the industrial struggle, however crude it may appear, however blind
and futile in some of its manifestations, is destined to affect
profoundly the course of the more orthodox trade-union movement. The
daring assumptions that labor is the supreme force, that loyalty to
the working world is the supreme virtue, and failure in that loyalty
the one unpardonable sin, has stirred to the very depths organized
labor of the conservative type, has roused to self-questioning many
and many a self-satisfied orthodox trade unionist, inspiring him with
loftier and more exacting ideals. He has been thrilled, as he had
never been thrilled before with a realization of the dire need of the
submerged and unorganized millions, and of the claims that they have
upon him. Verily, in the face of such revelations, satisfaction in the
fine organization of his own particular trade receives a check. The
good of his own union as his highest aim sinks into insignificance,
though regarding it as a means to an end, he may well go back to his
workshop and his union card, intending to do for his fellow-craftsmen
in his shop and in his trade more than ever before.
The very activities of the I.W.W. during the last two or three years,
side by side with the representatives of the American Federation of
Labor on the same strike fields, and often carrying out opposition
tactics, have for the first time in their lives given many furiously
to think out policies and plans of campaign. From such shocks and
stimuli are born thinkers and original tacticians, especially among
the younger men and women.
Wherever syndicalists have actively taken part in labor struggles,
there has been the bitterest antagonism between them and the regular
labor bodies. The latter ever bear in mind the risks of a divided
front, and they have just reason to dread the "dual" organization
as the most completely disruptive influence that can weaken labor's
forces, and play into the employers' hands. Of this experience there
have been too many instances in the United States.
Syndicalists condemn agreements as a device of the enemy. It is true
that agreements may be so managed as to prove a very weak reed for the
workers to depend on in time of trouble. We have had many instances
within the last few years of the disintegrating effect on the labor
movement of agreements made between the employers and sections of
their employés, which while protecting these particular sections leave
other employés of the same firms out in the cold, either because the
latter have no agreement at all, or because it is worded differently,
or, most common defect of all, because it terminates upon a different
date, three months, say, or a year later. It was on this rock that the
printing pressmen struck during the huge newspaper fight in Chicago
which lasted the whole summer of 1912, ending in a defeat costly to
the conqueror, as well as to the conquered and whose echoes are
still to be heard in discussions between representatives of the
organizations and the sub-organizations involved. Though the fight was
lost by the pressmen, the dispute between the unions involved is not
settled yet, and the two principles at stake, loyalty to the interest
of their fellow-workers and the duty of keeping a pledge made to
employers, are as far as ever from being reconciled. The solution
ahead is surely the strengthening of organizations so that failing
a common agreement one branch or one craft will be in a position to
refuse to sign one of these non-concurrent agreements, or any sort of
agreement, which will leave other workers at a palpable disadvantage.
The demand for the speedy taking over of the direct control of
industries by the workers appears to me to ignore alike human
limitations and what we know of the evolution of society. But great
hope is to be placed in the coöperative movement, with the gradual
establishment of factories and stores by organizations of the workers
themselves.
The condemnation of political activity, too, is, as I see it, out
of line with the tendencies of social evolution, which demands
organization and specialized skill in managing the affairs of the
largest community as of the smallest factory.
The strength and value of syndicalism is rather in criticism than in
constructive results. In almost every paragraph in the platform we
can detect a criticism of some weak point in the labor movement,
in political socialism, or in the existing social framework we are
consenting to accept and live under.
So far in every country where it has risen into notice syndicalism has
been more of a free-lance body than a regular army, and it may be that
that is what syndicalists will remain. Up to the present they have
shown no particular constructive ability. But they may develop great
leaders, and with development work out plans to meet the new problems
that will crowd upon them. Even if they should not, and should pass
away as similar revolutionary groups have passed before, they will
have hastened tremendously the closer knitting together of all groups
of trade unionists. On the one hand they have already stirred up
socialists to a better understanding and more candid admission of
their own shortcomings in the political field, and on the other, they
have already made labor more fearless and aggressive, and therefore
more venturesome in the claims it makes, and more ready and
resourceful in its adaptation of new methods to solve modern
difficulties.
Before leaving the syndicalists, I would call attention to a change
that is coming over the spirit of some of their leaders, as regards
immediate plans of action. From a recent number of _La Guerre
Sociale_, edited by Gustave Hervé, the _Labour Leader_ (England),
quotes an article attributed to Hervé himself, in which the writer
says:
"Because it would be a mistake to expect to achieve everything by
means of the ballot-box, it does not follow that we can achieve
nothing thereby."
