A History of Trade Unionism in the United States

by Selig Perlman

The trade unions, too, were benefiting as organizations. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union firmly established itself by formal agreement on the men's clothing "markets" of Chicago, Rochester, Baltimore, and New York. The membership of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union rose to 175,000. Employers in general were complaining of increased labor unrest, a falling off of efficiency in the shop, and looked askance at the rapid march of unionization. The trade unions, on their part, were aware of their opportunity and eager for a final recognition as an institution in industry. As yet uncertainty prevailed as to whether enough had survived of the War-time spirit of give and take to make a struggle avoidable, or whether the issue must be solved by a bitter conflict of classes.

A partial showdown came in the autumn of 1919. Three great events, which came closely together, helped to clear the situation: The steel strike, the President's Industrial Conference, and the strike of the soft coal miners. The great steel strike, prepared and directed by a Committee representing twenty-four national and international unions with William Z. Foster as Secretary and moving spirit, tried in September 1919 to wrest from the owners of the steel mills what the railway shopmen had achieved in 1918 by invitation of the government, namely, "recognition" and the eight-hour day. Three hundred thousand men went out on strike at the call of the committee. The industry came to a practical standstill. But in this case the twenty-four allied unions were not dealing with a government amenable to political pressure, nor with a loosely joined association of employers competing among themselves. Furthermore, the time had passed when the government had either the will or the power to interfere and order both sides to arbitrate their dispute. On the contrary, the unions were now dealing unaided with the strongest capitalist aggregation in the world.

At the request of President Wilson, Gompers had urged the strike committee to postpone the strike until after the meeting of the national industrial conference called by the President in October, but the committee claimed that it could not have kept the men back after a summer of agitation and feverish organization had they even tried. The President's conference, modelled upon a similar conference which met earlier in Great Britain, was composed of three groups of representatives equal in number, one for capital, one for labor, and one for the general public. Decisions, to be held effective, had to be adopted by a majority in each group. The labor representation, dominated of course by Gompers, was eager to make the discussion turn on the steel strike. It proposed a resolution to this effect which had the support of the public group, but fearing a certain rejection by the employer group the matter was postponed. The issue upon which the alignment was effected was industrial control and collective bargaining. All three groups, the employer and public groups and of course the labor group, advocated collective bargaining,—but with a difference. The labor group insisted that collective bargaining is doomed to be a farce unless the employes are allowed to choose as their spokesmen representatives of the national trade union. In the absence of a powerful protector in the national union, they argued, the workers in a shop can never feel themselves on a bargaining equality with their employer, nor can they be represented by a spokesman of the necessary ability if their choice be restricted to those working in the same plant. The employers, now no longer dominated by the War-time spirit which caused them in 1917 to tolerate an expansion of unionism, insisted that no employer must be obliged to meet for the purpose of collective bargaining with other than his own employes.[89] After two weeks of uncertainty, when it had become clear that a resolution supported by both labor and public groups, which restated the labor position in a milder form, would be certain to be voted down by the employer group, the labor group withdrew from the conference, and the conference broke up. The period of the cooperation of classes had definitely closed.

Meantime the steel strike continued. Federal troops patrolled the steel districts and there was no violence. Nevertheless, a large part of the country's press pictured the strike by the steel workers for union recognition and a normal workday as an American counterpart of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia. Public opinion, unbalanced and excited as it was over the whirlpool of world events, was in no position to resist. The strike failed.

Nothing made so clear to the trade unionists the changed situation since the War ended as the strike of the bituminous coal miners which began November 1. The miners had entered, in October 1917, into a wage agreement with the operators for the duration of the War. The purchasing power of their wages having become greatly reduced by the ever rising cost of living, discontent was general in the union. A further complication arose from the uncertain position of the United States with reference to War and Peace, which had a bearing on the situation. The miners claimed that the Armistice had ended the War. The War having ended, the disadvantageous agreement expired with it. So argued the miners and demanded a sixty percent increase in tonnage rates, a corresponding one for yardmen and others paid by the day or hour, and a thirty-hour week to spread employment through the year. The operators maintained that the agreement was still in force, but intimated a readiness to make concessions if they were permitted to shift the cost to the consumer. At this point, the Fuel Administration, a War-time government body, already partly in the process of dissolution, intervened and attempted to dictate a settlement at a fourteen percent increase, which was entirely unacceptable to the union. The strike continued and the prospect of a dire coal famine grew nearer. To break the deadlock, on motion of Attorney-General Palmer, Judge Anderson of Indianapolis, under the War-time Lever Act, issued an injunction forbidding the union officials to continue conducting the strike. The strike continued, the strikers refusing to return to work, and a Bituminous Coal Commission appointed by the President finally settled it by an award of an increase of twenty-seven percent. But that the same Administration which had given the unions so many advantages during the War should now have invoked against them a War-time law, which had already been considered practically abrogated, was a clear indication of the change in the times. In a strike by anthracite coal miners in the following year an award was made by a Presidential board of three, representing the employers, the union, and the public. The strikers, however, refused to abide by it and inaugurated a "vacation-strike," the individual strikers staying away on a so-called vacation, nominally against the will of the union officers. They finally returned to work.

