LETTER X
My dear Judd:
We have seen the poor struggling to protect themselves against the rich in the field of politics, and meeting with no great success. There is another place where they struggle—in the labor market. Let us see what happens to them there.
Seeing the employers combining into larger and larger organizations, it naturally occurred to the workers to combine, and sell their labor as a unit. At first the employers made this action a crime, and a great many working men went to jail, before the right of labor combination was granted. Even now, it is only grudgingly granted; the employers in their hearts are still certain that anything which reduces their profits is a crime, and through their courts they hedge the labor unions about with all sorts of restrictions. The doctrine of the present hour is briefly this: that labor organization is all right, provided it does not accomplish anything.
You, Judd, are a non-union man. You grew up in small places, and live now in a suburban neighborhood which is like a small place, in that everybody knows everybody else, and the people you work for are not much better off than you are. You can leave your job any time you don’t like it, and that gives you a sense of freedom. But suppose, Judd, you had been raised in the slums of a city, and had to do your carpentering on great buildings, under a firm of contractors; and suppose you found that your freedom to leave your job involved the necessity of hunting another job, under some contractor who belonged to the same employers’ association, and paid the same scale, and followed the same working rules as your previous boss? You must see that this would make quite a difference in your sense of “freedom.”
Or suppose you had grown up in some industrial center, and worked for the coal trust, or the steel trust, or the beef trust. You have read “The Jungle,” and know how the wage-slaves of Packingtown lived twenty years ago. Well, Judd, they are living exactly the same way today. I said concerning “The Jungle” that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”; the public insisted that some pretense be made that their meat was better, but no one even pretended that the workers were helped. And the same thing is true of the slaves of “King Coal”; it did not trouble the American people to learn that the men who dug their coal were living in privately-owned empires, where the elemental rights of American citizens, and even of human beings, had no existence.
In such places the only hope of the workers is to organize, and present a solid front to their masters, and extort better terms by the threat of withholding their labor. For a hundred years the workers have been forging that weapon, and trying it out. There are about four million of them organized, out of the forty-two million wage-earners of the country, and that seems a pitiful few; but you know about the leaven in the dough, Judd. Perhaps it never occurred to you to realize the influence which the organized carpenters—some 315,000 of them—exercise upon the lives of unorganized carpenters like yourself. They set a standard, that would otherwise be unknown in the carpenter world; they make it certain that no boss can get a really big job done at lower than the union scale—first, because it is hard to get a lot of skilled men together except through the unions, and second, because of the constant threat that a union organizer will get in among them. It is strange to see a man like yourself, rather suspicious of unions, because of all the poison you absorb from the capitalist press—and yet at the same time profiting every working hour of your life from the sacrifices made by union men! Also it is strange to see employers who fight the unions, and denounce them, and boast of the contentment of their non-union workers—and make that contentment by paying the union scale, which otherwise neither the employer nor the men would ever have dreamed of! Once let the “open shop” bosses have their way, Judd, and then see how a “free” carpenter’s wages will drop!
We have seen that there is in America a law for the rich, and quite a different law for the poor; and that state of affairs is well known to organized labor, you may be sure. The unions never get far in their effort to raise their members’ standards, without encountering the iron fist of the government. I have shown you how the rich defy the laws they do not like; but let no workingman, union or non-union, ever make the mistake of trying that! There are jails and prisons, and also there is the hideous “third degree,” with torture-chambers where workingmen are taught their “place”—of subjection and impotence.
Let me give you an illustration, Judd, right here at home, in this paradise of the “open shop.” We have a group of employers’ federations, with an iron-clad policy of class warfare. An employer who “panders to the union element” cannot get any business, he cannot get credit with the banks—they smash him as you would a louse. And, of course, they keep a card list of men who belong to unions, they follow a man up—the grim device known as the “blacklist.” And all this quite openly, it is the industrial policy of Los Angeles, and its boast. And do you hear anything about its being a violation of law? Do you see the publisher of the Los Angeles “Times” being sent to jail for advising employers not to hire members of the carpenters’ union? No, Judd, you do not see that!
So, naturally, the idea occurred to the workers that two could play at this game. If the employers could refuse to do business with them, obviously they could refuse to do business with the employers. So they tried it; and then what happened? Why then there appeared suddenly a new crime in the calendar of the law; a monstrous form of wickedness known as the “boycott!” It was a “conspiracy,” a plot to ruin a business man and deprive him of his property; and the judges were called upon to forbid it, and they did so. For violation of such a judge-made “law,” the Danbury hatters—union workingmen of Connecticut—were fined $240,000; and the United States Supreme Court upheld that decision. Afterwards union labor succeeded in getting a law in their favor through Congress, and now the courts are engaged in paring that down to nothing. Workingmen may boycott their own employers, but not other employers! But do you ever see employers limited to blacklisting their own workingmen?
I have shown you the judges taking by force the right to annul laws of Congress. Confronting the emergencies of labor strife, these judges proceeded to invent another weapon, known as the “injunction”; which means in brief that any ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench will issue an order forbidding workingmen to do anything that the corporations do not want them to do; and the workingmen have to obey that order, or else the judge will send them to jail for any length of time that the corporation may desire; and there is no jury trial, and no defense, and no redress—the workingmen just go to jail!
What these injunction judges have forbidden labor to do makes a catalog over which you might have a good laugh, if you could forget all the heartbreak and agony of the poor that is summed up in the preposterous sentences. All the hopes that were blasted, the pitiful hopes of a little better food for a sick wife, of a chance to keep the children in school! Such things are the meaning of a strike to workingmen; and suddenly a grim personage in a black silk robe lifts a club and smashes these hopes over the head! As I write, some clothing workers of New York are on strike, and a judge has issued an injunction, forbidding them, not merely to picket the shops of their boss, but to go within ten blocks of the place! In the West Virginia coal fields, they are now forbidding mass-meetings, forbidding the use of money in unionizing the mines, and even the use of tent-colonies for the families of miners who have been ejected from company houses! In Oklahoma they recently forbade miners to pray! In Minneapolis I talked with a labor man who had spent six months in jail for violating an injunction, and he gave me the thing to read, a list of prohibitions that would fill a couple of pages of this book; as the man said, “I’d have broken the law if I’d waked up in the night and disliked my boss.”
And every year they are encroaching a little farther on the rights of the workers, and of all citizens. They are trying to set up the principle that it is a conspiracy against the public welfare to interfere with “essential industries.” Thirty years ago, when Grover Cleveland sent in Federal troops over the head of Governor Altgeld of Illinois, and smashed the strike of the railwaymen, and threw Gene Debs into jail, it was considered quite a startling action. But now we have got used to things like that, and in 1922 they imprisoned eight railway leaders in Los Angeles, calling their strike “a conspiracy to interfere with the mail.” Now President Coolidge, in his message to Congress, is calling for a law to forbid all such strikes, and take off the shoulders of the judges the embarrassment of having to create the law!
And so, once more, Judd, do you see why the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer? Do you see why the index figures of a university professor revealed that the wage-earners of America, taken as a whole, were five per cent poorer today than in 1890? I told you that riches and poverty are not caused by the Will of God, nor yet by any implacable Economic Law, but purely and simply by the actions of men, driven by the basest of all human impulses, which is greed. And here you see, Judd, exactly what these actions are. Every time an ex-corporation-lawyer on the bench issues an injunction which smashes a strike, he is reducing the average real wages of the workers of America; he is taking away a little more from the poor, and handing it to the rich—and that is the job for which the rich set him up in office, and bought him his black silk robe!