Another syndicalist of influence has been advocating the establishment
of training-schools for the workers, in preparation for the day when
they are to take over the industries. Vocational instruction this upon
the great scale!
Ramsay McDonald, by no means an indulgent critic of syndicalism, does
not believe that Sorel really anticipates the general strike as the
inauguration of the new order, but as a myth, which will lead the
people on to the fulfillment of the ideal that lies beyond and on the
other side of all anticipated revolutionary action.
It is time now to consider the tendencies towards growth and
adaptation to modern needs that have been, and are at work, within
the American Federation of Labor, and among those large outside
organizations on the outer edge of the Federation, as it were, such as
the brotherhoods of railroad trainmen. These tendencies, are, speaking
generally, towards such reorganization as will convert many small
unions into fewer, larger, and therefore stronger bodies, and towards
the long-delayed but inevitable organization of the workers on the
political field. Such reorganization is not always smooth sailing, but
the process is an education in itself.
The combination or the federation of existing organizations is but
the natural response of the workers to the ever-growing complexity of
modern industrial life. Ever closer organization on the part of
the employers, the welding together of twenty businesses into one
corporation, of five corporations into one trust, of all the trusts in
the country into one combine, have to be balanced by correspondingly
complete organization on the part of the workers. There is this
difference of structure, however, between the organization of
employers and that of the employed. The first is comparatively simple,
and is ever making for greater simplicity. Without going into the
disputed question of how far the concentration of business can be
carried, and of whether or not the small business man is to be finally
pushed out of existence, it is beyond question that every huge
business, for example, each one of our gigantic department stores,
includes and represents an army of small concerns, which it has
replaced, which have either been bought up or driven to the wall. In
either case the same amount of trade, which it once took hundreds of
separate small shopkeepers to handle, is now handled by the one firm,
under the one management. Such welding together makes for the economy
in running expenses which is its first aim. But it also makes for
simplicity in organization. It is evidently far easier for the heads
of a few immense businesses to come together than it was for the
proprietors of the vast agglomeration of tiny factories, stores
and offices which once covered the same trade area, or to be quite
accurate, a much smaller trade area, to do so.
But if, at the one end of the modern process of production and
distribution, we find this tendency towards a magnificent simplicity,
at the other, the workers' end, we have the very same aim of economy
of effort and the cheapening of production resulting in an enormously
increased complexity. The actual work performed by each worker is
simplified. But the variety of processes and the consequent allotting
of the workers into unrelated groups make for social complexity;
render it not easier, but much harder for the workers to come together
and to see and make others see through and in spite of all this
apparent unlikeness of occupation, common interests and a common need
for coöperative action.
Again, take a factory, such as a cotton mill. The one firm, before
marketing its product, will have employed in its preparation and
final disposal till it reaches the consumer, groups engaged in very
different occupations, spinners, weavers, porters, stenographers,
salesmen, and so on. The industry which furnished employment to
one, or at most, to two groups, has been cut up into a hundred
subdivisions, but the workers have still many interests in common, and
they need to cling together or suffer from all the disadvantages of
unorganized or semi-organized occupations.
The first unions were naturally craft unions. The men working in the
same shop, and at the same processes got together, and said: "We who
do this work must get to know the fellows in the other shops; we must
just stick together, make common demands and support one another."
As industry became more highly specialized, there slipped in,
especially during the last fifty years or so, a disintegrating
tendency. The workers in what had been one occupation, found
themselves now practicing but a small fraction of what had been their
trade. They were performing new processes, handling novel tools and
machinery unheard of before. The organizations became divided up into
what were nominally craft unions, in reality only process unions. Or
if a new organization was formed, it was but a mere clipping off the
whole body of operatives. And these unions, too, would probably have
their international organization, to which they could turn to come in
touch with brother workers, similarly qualified and employed. There
is necessarily involved an element of weakness in any organization,
however extensive, built up upon so limited a foundation, unless the
membership has other local and occupational affiliations as well.
So, to meet this defect, there have been formed all sorts of loose
aggregations of unions, and almost every day sees fresh combinations
formed to meet new needs as these arise. Within the wide bounds of
the American Federation itself exist the state federations, also city
federations, which may include the unions in adjoining cities, even
though these are in different states, such as the Tri-City Federation,
covering Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. The
district councils, again, are formed from representatives of allied
trades or from widely different branches of the same trade, such as
the councils of the building trades, and the allied printing trades.
