[87]] See below, [238-240.]
[88] The unions again lost their hold upon the packing industry in the autumn of 1921.
CHAPTER 11
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
The Armistice with Germany came suddenly and unexpectedly. To the organized workers the news was as welcome as to other citizens. But, had they looked at the matter from a special trade union standpoint, they would probably have found a longer duration of the War not entirely amiss. For coal had been unionized already before the War, the railways first during the War, but the third basic industry, steel, was not touched either before or during the War. However, it was precisely in the steel industry that opposition to unionism has found its chief seat, not only to unionism in that industry alone but to unionism in related or subsidiary industries as well.
The first three months after the Armistice the general expectation was for a set-back in business conditions due to the withdrawal of the enormous government War-time demand. Employers and trade unions stood equally undecided. When, however, instead of the expected slump, there came a prosperity unknown even during the War, the trade unions resumed their offensive, now unrestrained by any other but the strictly economic consideration. As a matter of fact, the trade unions were not at all free agents, since their demands, frequent and considerable though they were, barely sufficed to keep wages abreast of the soaring cost of living. Through 1919 and the first half of 1920 profits and wages were going up by leaps and bounds; and the forty-four hour week,—no longer the mere eight-hour day,—became a general slogan and a partial reality. Success was especially notable in clothing, building, printing, and the metal trades. One cannot say the same, however, of the three basic industries, steel, coal, and railways. In steel the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week continued as before for approximately one-half of the workers and the unions were preparing for a battle with the "Steel Trust." While on the railways and in coal mining the unions now began to encounter opposition from an unexpected quarter, namely, the government.
When in the summer of 1919 the railway shopmen demanded an increase in their wages, which had not been raised since the summer of 1918, President Wilson practically refused the demand, urging the need of a general deflation but binding himself to use all the powers of the government immediately to reduce the cost of living. A significant incident in this situation was a spontaneous strike of shopmen on many roads unauthorized by international union officials, which disarranged the movement of trains for a short time but ended with the men returning to work under the combined pressure of their leaders' threats and the President's plea.
In September 1919, the United States Railroad Administration and the shopmen's unions entered into national agreements, which embodied the practices under the Administration as well as those in vogue on the more liberal roads before 1918, including recognition and a large number of "working rules." These "national agreements" became an important issue one year later, when their abolition began to be pressed by the railway executives before the Railroad Labor Board, which was established under the Transportation Act of 1920.
In the summer of 1919 employers in certain industries, like clothing, grew aware of a need of a more "psychological" handling of their labor force than heretofore in order to reduce a costly high labor turnover and no less costly stoppages of work. This created a veritable Eldorado for "employment managers" and "labor managers," real and spurious. Universities and colleges, heretofore wholly uninterested in the problem of labor or viewing training in that problem as but a part of a general cultural education, now vied with one another in establishing "labor management" and "labor personnel" courses. One phase of the "labor personnel" work was a rather wide experimentation with "industrial democracy" plans. These plans varied in form and content, from simple provision for shop committees for collective dealing, many of which had already been installed during the War under the orders of the War Labor Board, to most elaborate schemes, some modelled upon the Constitution of the United States. The feature which they all had in common was that they attempted to achieve some sort of collective bargaining outside the channels of the established trade unions. The trade unionists termed the new fashioned expressions of industrial democracy "company unions." This term one may accept as technically correct without necessarily accepting the sinister connotation imputed to it by labor.