By the agreement reached by strikers and contractors at the hearing
before the Bureau of Arbitration, the men waived the point of union
recognition. Since present estimates on the contractor’s work were made
before union demands were presented, the rate of pay for an eight hour
day is to be based on $2 for a nine hour day until present contracts
expire, all new contracts to be based on $2 for eight hours. Other terms
of the agreement call for the abolition of the padrone system; the
preferential employment of laborers living in the neighborhood of any
piece of work—in itself a blow at the padrone system, with its big
employment fees and rake-off from feeding and transporting the labor
gangs;—the abolition of the shack lodging house and its keeper and the
enforcement of weekly wage payments. The last two are merely corrections
of illegal conditions. This agreement was unsigned. It is perhaps given
some security by being filed with the bureau, but there was no one
designated to follow up and enforce any point except those correcting
illegal conditions.
However much the unearthing of these illegal conditions may reflect on
the state labor authorities as a whole, they are not the fault of the
bureau of arbitration, whose representatives settled the strike largely
on terms which call for a living up to the law in the future.
The mediators laid themselves open to criticism, however, in yielding
their places as impartial questioners of both parties to the
controversy, to a local official who showed open prejudice for the
contractors and a tendency to browbeat the strikers throughout the
hearing. This official made the original and astonishing statement that
the strikers’ demand for recognition was illegal as it constituted a
conspiracy in restraint of trade, and that it would therefore render the
paper on which their demands were written worthless before the law.
One of his taunting questions was: “How can you demand $2 a day for a
man who isn’t worth seventy-five cents?” The president of the union made
reply. He was an Italian and he spoke with some heat; perhaps he did not
know he was setting off a human estimate against what an economist would
call the commodity theory of labor?
“Man wort’ seventy-five cent a day?” he asked. “No man wort’
seventy-five cent, no man wort’ less than two dolla day. Man got a wife,
man got a child. Everybody wort’ two dolla day. That the least price
will take.
“I like the men live more nice. You no like to live ten in a room. You
no like take your children out of the school to work. You no like to be
out of work five mont’ in the year. Me figure this pay on basis twelve
mont’ to live on seven mont’ pay. That’s dolla day. Can you support
five, six child on that?
“Contractor can pay. On some men he make four dolla profit; big profit
on all de men. The men they want this two dolla. They no take less.”
Small as this strike was, in several respects it was remarkable. It is
an instance of the crystalization of unskilled labor into unions and its
spontaneous outbreak—in this instance without any revolutionary I. W. W.
leadership. The strike was not in an industrial center, but in a
community of homes, and there were people who looked out of their
windows and saw how the type of hired detective, who usually operates in
out of the way strike regions, shot into a crowd of strikers without
guns, who were in more senses than one, to be sure, taking the law into
their own hands, but doing so only long after the authority which the
men with the guns represented had failed to enforce it.
But beyond all that, the strike revealed the dread, the utter
misunderstanding, the gap between the people who live by the sides of
the roads and the men who build them. They did not know it was a desire
for settled employment, for homes instead of padrone’s barracks that was
arousing these workers.