There are the international unions (more properly styled continental)
covering the United States and the Dominion of Canada. With these
are affiliated the local unions of a trade or of a whole industry,
sometimes, from all over the continent of North America. Among these
the most catholic in membership are such broadly organized occupations
as the united mine-workers, the garment-workers, the ladies'
garment-workers, the iron, steel and tin-plate workers. An
international union composed of separate unions of the one trade, or a
state or a city federation of local unions of many trades, bears the
same relation to the component single unions as does the union itself
to the individual workers; so we find that all these various and often
changing expressions of the trade-union principle are accepted and
approved of today.
Even more significant are other groupings which may be observed
forming among the rank and file of the union men and women themselves.
Sometimes these groups combine with the full approval of the union
leaders, local and international. Sometimes they are more in the
nature of an insurgent body, either desiring greater liberty of
self-government for themselves, or questioning the methods of the
organization's leaders, and desiring to introduce freer, more
democratic and more modern methods into the management of the parent
organization. This may take the form of a district council, and in at
least one noteworthy instance, the employés of one large corporation
send their representatives to a joint board, for purposes of
collective bargaining.
The railway unions within the American Federation of Labor, one of the
largest and most powerful bodies of union men in the United States
feel the need of some method of grouping which shall link together
the men's locals and the internationals into which the locals
are combined. This is seen in the demand made by the men for the
acknowledgment by the railways of the "system federation." The reason
some of the more radical men were not found supporting the proposal
was not that they objected to a broader form of organization,
but because they considered the particular plan outlined as too
complicated to be effective.
There is one problem pressing for decisive solution before very long,
and it concerns equally organized labor, governments and public bodies
and the community as a whole. That is, the relations that are to
exist between governing bodies in their function as employer, and the
workers employed by them. So far all parties to this momentous bargain
are content to drift, instead of thinking out the principles upon
which a peaceful and permanent solution can be found for a condition
of affairs, new with this generation, and planning in concert such
arrangements as shall insure even-handed justice to all three parties.
It is true that governments have always been employers of servants,
ever since the days when they ceased to be masters of slaves, but
till now only on a limited scale. But even on this limited scale no
entirely satisfactory scheme of civil-service administration has
anywhere been worked out. Of late years more and more have the
autocratic powers of public bodies as employers been considerably
clipped, but on the other hand, the ironclad rules which make
change of occupation, whether for promotion or otherwise, necessary
discipline and even deserved dismissal, so difficult to bring about,
have prejudiced the outside community whom they serve against the just
claims of an industrious and faithful body of men and women. And the
very last of these just claims, which either governing bodies or
communities are willing to grant, is liberty to give collective
expression to their common desires.
The question cannot be burked much longer. Every year sees public
bodies, in the United States as everywhere else, entering upon
new fields of activity. In this country, municipal bodies, state
governments, and even the Federal Government, are in this way
perpetually increasing the number of those directly in their
employ. The establishment of the parcel post alone must have added
considerably to the total of the employés in the Postal Department. It
cannot be very many years before some of the leading monopolies,
such as the telegraph and the telephone, will pass over to national
management, with again an enormous increase in the number of employés.
Schools are already under public control, and one city after another
is taking up, if not manufacture or production, at least distribution
as in the case of water, lighting, ice, milk or coal.
This is no theoretical question as to whether governmental bodies,
large and small, local and national, should or should not take over
these additional functions of supplying community demands. The fact
is before us now. They are doing it, and in the main, doing it
successfully. But what they are not doing, what these very employés
are not doing, what organized labor is not doing, what the community
is not doing, is to plan intelligently some proper method of
representation, by which the claims, the wishes and the suggestions of
employés may receive consideration, and through which, on the other
hand, the governing body as board of management, and the public, as
in the long last the real employer, shall also have their respective
fights defined and upheld.
The present position is exactly as if a sovereign power had conquered
a territory, and proposed to govern it, not temporarily, but
permanently, as a subject province. We know that this is not the
modern ideal in politics, and it ought not to be assumed as the right
ideal when the territory acquired is not a geographical district, but
a new function. In this connection, moreover, the criticisms of our
candid friends the syndicalists are not to be slighted. Their solution
of the problem, that the workers should come into actual, literal
possession and management of the industries, whether publicly or
privately owned, may appear to us hopelessly foolish and impractical,
but their misgivings regarding an ever-increasing bureaucratic control
over a large proportion of the workers, who are thus made economically
dependent upon an employer, because that employer chances also to hold
the reins of government, have already ample justification. The people
have the vote, you will say? At least the men have. Proposals to
deprive public employés of the vote have been innumerable, and in not
a few instances have been enacted into law. There are whole bodies of
public employés in many countries today who have no vote.
