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.”