A Key to the Labor Movement
When employers talk about the freedom of labor, it may be that some
of them are really worried over the hostility of most unions to
exceptional rewards for exceptional workers. But in the main that isn’t
what worries them. They are worried about their own freedom, not the
freedom of wage-earners. They dislike the union because it challenges
their supremacy. And they fight unions as monarchs fight constitutions,
as aristocracies fight the vote. When an employer tells about his own
virtues, he dilates upon his kindness, his fairness, and all the good
things he has done for his men. That is just what benevolent autocrats
do: they try to justify their autocracy by their benevolence. Indeed,
the highest vision of those who oppose unions is that the employer
will develop the virtues of a good aristocrat.
But, of course, wage-earners are not dealing with men inspired by a
sense of _noblesse_ or _richesse oblige_. Henry Ford is a sensational
rarity among employers. No doubt there are some others, not so
conspicuous. Now, if workers faced only men with such an outlook, I
don’t think their problem would be solved, but it would take on a very
different complexion. This is, however, an academic question, for the
great mass of employers show no desire to make big concessions.
Employers are organized for obstruction. There is, for example,
the National Association of Manufacturers, embracing four thousand
individual employers, who represent a capital of about ten billion
dollars. Their constructive program consists of such attractive
items as “unalterable antagonism to the closed shop,” opposition to
eight-hours’ bills, and with mild emphasis hostility “to any and
all anti-injunction bills of whatever kind.” American civilization
is also assisted by the National Council for Industrial Defense, an
unincorporated body which employs a lobbyist at the rate of a thousand
dollars a month. According to the proud words of its late President,
this Council “in the number of members, in the capital which they
control, and in the social, industrial and political influence which
they exert ... is by far the largest and most powerful league of
conservative and public-spirited citizens ever formed in any country of
the world.”[5]
There are also a number of national associations in various trades
endeavoring to prevent wage-earners from submerging their individuality
in unions. They have been known to refuse advertising to papers which
were friendly to organized labor--on the highest grounds, of course,
such high grounds being a refusal “to pander to the unthrifty class.”
They have been known to use the black-list, though of course they do
not approve of it. They have been known to place spies in labor unions
to protect workers against themselves. They have been known to use what
revolutionists call the “provocateur”: in Cleveland during the garment
strike there was a glib, plausible person who talked dynamite in an
effort to discredit the union. There have been some actual “planting”
of dynamite as at Lawrence, a little beating up as at Calumet,
kidnapping, private armies, gatling guns and armored trains as at West
Virginia and Colorado.
It is well known, of course, that newspapers make every effort to
enable workingmen to reach public opinion, and make their appeal not to
force but to the national conscience. All civil rights are carefully
guarded for workers as in Paterson, Lawrence, and the southern lumber
camps. Employers are precise in their desire to secure judges who have
no bias whatever. And the voters are an active, intelligent body of
imaginative democrats fighting at every step to see that justice is
done.
The fact is that nothing is so stubbornly resisted as the attempt
to organize labor into effective unions. Yet it is labor organized
that alone can stand between America and the creation of a permanent,
servile class. Unless labor is powerful enough to be respected, it
is doomed to a degrading servitude. Without unions no such power is
possible. Without unions industrial democracy is unthinkable. Without
democracy in industry, that is where it counts most, there is no such
thing as democracy in America. For only through the union can the
wage-earner participate in the control of industry, and only through
the union can he obtain the discipline needed for self-government.
Those who fight unions may think they are fighting its obvious errors,
but what they are really against is just this encroachment of democracy
upon business.
Now men don’t agitate for democracy because it is a fine theory. They
come to desire it because they have to, because absolutism does not
work out any longer to civilized ends. Employers are not wise enough to
govern their men with unlimited power, and not generous enough to be
trusted with autocracy. That is the plain fact of the situation: the
essential reason why private industry has got to prepare itself for
democratic control.
I don’t pretend for one moment that labor unions are far-seeing,
intelligent, or wise in their tactics. I have never seen a political
democracy that aroused uncritical enthusiasm. It seems to me simply
that the effort to build up unions is as much the work of pioneers, as
the extension of civilization into the wilderness. The unions are the
first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic
life. They may not succeed, but if they don’t their failure will be a
tragedy for civilization, a loss of coöperative effort, a baulking of
energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.
