INDUSTRIAL DISPLACEMENT
The facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native labor is not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into Pennsylvania forty-odd years ago by mine-operators looking for more tractable miners. Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor, and frequently foreigners were brought in when a strike was on. The first instance seems to have occurred in Drifton in 1870, and resulted in the importation of two ship-loads of Hungarians. The process of replacing the too-demanding American, Welsh, and Irish miners with labor from Austria-Hungary went on so rapidly that by the middle of the nineties, the change was accomplished. In 1904, during a strike in the coal-fields near Birmingham, Alabama, many South Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the larger companies imported a number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and unionism destroyed in that region. In 1880, in the first strike in the coal-mines of Kansas, "the first immigrants from Italy were brought into the fields as strike-breakers."
Poles were introduced into South Cleveland in 1882 to replace strikers in the wire-mills. The meat-packing strike of 1904 in Chicago was broken with trainloads of negroes, Italians and Greeks. In 1883 the largest oil-refining company at Bayonne, New Jersey, "in order to break the strike among the Irish and American coopers, ... introduced great numbers of Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles." In 1887 a coal-dockers' strike was broken with Magyars, and in 1904 striking boiler-makers were replaced by Poles. The striking glass-workers in 1904 were beaten by the introduction of Slovaks, Italians, Poles and Magyars. During the 1907 strike in the iron-mines of northern Minnesota, "one of the larger companies imported large numbers of Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strike-breakers, while a few of the smaller companies brought into the region a number of German-Austrians." "One mining company imported as many as 1300 of these strike-breakers."
The hejira of the English-speaking soft-coal miners shows what must happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked and their lot growing worse under the floods of men from southern and eastern Europe, migrated in great numbers to the Middle West and the Southwest. But of late the coal-fields of the Middle West have been invaded by multitudes of Italians, Croatians, Poles, and Lithuanians, so that even here American and Americanized miners have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced trade-unionists who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas, the pouring in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and many have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and Colorado.
Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element that rose to better posts in the mines or in other occupations. As for the displaced, the Iliad of their woes has never been sung—the loss of homes, the shattering of hopes, the untimely setting to work of children, the struggle for a new foothold, and the turning of thousands of self-respecting men into day laborers, odd-job men, down-and-out-ers, and "hoboes."
IMMIGRANTS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
The dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large cities has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent immigration upon trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from the backward parts of Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter, labor organizations in the fields they enter. They arrive needy and eager to get any work at almost any pay. Having had no industrial experience in the old country, they lack the trade-union idea. Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who are not staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay union dues and to run the risk of having to strike. It is true that the labor organizer evangelizes the alien workers with his union gospel; but by the time one batch has been welded into a fighting force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like Penelope's web, is raveled out about as fast as it is woven. No wonder that in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the iron miners, less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the United States Steel Corporation's constituent companies signed agreements with two-thirds of their 125,000 workmen, among whom the English-speaking held a dominant place. Ten years later the company signed not a single agreement with its beaten mass of Slav-Latins. There was no union with which to sign. The organizing, organizable Americans had been deleted from the works. No wonder that organized labor demands restriction of immigration. While the inrush continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital.
IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES
During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen principal articles of food has risen seventy per cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to retain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-eight per cent., while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently the working man was falling behind in the social procession. In the soft-coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the coal-worker receives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance which otherwise must have occurred.