The late Colonel Waring was far-sighted beyond his day and generation.
When he took over the Street Cleaning Department of New York, which
was in an utterly demoralized condition, he saw that reasonable
self-government among his army of employés was going to help and not
to hinder his great plans, and it was not only with his full consent,
but at his suggestion and under his direction, that an organization
was formed among them, which gave to the dissatisfied a channel of
expression, and to the constructive minds opportunity to improve the
work of the department, as well as continually to raise the status of
the employé.
All such organizations to be successful permanently and to be placed
on a solid basis must join their fortunes with the labor movement, and
this is the last pill that either a conservative governing body or the
public themselves are willing to swallow. They use exactly the same
argument that private employers used universally at one time, but
which we hear less of today--the right of the employer to run his own
business in his own way.
Very many people, who see nothing wicked in a strike against a private
employer, consider that no despotic conduct on the part of superiors,
no unfairness, no possible combination of circumstances, can ever
justify a strike of workers who are paid out of the public purse. Much
also is made of the fact that most of such functions which governments
have hitherto undertaken are directly associated with pressing needs,
such as street-car and railroad service, water and lighting supplies,
and the same line of reasoning will apply, perhaps in even a higher
degree, to future publicly owned and controlled enterprises. This
helps yet further to strengthen the idea that rebellion, however
sorely provoked, is on the part of public employés a sort of
high treason, the reasons for which neither deserve nor admit of
discussion. The greatest confusion of thought prevails, and no
distinction is drawn between the government as the expression and
embodiment of the forces of law, order and protection to all, as truly
the voice of the people, and the government, through its departments,
whether legislative, judicial or administrative, as just a plain
common employer, needing checks and control like all other employers.
The problem of the public ownership of industries in relation to
employés might well be regarded in a far different light. It holds
indeed a proud and honorable position in social evolution. It is the
latest and most complex development of industry, and as such the heads
of such enterprises should be eager to study the development of
the earlier and simpler forms of industry in relation to the labor
problem, and to study them just as conscientiously and gladly as
they study and adopt scientific and mechanical improvements in their
various departments.
But no. We are all of us just drifting. Every now and then the
question comes before us, unfortunately rarely as a matter for cool
and sane discussion, but usually arising out of some dispute. Both
sides are then in an embittered mood. There may be a strike on. The
employés may be in the wrong, but any points on which they may yield
are merely concessions wrung from them by force of superior strength,
for the employing body unfailingly assumes rights and privileges
beyond those of the ordinary employer. In particular, discontented
employés are invariably charged with disloyalty, and lectured upon
their duty to the public. As if the public owed nothing to them!
More democratic methods of expressing the popular will, giving us
legislation, and in consequence administration more in harmony with
the interests of the workers as a whole, and therefore in the end
reacting for the advantage of the community at large, will assuredly
do much to remove some of these difficulties. This is one reason
why direct legislation and such "effective voting" as proportional
representation should be earnestly advocated and supported by
organized labor on all possible occasions. But that we may make full
and wise use of such additional powers of democratic expression in
placing public employment upon a sounder footing, it is necessary that
we should give the subject the closest attention and consideration
both in its general principles, and in details as they present
themselves. If not, satisfaction in the growth of publicly controlled
industry may be marred through the sense that the public are being
served at an unfair cost to an important section of the workers.
All of these problems touch women as well as men; and if they are to
be solved on a just as well as a broad basis women must do their share
towards the solving. Needless to say, women in industry suffer as much
or more than their brothers from whatever makes for reaction in the
labor movement. It is therefore fortunate for the increasing numbers
of wage-earning women that progressive forces are at work, too. From
one angle, the very activity of Women's Trade Union Leagues in the
cities where they are established is to be regarded as one expression
of the widespread and growing tendency towards such complete
organization of the workers as shall correspond to modern industrial
conditions.
Mrs. Gilman is never tired of reiterating that we live in a man-made
world, and that the feminine side in either man or woman will never
have a chance for development until this is a human-made world. And
before this can come about woman must be free from the economic
handicap that shackles her today.
The organization of labor is one of the most important means to
achieve this result. It is not only in facing the world outside, and
in relation to the employer and the consumer that woman organized is
stronger and in every way more effective than woman unorganized. The
relation in which she stands to her brother worker is very different,
when she has behind her the protection and with her the united
strength of her union, and the better a union man he is himself the
more readily and cheerfully will he appreciate this, even if he has
occasionally to make sacrifices to maintain unbroken a bargain in
which both are gainers.