The unions are struggling where life is nakedly brutal, where the
dealings of men have not been raised even to the level of discussion
which we find in politics. There is almost as little civil procedure
in industry as there is in Mexico, or as there was on the American
frontier. To expect unionists then to talk with velvet language, and
act with the deliberation of a college faculty is to be a tenderfoot,
a victim of your class tradition. The virtues of labor to-day are
frontier virtues, its struggles are for rights and privileges that the
rest of us inherited from our unrefined ancestors.
Men are fighting for the beginnings of industrial self-government. If
the world were wise that fight would be made easier for them. But it
is not wise. Few of us care for ten minutes in a month about these
beginnings or what they promise. And so the burden falls entirely
upon the workers who are directly concerned. They have got to win
civilization, they have got to take up the task of fastening a
worker’s control upon business.
No wonder they despise the scab. He is justly despised. Far from being
the independent, liberty-loving soul he is sometimes painted, the scab
is a traitor to the economic foundations of democracy. He makes the
basic associations of men difficult. He is an indigestible lump in the
common life, and it is he who generates nine-tenths of the violence
in labor disputes. Democracies of workingmen have to fight him out of
sheer self-protection, as a nation has to fight a mutiny, as doctors
have to fight a quack. The clubbing of scabs is not a pretty thing; the
importation of scabs is an uglier one. It is perhaps true that there
is, as ex-President Eliot said, no such thing as peaceful picketing.
There is no such thing as a peaceful coast defense or a gentlemanly
border patrol. The picket-line is to these little economic democracies
the guardian of their integrity, their chief protection from foreign
invasion.
Without some security no internal growth is possible. As long as the
unions have to fight for mere existence, their immense constructive
possibilities will be obscured in the desperation of the struggle.
The strikebreaker, then, is not only a peril to the union, he is a
peril to the larger interests of the nation. He keeps workingmen from
their natural organization, deprives them of the strength that union
brings, and thwarts all attempts to train men for industrial democracy.
Instead of discipline and preparation for the task of the future,
instead of deep-grounded experience in coöperative effort, we shall
get, if strike-breakers and blind legislators and brutal policemen and
prejudiced judges and visionless employers prevail, despair and hate
and servile rebellions.
There are certain preliminaries of civilization which the great mass of
workingmen have not yet won. They have not yet won a living wage, they
have not yet won anything like security of employment, they have not
yet won respect from the government, they have not yet won the right
to be consulted as to the conditions under which they work. Until they
do, it is idle to talk about industrial peace, and folly to look for
“reasonable” adjustments of difficulties. Reason begins when men have
enough power to command respect; a coöperative solution of industrial
problems is possible only when all the partners to the coöperation
must listen to each other. Until labor is powerful enough to compel
that, it cannot trust to the benevolence of its masters,--it has to
be suspicious, it has to cling to the few weapons left it, for labor
is right in supposing that no national conscience and no employers’
conscience yet exhibited are adequate.
There are certain occupations where workingmen have won these
preliminaries of civilized life. The most notable example is in
railroading, where the Brotherhoods have become a real part of the
industrial structure. They are so powerful that they can’t be left out.
More than that, they are so powerful that they don’t have to flirt
with insurrection. It is the weak unions, the unorganized and shifting
workers, who talk sabotage and flare up into a hundred little popgun
rebellions. Guerilla warfare is the only tactic open to weakness. But
where unions can meet the employers on a real equality, as railroad
workers can, there you will find very little insurrectionary talk.
You will meet in these powerful unions what radical labor leaders call
conservatism. That is a very interesting accusation. The railroad men
have won wages and respect far beyond anything that the I. W. W. can
hope for. They have power which makes the I. W. W. look insignificant.
If the I. W. W. could win for the unskilled anything like the position
and responsibility that railroad men enjoy, it would have achieved
something that might well be called a social revolution. The fact is
that the railroad men are “conservatives” in the labor world, just as
the Swiss are conservatives among the nations. They have won the very
things the lack of which makes rebellion necessary. For if men are
ground down in poverty, if the rights of assemblage and free speech
are denied them, if their protests are ineffective and despised, then
rebellion is the only possible way out. But when there is something
like a democracy where wrong is not a matter of life and death, but
of better and worse, then the preliminaries of civilization have been
achieved, and more deliberate tactics become possible.
