At the plant of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron I was told
that the plant had been reduced from 30,000 men to 6,000 men in less
than six months without turning men off wholesale. The labor turnover
did the trick. The plant stopped taking on new men several months ago,
when it began to look as if the strong demand for tires was not going to
hold. Each week thereafter some of the migratory workers left. Normally
they would have been replaced by new migratory workers who presented
themselves for jobs, but in this way each week the payroll decreased
automatically. Week after week the usual number of men called for their
time and struck out, some because it was summer and their native
mountains called them, some to wander further afield into other
industrial towns. This went on all summer and fall and when, in
November, it became necessary, the management thought, to curtail
production sharply there were only 14,000 instead of 30,000 in the
plant. The rest had disappeared in the normal labor turnover. In the
other rubber plants in Akron the same process went on, so it was not a
case of turning tens of thousands of men into the streets when the real
slump came.
Much the same thing happened in Detroit. Last year it had more than
100,000 more people than it could properly house. These people had been
drawn into Detroit by the high wages. Handy men with intelligence were
getting $15 to $30 and more a day. Then came the slump in the automobile
market. Beginning last May, the demand for labor in Detroit began to
decrease, factories took on fewer men, but the city did not become
crowded with idle men. For a certain number took their time each week
and moved on. The overpopulation began to disappear. Detroit as a
working man’s bonanza was working out. Coming eastward in November from
the Pacific Coast, I encountered everywhere men with a few hundred
dollars in their pockets, “easy money,” made in Detroit, looking now for
something else. By the time I reached Detroit I found the factories had
150,000 less workmen than they had four months before and there was no
idle “proletariat” standing about.
Not Possible in Europe.
It is only in wonderfully rich America such things can happen. Here
alone we dare organize industry on this bonanza scale. In Europe the big
industrials know that if they build in this rapid fashion they must be
prepared for the slump. The soil will not reabsorb the migratory workers
as it has done for Akron and Detroit. In Europe the workers belong to a
proletariat divorced from the soil, descendants of a long line of
workmen. They are also class conscious and they do not conveniently
disappear in the labor turnover.
Thanks to the different state of affairs in America the present
readjustment in the country is going on with little difficulty from the
side of labor. In Europe, where there is a process of social revolution,
there can be no thought of a readjustment of any kind without first
finding out what effect it is going to have on the working classes. But
here there is no proletariat, no hard and fast working classes, hence no
class consciousness.
I have found recently in my travels about the country that all kinds of
people are agreed that prices, rents, wages, everything must come down
to somewhere near what they were. Before talking to labor leaders I find
the same reasonableness. This would be impossible if there were any
sentiment for class war.
Now is the time to test how much of the social turmoil in Europe has
been communicated to us. Flush times are passing and whatever discontent
there is is sure to show itself. I may be looking for something too
precise, but I do not find it. There is the usual discontent over the
struggle for existence, but it is not class conscious, as the phrase is
used in revolutionary circles abroad. The situation has not even
increased the following of the I. W. W. or of the industrial union
movement. It would seem like a propitious moment to make a drive, a
campaign of instruction, in the effort to convince workmen that
industrial unionism is their way to economic freedom. But I see very
small signs of such activity.
In Eastern Europe in its present frame of mind a readjustment could not
take place without workmen seizing rifles and machine guns and making
armed demands. Such doings are not in the American picture.
Workers Are Not Organized.
One reason may be that the portion of the working classes most hit is
not organized. Craft unionism has not kept pace with the growth of
industry. The important centres of diversified industry, as well as what
the Germans call the heavy industries, are not unionized. In the
Pittsburgh district there are approximately 400,000 workmen and whatever
organization exists among them is too small to count. No big
manufacturing centre in America is now union. Chicago, for instance, is
industrially open shop. So is Detroit or any other city where industry
has had rapid growth. It amused me in asking about the open-shop
movement to see the eagerness with which I always was informed that the
open-shop principle had always maintained in whatever community I might
be asking about.
The truth is, of course, that the big industries have been able to
prevent unionizing by keeping a steady flow of immigrants coming into
the country and they were clever enough to take them from the farms in
Europe, so they did not bring any class consciousness with them. Ever
since the famous Homestead strikes the steel industry has been
non-union. It was only when the flow of immigrants was dammed by the war
that a chance to unionize it came. It was then that John Fitzpatrick and
William Z. Foster began. But they tried out organizing industrially
first in the Chicago stockyards, and the steel manufacturers watched
them from afar, so, as one steel man said to me in Pittsburgh, “We saw
them coming and we were ready for them.”