Both the steel and coal strikes furnished occasions for considerable anti-union propaganda in the press. Public sentiment long favorable to labor became definitely hostile.[90] In Kansas the legislature passed a compulsory arbitration law and created an Industrial Relations Court to adjudicate trade disputes. Simultaneously an "anti-Red" campaign inaugurated by Attorney-General Palmer contributed its share to the public excitement and helped to prejudice the cause of labor more by implication than by making direct charges. It was in an atmosphere thus surcharged with suspicion and fear that a group of employers, led by the National Association of Manufacturers and several local employers' organizations, launched an open-shop movement with the slogan of an "American plan" for shops and industries. Many employers, normally opposed to unionism, who in War-time had permitted unionism to acquire scope, were now trying to reconquer their lost positions. The example of the steel industry and the fiasco of the President's Industrial Conference crystallized this reviving anti-union sentiment into action.

Meanwhile the railway labor situation remained unsettled and fraught with danger. The problem was bound up with the general problem as to what to do with the railways. Many plans were presented to Congress, from an immediate return to private owners to permanent government ownership and management. The railway labor organizations, that is, the four brotherhoods of the train service personnel and the twelve unions united in the Railway Employes' Department of the American Federation of Labor, came before Congress with the so-called Plumb Plan, worked out by Glenn E. Plumb, the legal representative of the brotherhoods. This plan proposed that the government take over the railways for good, paying a compensation to the owners, and then entrust their operation to a board composed of government officials, union representatives, and representatives of the technical staffs.[91] So much for ultimate plans. On the more immediate wage problem proper, the government had clearly fallen down on its promise made to the shopmen in August 1919, when their demands for higher wages were refused and a promise was made that the cost of living would be reduced. Early in 1920 President Wilson notified Congress that he would return the roads to the owners on March 1, 1920. A few days before that date the Esch-Cummins bill was passed under the name of the Transportation Act of 1920. Strong efforts were made to incorporate in the bill a prohibition against strikes and lockouts. In that form it had indeed passed the Senate. In the House bill, however, the compulsory arbitration feature was absent and the final law contained a provision for a Railroad Labor Board, of railway, union, and public representatives, to be appointed by the President, with the power of conducting investigations and issuing awards, but with the right to strike or lockout unimpaired either before, during, or after the investigation. It was the first appointed board of this description which was to pass on the clamorous demands by the railway employes for higher wages.[92]

No sooner had the roads been returned under the new law, and before the board was even appointed, than a strike broke out among the switchmen and yardmen, whose patience had apparently been exhausted. The strike was an "outlaw" strike, undertaken against the wishes of national leaders and organized and led by "rebel" leaders risen up for the occasion. For a time it threatened not only to paralyze the country's railway system but to wreck the railway men's organizations as well. It was finally brought to an end through the efforts of the national leaders, and a telling effect on the situation was produced by an announcement by the newly constituted Railroad Labor Board that no "outlaw" organization would have standing before it. The Board issued an award on July 20, retroactive to May 1, increasing the total annual wage bill of the railways by $600,000,000. The award failed to satisfy the union, but they acquiesced.

When the increase in wages was granted to the railway employes, industry in general and the railways in particular were already entering a period of slump. With the depression the open-shop movement took on a greater vigor. With unemployment rapidly increasing employers saw their chance to regain freedom from union control. A few months later the tide also turned in the movement of wages. Inside of a year the steel industry reduced wages thirty percent, in three like installments; and the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week, which had figured among the chief causes of the strike of 1919 and for which the United States Steel Corporation was severely condemned by a report of a Committee of the Interchurch World Movement,[93] has largely continued as before. In the New York "market" of the men's clothing industry, where the union faces the most complex and least stable condition mainly owing to the heterogeneous character of the employing group, the latter grasped the opportunity to break with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union. By the end of the spring of 1921 the clothing workers won their struggle, showing that a union built along new lines was at least as efficient a fighting machine as any of the older unions. It was this union also and several local branches of the related union in the ladies' garment industry, which realized the need of assuring to the employer at least a minimum of labor efficiency if the newly established level of wages was not to be materially lowered. Hence the acceptance of the principle of "standards of production" fixed with the aid of scientific managers employed jointly by the employers and the union.

The spring and summer of 1921 were a time of widespread "readjustment" strikes, or strikes against cuts in wages, especially in the building trades. The building industry went through in 1921 and 1922 one of its periodic upheavals against the tyranny of the "walking delegates" and against the state of moral corruption for which some of the latter shared responsibility together with an unscrupulous element among the employers. In San Francisco, where the grip of the unions upon the industry was strongest, the employers turned on them and installed the "open-shop" after the building trades' council had refused to accept an award by an arbitration committee set up by mutual agreement. The union claimed, however, in self-justification that the Committee, by awarding a reduction in the wages of fifteen crafts while the issue as originally submitted turned on a demand by these crafts for a raise in wages, had gone outside its legitimate scope. In New York City an investigation by a special legislative committee uncovered a state of reeking corruption among the leadership in the building trades' council and among an element in the employing group in connection with a successful attempt to establish a virtual local monopoly in building. Some of the leading corruptionists on both sides were given court sentences and the building trades' council accepted modifications in the "working rules" formulated by the counsel for the investigating committee. In Chicago a situation developed in many respects similar to the one in San Francisco. In a wage dispute, which was submitted by both sides to Federal Judge K.M. Landis for arbitration, the award authorized not only a wage reduction but a revision of the "working rules" as well. Most of the unionists refused to abide by the award and the situation developed into literal warfare. In Chicago the employers' side was aggressively upheld by a "citizens' committee" formed to enforce the Landis award. The committee claimed to have imported over 10,000 out-of-town building mechanics to take the places of the strikers.