The I. W. W., the anarchists and the syndicalists know this. That is
why the reformer is an object of special hatred amongst them. They
say, quite rightly, that reform undermines the revolutionary spirit,
and substitutes for flaming impatience and heroic moods, concrete
adjustments and grudging change. They say that only passionate revolt
can redeem society from stagnant mediocrity. They prefer the atmosphere
of temporary rebellion to the somewhat slow-footed and generally
uninspired method of a clumsy democracy. Thus the I. W. W. makes no
real effort to build up permanent unions. That is to say, it does
not look with favor upon the cohesive power of funds and fraternal
benefits. I have heard Haywood say that when a union had something
to lose, the spontaneity of rebellion was gone. He hopes to unite
wage-earners by militant feeling, rather than to knit them together by
common discipline and common interests. The I. W. W. prefers revolt to
solidarity--of course, it imagines that it can have workers united and
militant too. But in practice it is quite ready to destroy union for
the sake of militancy.
Syndicalists and anarchists half recognize the fact that only a small
minority of the workers can be aroused to bitter revolt. So they have
begun to sing the praises of a “conscious minority.” In other words
they have abandoned the path of democracy, because it is incompatible
with the temper they most admire. Workers who were really effectively
organized would produce great changes in our social structure, but
they would have to act with a deliberation that no temperamental
anarchist can stomach. This is the paradox of the labor movement, that
those who can’t overthrow society dream of doing it, while those who
could, don’t want to. If there is one occupation where syndicalist
tactics might work, it would be on the railroads. A small minority
could paralyze the country and precipitate a General Strike. But
American railroad men are not likely to do this because they don’t
need to. They have a stake in the country, a genuine representation in
public opinion, and they can at all times secure a respectful hearing.
If that were taken away from them, if their unions were disintegrated,
they too might take to conspiracy.
It is a commonplace of radicalism that power makes for peace. It is
deeply true of the labor movement that the alternatives before it are
powerful peace and weak insurrection. Thus if the I. W. W. should
succeed in organizing the unskilled on any extensive scale, the I. W.
W., as we know it, would have abolished itself. For the unions which
were created would inevitably seek a different type of leader: men of
administrative capacity who can wield power without exhausting it.
The extreme weakness of the unskilled workers has made them listen so
eagerly to the large hopes of men like Haywood, Ettor and Giovannitti.
Wherever democracy is feeble vague insurrection is its dream. And so
the civilized hope for labor is conditioned upon its conquest of power
in the life of the nation. This alone will make peaceful adjustments
possible, not the moral guardianship of the employers, not the charity
of the community. It is the rich who don’t need ready cash, it is the
strong who don’t have to fight.
I know how offensive all this will be to refined and sensitive
people. Those who believe in disarmament have come to think that the
possession of power is a temptation to use it. Perhaps that is true.
But wage-earners have no choice in the matter. If they abandon power,
employers will not abandon theirs. To preach mere peace, then, is to
preach a docile exploitation. Perhaps when society has learned to
respect labor, then society and labor will disarm. But that day is not
our day. It is not pleasant, but it’s true: if labor turns the other
cheek, that cheek will be smitten without much compunction. For the
Golden Rule works best among equals.
So the real peril to the nation from the side of labor is the existence
of great masses of unorganized, and perhaps unorganizable, workers.
From them will come most of the street-fights, the beatings and the
sabotage. They have no share in the country, they have “nothing to lose
but their chains.” But with the tactics open to them they haven’t “a
world to win.” They can parade and shout, call the police “cossacks,”
and talk revolution. But they have to put up with the pettiest gains.
To the weakness of all labor is to be ascribed its lack of interest
in the efficiency of industry. An employer will tell you in one breath
that he will stand no interference with “his” business, and in the next
that his employees take no interest in that business. Of course they
don’t. They haven’t any _interest_. They are unconsulted outsiders.
You might as well expect an Indian peasant to be interested in the
administrative efficiency of the British government. What possibility
is there for a sense of craftsmanship when you are a mere hired hand?
What incentive have wage-earners to take a personal interest in the
problems of industry, when nobody asks their advice, and everybody
resents it? If labor is apathetic, hostile to efficiency, without much
pride, it is because labor is not a part of industrial management.
People don’t take a sympathetic interest in the affairs of state until
they are voting members of the state. You can’t expect civic virtue
from a disfranchised class, nor industrial virtue from the industrially
disfranchised.