What struck me as an interesting comment on the unionizing of factory
workers was made to me in Detroit by Mr. C. M. Culver, director of the
Employers’ Association, an institution which handles the labor problem
for its members. He said:
“When employers do not combine to hold down wages, unionism does not
grow. When employers are competing for workmen, as they have been doing
here in Detroit, when they are too busy turning out machines, when the
inventive minds are just boiling and the native American genius is
concentrated on getting results, men do not join unions.”
Unionism certainly made very little headway in Detroit. The A. F. of L.
played a very small role there and the automobile workers had succeeded
in enrolling less than one-twentieth of the men who were eligible to
this industrial union. It is significant, however, that the automobile
workers, even with their small membership, have their importance in the
industry, and the manufacturers consider their growth alone a possible
menace. It shows the power that would pass into the hands of the factory
worker if industrial unionism ever gets a hold on American industry.
In Detroit the percentage of foreign or foreign-born among the workers
is about 70 per cent. In Pittsburgh it is even higher. Manufacturers in
both places say they do not fear labor organization as long as this
percentage persists. Labor organizations built among the foreign workers
do not last. They can be organized quickly, as William Z. Foster found
when he organized the steel strike in 1919. They give their money freely
and enthusiastically for organization, but they expect quick results and
do not stand up under adversity. I have just passed through the steel
region in Ohio and Pittsburgh where Foster organized most successfully a
year ago and there is hardly a trace of his work to be found. With
difficulty I found the emaciated skeletons of the flourishing unions
Foster developed in a few months.
After visiting the steel towns and the modern factory cities I agree
with the I. W. W. that American industry is not organized. Labor, as
distinguished from industry, is organized, but the factories, with their
hundreds of thousands—added together, their millions—of unskilled and
semi-skilled labor, are quite unorganized. The A. F. of L. has not
interested itself in them, and the I. W. W. has tried to do it on so
pretentiously revolutionary a scale that it has not succeeded. The field
is open. The American field of industry is practically unhampered by the
prejudices or the hard conditions of Europe. The European-trained
agitators have sown the American industrial field time and again with
their European-born ideas, but they have not yielded a crop.
There are, broadly, two kinds of employers in American industry. There
is the “catch ’em young, treat ’em rough and learn ’em nothing” kind
which is loud in support of “property rights” and is backing the
ruthless open-shop “American plan.” The steel, coal and copper
industries, the heavy industries, are dominated by this spirit even at
this late date. To them labor has no rights. It is enough to make a
Bolshevik out of any workman who comes in contact with them. Take Butte,
where the Anaconda Copper Company rules. If a miner comes to Butte he
must go through the copper company’s passport bureau before he can even
apply for a job. If he succeeds in getting a “rustling card,” a sort of
passport bearing a description of him, he can seek work at the mines. If
he is a member of a union that is not in favor, he has to lie about it
and say he is not or he does not get a “rustling card.” This is
industrial feudalism, and there is no calling it by another name. I was
in the office of the Bulletin, the labor paper published in Butte, and I
noticed half a dozen rifles in the corner of the plant. “Have you got a
Red Guard?” I asked. “No, but the company has a White Guard,” was the
answer; “we have to protect ourselves, especially around election.”
Efforts to Solve Problem.
Combating this spirit there is a type of American employer who realizes
he has a responsibility toward the men he gathers together in his
factories. He comes nearer representing the modern spirit in American
industry. He usually begins with some patronizing welfare work, but ends
up with whole-hearted co-operation. Men of this type see the gulf
between capital and labor, and instead of trying to widen it and
perpetuate industrial strife like the leaders in the heavy industries
they are throwing out flying bridges across the gulf. They are trying to
establish a decent human relationship between employer and employee and
give the lie to the I. W. W. preamble that “the working class and the
employing class have nothing in common.”
The men who are making these attempts are fairly sane and do not think
they are “solving the labor problem.” They are trying to re-establish in
modern industry the touch that was lost between the master mechanic and
the journeyman mechanic when they stopped working over the same bench.
Some are having a real success. Others cannot make it go. It depends
upon the amount of sincerity in the undertaking. But there are some 700
plants in America being run on this voluntary “industrial conference”
system. They do not pretend to be throwing more than a flying bridge
across the gulf, but they may have some permanency. At any rate, it is
the most interesting experiment in American industry. If it succeeds it
will establish new standards in industry and we shall be able to say
that America has succeeded in working out another way the industrial
problem that has led to the social revolution in Europe.