide matters as intimately connected with the welfare of his business as the ones relating to his labor costs and shop discipline with national union leaders, since the latter, at best, are interested in the welfare of the trade as a whole but rarely in the particular success of _his own_ particular establishment.

[90] The turn in public sentiment really dated from the threat of a strike for the eight-hour day by the four railway brotherhoods in 1916, which forced the pa.s.sage of the Adamson law by Congress. The law was a victory for the brotherhoods, but also extremely useful to the enemies of organized labor in arousing public hostility to unionism.

[91] See below, 259-261, for a more detailed description of the Plan.

[92] The Transportation Act included a provision that prior to September 1, 1920, the railways could not reduce wages.