“PROLETARIAT OF AMERICA” JUST GOES AND GETS JOB, WORLD INVESTIGATOR FINDS

By Arno Dosch-Fleurot.

At Akron, O., where the rubber industry swelled to enormous proportions in the last few years, business dropped like a skyrocket recently and there were reports of tens of thousands of men thrown out of work. So I went to Akron to see how great were the sufferings of the “proletariat.”

Here, at least, I thought I should find a mass of unskilled labor and a proletarian class consciousness such as I have been in the habit of associating with big industry in Europe.

I found Akron pretty well shut down, but there was no proletariat about. There were no bread lines, no soup kitchens. Still there was no question but that there were some 50,000 fewer men working in the small city than there had been a short time before. Where were they?

They had gone home. They had acquired no stake in Akron. Most of them were from West Virginia. They were migratory workers, and when they were not wanted conveniently disappeared. They went to other towns, other industries, back to the land. Broadly they were a migratory class, but they had no consciousness of class. To-day they were seeking the highest pay in the factories, to-morrow they will be tilling the soil. To a would-be proletarian leader they must be exasperatingly elusive.

I found the manufacturers of Akron deeply grateful to them. They came when they were wanted and took themselves away when they were no longer wanted. Without them it would have been impossible to build industries so rapidly to meet the demands of a day, and if they did not take themselves off when the slump came they would create a disagreeable responsibility for the manufacturer who got them together. It is a situation that is purely American and would leave bewildered any one who tried to fix European ideas of industrial organization upon American institutions.

No Upheaval When Labor Turnover Makes Jobs Vacant

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 Normally they would have been replaced by new migratory workers who presented themselves for jobs, but in this way each week the payroll decreased automatically.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.