The labor problem, then, is at bottom the effort of wage-earners to
achieve power. And that effort points, neither to insurrection nor
inefficiency, but to a correction of the weakness and unimportance
which make rebellion necessary and destroy an interest in work. This is
what the fighting and turmoil are about. Employers will tell you that
they don’t mind raising wages half so much as they mind giving unions
“something to say.” Yet “something to say” is just what the workers
want. They know that better conditions are very elusive unless they
have the power to enforce them, to see that what is given with one
hand is not taken away with the other. The great battles of labor are
for recognition of the union or to maintain its integrity. It happens
that the great battles of American history have also been fought for
independence and union.
When these prime conditions are achieved, labor’s demands tend toward
an increasing share of control. The right of summary discharge is
the issue in many a strike. For unions will encroach more and more
on matters of discipline: they are seeking to raise themselves to a
partnership in the management. It is no idle guess to suppose that they
will come to demand the right to choose their own foremen, perhaps
to elect some of the directors, and to take not only wages, but a
percentage of the profits.
It is obvious, of course, that this assumption of power cannot go
to indefinite limits. There are people concerned about industry
besides the workers in it. The consumers will have a control, and the
state, which while it includes workers and purchasers is larger than
particular groups of them, the state too will have a say about the
control of industry. It is one of the immense problems of the future
to adjust these conflicts and to reach some working plan. But that
problem has only outlined itself dimly as yet. Labor is far from having
achieved anything like its legitimate influence in the conduct of
industry, and the best hope for future adjustment lies in the immense
discipline that power will enforce upon the worker.
In this movement to eat into economic absolutism, very perplexing
questions, of course, arise. What is the proper structure for a union?
Shall it be organized by crafts, or occupations, or industries? With
amalgamation or by federation? How shall the unions be governed: by
representatives or by direct vote? In fact, there is hardly a problem
of constitutional government which doesn’t appear in acute form among
the workers. And in passing, one might suggest that scholars who wish
to see sovereignty in the making cannot do better than to go among
the unions. They will find the initiative and referendum in constant
use. They will find all phases of corruption and misrepresentation:
the disappointments of indiscriminate democracy and the blight of
officialism. There is a long history of bickerings over sectional
interests as against national ones, home rule, devolution,--for all
of these matters are, under different phrases, of course, the daily
subject of union discussion.
The solutions are of very great interest to the nation. For on the
capacity of labor to develop an efficient government for itself hangs
the decision as to how much responsibility the unions can afford to
assume. It is the development of a citizenship in industry that the
labor movement has before it. It will have to work out the intricate
problem of popular control in relation to technical administration. Any
useful kind of industrial training, then, has got to serve this need.
It is obvious that mere skill at some one process is no preparation.
Nor is a generalized knowledge of industry enough. There must be added
to it an understanding of what may be called the political problem of
labor, the questions that arise in its efforts at self-government, in
its adjustments to the world that surrounds the industry.
There is nothing simple and perfectly reassuring ahead. With
wage-earners about one-tenth organized, unionism has a gigantic
problem before it. And there seems to be no limit to the methods by
which organization is thwarted. Race is played against race, religion
against religion, there are spies, black-lists, lockouts, thugs,
evictions, the denial of free speech and the right to assemble. Things
are done in America to-day which are more lurid than melodrama. After
thinking of the promise of the labor movement, you have to turn back
to present realities, to that brutal struggle in West Virginia, for
example, where a gatling gun mounted on a railroad car was run through
a mining village at night, “spitting bullets at the rate of two hundred
and fifty a minute.”
You think of the powerful organizations ready to combat every sign of
unionism, of the congestion of immigrants in the labor market, of the
hostility of courts and newspapers to the preliminaries of industrial
democracy. I don’t know, no one knows, whether labor can realize its
promise. The odds seem to be overwhelming. There is a real struggle,
a trial of strength. It is not yet a matter of justice in which “there
is much to be said on both sides.” Labor is still fighting to be
admitted to the sphere of human society where it is possible to talk of
adjusting difficulties. A few workers, like the skilled railroad men,
have just about climbed in. But the great mass has not been made part
of that world where decisions are made and policies formulated. The
unions are struggling to give the wage-earners representation, and that
is why the hopes of democracy are bound up with the labor movement.
Bound up, not with its words and dogmas, but with the purpose which
animates it. Labor needs criticism, needs inventive thought, needs
advice and help. But no one can give any of these things who has not
grasped with full sympathy that impulse for industrial democracy which
is the key to the movement. Without this sympathy the crudity of labor
is shocking, the intrigue of labor politics disgusting, the tone of
labor discouraging; but with an understanding that a new interest is
rising to power it is possible, I think, to find a glimmer of meaning
in the bewildering intricacy of the whole matter.