“Beautiful! Now to his record in the struggles between Capital and Labor, what is it?”
Why, it can’t be beat! Lynch is the most prominent apostle of sanctity of contracts between employers and employees, the most faithful watch-dog of the employers’ interests and upholder of the employers’ claim to the lion’s share of the wealth produced. He not only preaches it, but practices it with an iron hand. When the Newspaper Solicitors’ Union in San Francisco, in 1910, was compelled to declare a boycott against the publishers of a local capitalist daily, and the boycott was endorsed and taken up by the entire force of organized labor in that city, it was Lynch who telegraphed to them to stop that boycott, got the International Presidents of Union Pressmen, Stereotypers, etc., to send similar telegrams, and finally succeeded in breaking that boycott with the aid of President Gompers himself.
Again, when the union pressmen were locked out by the newspaper publishers in Chicago in 1912 and the union stereotypers joined their fight to help them in the trouble and union compositors of the I. T. U. intended to do likewise, it was Jim Lynch who rushed to Chicago and by threats of withdrawing their charter compelled the union compositors to stay in and scab it on union pressmen. The International President of the union stereotypers followed a similar policy, actually taking away the charter of the union stereotypers who were struggling together with the pressmen, and thus both he and Lynch broke the fight of the union men against the daily papers in Chicago. Don’t worry. Jim Lynch never hesitates to break a strike of union men when his and his friends’, the employers’, interests are crossed.
“That’s bully! Why, Lynch is even better than Mitchell. Now, one more thing. Would he be willing ‘to be insulted’ by the offer to him of a nice, juicy political job?”
Would he? Just try him! Wasn’t he only a few weeks ago fishing in Washington, D. C., for the appointment to the federal job of Public Printer? He came very near landing that job, only it slipped off the hook as Mitchell’s job in New York State slipped off.
“It’s O. K.” concluded the Governor, approached Jim Lynch,—and discovered, or at least surmised, that he was the very man who was pulling the wires through his friends, the politicians, to prevent the State Senate from ratifying Mitchell’s appointment so that the job should go to him, Jim Lynch. The friendship between dogs ceases when a bone is thrown to them. The friendship and “solidarity” between “labor lieutenants” of the capitalist class ceases, and they are ready to stab each other in the back, when a good job is at stake. As to the Governor, it made no difference to him who got the job, Mitchell, Lynch or anybody else, so long as his political fences were thereby mended. So the upshot of it was that Jim Lynch who was drawing $3,500 yearly salary as President of the International Typographical Union was named for New York State Commissioner of Labor with an $8,000 yearly salary. May God have mercy on the souls of the working people of New York State when James T. Lynch is in charge of the Labor Bureau!
While handing out this political plum to Lynch, Governor Sulzer, to make assurance doubly sure, gave to another “labor lieutenant,” Charles J. Chase, leader of union locomotive engineers, another good political job. He made him member of an up-state Public Service Commission.
Many more such cases of “labor politics” could be cited, but the above will suffice to show the character of the political fruits of the American Federation of Labor. And the Sun of Labor Day helps to ripen them!
Corrupting Influences.
The demoralizing and corrupting effect of the general character and the whole atmosphere of the American Federation of Labor, the celebrant of the Labor Day, is also seen in the matter of “controlling the jobs by the workers.” One of the aims of the Labor Movement is to secure such changes in the run of things that “the workers should own their jobs.” Well, some of the unions of the A. F. of L., bakers, printers, etc., have secured such a hold upon their trade in certain localities that they succeeded in putting into their contracts with the employers provisions that the union is to act as the employment agency for the employer, and the latter, whenever he needs help, must take whomever of its membership the union will send to him. On the face of it it looks as though “the workers control their jobs,” a step to “the workers’ owning their jobs.” In reality this “victory” is only an additional source of corruption in these unions. The actual power of distributing the jobs is in the hands of the business agent of the union and his hangers-on, or of the chairman of the union chapel of the shop. This power to manipulate the assignment of certain members of the union to more steady, easier and better paying jobs, and others, on the contrary, as mere “subs” to jobs for only few hours or days or for half-time jobs, or for harder and poorer paid jobs, inevitably leads in the selfish and corrupt atmosphere of the A. F. of L. unions to exactions of bribes by the leaders from the unemployed union members, to favoritism, to keeping of the “kickers” against leaders on the unemployed lists or on bad jobs. This ulcer upon the American Labor Movement has led even to the formation among the union printers, under the leadership of the above mentioned Jas. T. Lynch, of a secret malodorous organization, known as “Wahneta,” within the International Typographical Union.