Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

Group 3, the industrially nonconscious workers, includes the great majority of labor in the United States. Under this heading come all those who for reasons connected with the type of industry engaged in, or because of individual or sex characteristics, remain apart from any so-called labor movement. Practically all women fall under this head, most of the foreign labor population, most of unskilled labor. Many members of labor organizations technically belonging in Group 1 really fall under Group 3. The great majority of American labor undoubtedly are not class or group conscious in the sense that they feel themselves as workers pitted against a capitalist class. Temperamentally, intellectually, the doctrines of Karl Marx are not for them. They never heard of Karl Marx. They get up and go to work in the morning. During the day they dub away at something or other, whatever it may be—the chances are it changes rather often—putting no more effort into the day's work than is necessary to hold down an uninteresting job. They want their pay at the end of the week. Many have not the minimum intellectual capacity necessary to do a piece of work properly. Many more have not the minimum physical capacity required for even routine tasks. Very many, indeed, are nervous misfits.

Yet a goodly number in Group 3 represent a high type of worker to whom the doctrine of class warfare is repugnant, and yet whose industrial experience has never resulted in making them industrially conscious. They feel no particular call to show more than average interest in their job.

Peace, efficiency, production in industry, can come only as Group 2 increases. To recruit from Group 1 will always be difficult. Once labor feels itself hostile to the employer and his interests, which is another way of saying, once the employing group by its tactics succeeds in making labor conclude that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” the building up of a spirit of co-operation is difficult indeed. Class consciousness is poor soil in which to plant any seeds of industrial enthusiasm.

Would you, then, asks a dismayed unionist, build up your so-called industrially conscious group at the expense of organized labor? The answer is a purely pragmatic one, based on the condition of things as they are, not as idealists would have them. Rightly or wrongly, the American employing group long ago decided that the organized-labor movement was harmful to American industry. The fact that the labor movement was born of the necessity of the workers, and in the main always flourished because of the continued need of the workers, was never taken into account. Every conceivable argument was and is used against organized labor. Many of those arguments are based on half truths; or no truths at all. The fact remains that probably the majority of the American public believes the organized-labor movement to be against our social, civic, and industrial welfare. However right or wrong such a deduction is, it is safe to say that for the great part those who hold that belief do so in absolute good faith.

The result is that the American labor movement has developed ever in an atmosphere so hostile that the effect on the growth of the movement has been that which hostile environment always exerts on any growing thing. It has warped the movement. It has emphasized everything hostile within the movement itself. No wonder a fighting spirit has ever been in evidence. No wonder only the fighting type of labor leader has emerged. The movement has had little or no opportunity for construction. Always the struggle for existence itself has been uppermost. No wonder the conclusion can justly be drawn that the American labor movement has not always played a highly productive role in American industry.

It has been everybody's fault, if we are searching for a resting place for the blame of it all. Which gets us no place.

The point is, looked at without the tinted glasses of either capital or labor, that the psychology of the American employer for the past, assuredly the present, and at least the near future, has been, and is, and will be, so inimical to organized labor that the movement would not be allowed to function as a constructive industrial force. Too much of its energies must go to fighting. At the same time, too much of the energies of the employer go to fighting it. The public pays the price, and it is enormous. The spiritual cost of bitterness of spirit far outweighs any monetary loss to industry, tremendous as that is.

Why is not the present, then, a wise time in which to encourage an alternative movement, one that has not the effect of a red rag to a bull? Labor can shout its loudest; the fact remains that in this country labor is very far from controlling the industrial situation. Therefore, the employer must still be taken into account in any program of industrial reform. That being so, it might be saner to try some scheme the employer will at least listen to than stubbornly continue to fight the issue out along the old lines of organized labor alone, at the very mention of which the average employer grows red in the face.

It is not, indeed, that we would do away with the organized-labor movement, if we could. The condition is far too precarious for that. Labor too often needs the support of unionism to keep from being crushed. The individual too often needs the educational influence organization exerts. Organized labor, despite the handicaps within and without, has too much of construction to its credit. The point is, further growth in the organized-labor movement, considering the development forced upon the movement by its own past and the ever antagonistic attitude of business, will not, for the present and immediate future, necessarily spell peace, efficiency, production. Rather, continued, if not increased, bitterness.

What is the development, at least for the present and immediate future, which will improve the situation?