In the autumn of 1921 the employers in the packing industry discontinued the arrangement whereby industrial relations were administered by an "administrator,"[94] Judge Alschuler of Chicago, whose rulings had materially restricted the employers' control in the shop. Some of the employers put into effect company union plans. This led to a strike, but in the end the unions lost their foothold in the industry, which the War had enabled them to acquire. By that time, however, the open-shop movement seemed already passing its peak, without having caused an irreparable breach in the position of organized labor. Evidently, the long years of preparation before the War and the great opportunity during the War itself, if they have failed to give trade unionism the position of a recognized national institution, have at least made it immune from destruction by employers, however general or skillfully managed the attack. In 1920 the total organized union membership, including the 871,000 in unions unaffiliated with the American Federation of Labor, was slightly short of 5,000,000, or over four million in the Federation itself. In 1921 the membership of the Federation declined slightly to 3,906,000, and the total organized membership probably in proportion. In 1922 the membership of the Federation declined to about 3,200,000, showing a loss of about 850,000 since the high mark of 1920.
The legal position of trade unions has continued as uncertain and unsatisfactory to the unions, as if no Clayton Act had been passed. The closed shop has been condemned as coercion of non-unionists. Yet in the Coppage case[95] the United States Supreme Court found that it is not coercion when an employer threatens discharge unless union membership is renounced. Similarly, it is unlawful for union agents to attempt organization, even by peaceful persuasion, when employes have signed contracts not to join the union as a condition of employment.[96] A decision which arouses strong doubt whether the Clayton Act made any change in the status of trade unions was given by the Supreme Court in the recent Duplex Printing case.[97] In this decision the union rested its defense squarely on the immunities granted by the Clayton Act. Despite this, the injunction was confirmed and the boycott again declared illegal, the court holding that the words "employer and employes" in the Act restrict its benefits only to "parties standing in proximate relation to a controversy," that is to the employes who are immediately involved in the dispute and not to the national union which undertakes to bring their employer to terms by causing their other members to boycott his goods.
The prevailing judicial interpretation of unlawful union methods is briefly as follows: Strikes are illegal when they involve defamation, fraud, actual physical violence, threats of physical violence, or inducement of breach of contract. Boycotts are illegal when they bring third parties into the dispute by threats of strikes, or loss of business, publication of "unfair lists,"[98] or by interference with Interstate commerce. Picketing is illegal when accompanied by violence, threats, intimidation, and coercion. In December 1921 the Supreme Court declared mere numbers in groups constituted intimidation and, while admitting that circumstances may alter cases, limited peaceful picketing to one picket at each point of ingress or egress of the plant.[99] In another case the Court held unconstitutional an Arizona statute, which reproduced verbatim the labor clauses of the Clayton Act;[100] this on the ground that concerted action by the union would be illegal if the means used were illegal and therefore the law which operated to make them legal deprived the plaintiff of his property without due process of law. In June 1922, in the Coronado case, the Court held that unions, although unincorporated, are in every respect like corporations and are liable for damages in their corporate capacity, including triple damages under the Sherman Anti-Trust law, and which may be collected from their funds.
We have already pointed out that since the War ended the American labor movement has in the popular mind become linked with radicalism. The steel strike and the coal miners' strike in 1919, the revolt against the national leaders and "outlaw" strikes in the printing industry and on the railways in 1920, the advocacy by the organizations of the railway men of the Plumb Plan for nationalization of railways and its repeated endorsement by the conventions of the American Federation of Labor, the resolutions in favor of the nationalization of coal mines passed at the conventions of the United Mine Workers, the "vacation" strike by the anthracite coal miners in defiance of a government wage award, the sympathy expressed for Soviet Russia in a number of unions, notably of the clothing industry, have led many to see, despite the assertions of the leaders of the American Federation of Labor to the contrary, an apparent drift in the labor movement towards radicalism, or even the probability of a radical majority in the Federation in the not distant future.
The most startling shift has been, of course, in the railway men's organizations, which have changed from a pronounced conservatism to an advocacy of a socialistic plan of railway nationalization under the Plumb Plan. The Plumb Plan raises the issue of socialism in its American form. In bare outline the Plan proposes government acquisition of the railroads at a value which excludes rights and privileges not specifically granted to the roads in their charters from the States. The government would then lease the roads to a private operating corporation governed by a tri-partite board of directors equally representing the consuming public, the managerial employes, and the classified employes. An automatic economy-sharing scheme was designed to assure efficient service at low rates calculated to yield a fixed return on a value shorn of capitalized privileges.
The purpose of the Plumb Plan is to equalize the opportunities of labor and capital in using economic power to obtain just rewards for services rendered to the public. In this respect it resembles many of the land reform and other "panaceas" which are scattered through labor history. Wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized representatives of producers' interests entitled to participate in the direct management of industry. An ideal of copartnership and self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties.
But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism. The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the sine qua non of the American labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of 1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was reelected and again reelected. And in obeying instructions to cooperate with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune to press Plumb Plan legislation actively. So far as the railway men themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under the Esch-Cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided. Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of employment.
The drift towards independent labor politics, which many anticipate, also remains quite inconclusive. A Farmer-Labor party, launched in 1920 by influential labor leaders of Chicago (to be sure, against the wishes of the national leaders), polled not more than 350,000 votes. And in the same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the change in the government's attitude after the passage of the War emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for President fell below a million, that is behind the vote of 1912, notwithstanding a doubling of the electorate with women's suffrage. Finally, the same convention of the American Federation of Labor, which showed so much sympathy for the ideas of the Plumb Plan League, approved a rupture with the International Trade Union Federation, with headquarters in Amsterdam, Holland, mainly on account of the revolutionary character of the addresses issued by the latter.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] The most plausible argument in favor of the position taken by the employing group is that no employer should be forced to decide matters as intimately connected with the welfare of his business as the ones relating to his labor costs and shop discipline with national union leaders, since the latter, at best, are interested in the welfare of the trade as a whole but rarely in the particular success of his own particular establishment.