The representatives of the unions replied by a public statement, in which they declared that this was an "unwarrantable threat" and an attempt to put the responsibility for the suspension of work on the unions:—
"We consider the statement made in behalf of his Majesty's government, an unwarrantable threat uttered against the railroad workers who for years have made repeated applications to the Board of Trade and also to Parliament to consider the advisability of amending the conciliation board scheme of 1907.... And further it shows a failure of the Board of Trade to amend its own scheme, and also of the railroad companies to give an impartial and fair interpretation of such schemes.... And inasmuch as this joint meeting has already urged the employers to meet us with a view to discussing the whole position and which, if agreed to by them, would in our opinion have settled the matter, we therefore refuse to accept the responsibility the government has attempted to throw upon us, and further respectfully but firmly ask his Majesty's government whether the responsibility of the railroad companies is in any degree less than that of other employers of labor."
In other words, there is and can be no law compelling men to labor, and no matter what the consequences of their refusal to work, it is a matter that concerns the workers themselves more than all other persons.
Mr. Winston Churchill made a more detailed statement. He said that "the government was taking all necessary steps to make sure that the food supply as well as fuel and other essentials should not be interrupted on the railways or at the ports."
"All services vital to the community should be maintained, and the government would see to that, not because they were on the side either of the employers or the workmen, but because they were bound to protect the public from the danger that a general arrest of industry would entail." He continued:—
"The means whereby the people of this land live are highly artificial, and a serious breakdown would lead to starvation among a great number of poorer people. Not the well-to-do would suffer, but the poor of the great cities and those dependent upon them, who would be quite helpless if the machinery by which they are fed—on which they are dependent for wages—was thrown out of gear.
"The government believes that the arrangements made for working the lines of communication, and for the maintenance of order, will prove effective; but, if not, other measures of even larger scope will be taken promptly. It must be clearly understood that there is no escape from these facts, and, as they affect the supply of food for the people, and the safety of the country, they are far more important than anything else."
To this the railway workers answered that it is to protect their own food that they strike, and that food is as important to them as to others, that practically all those who are dependent on wages are willing to undergo the last degree of suffering to preserve the right to strike, that the means of livelihood of this majority are no whit less important than the "safety" of the rest of the country. Moreover, if the government is allowed to use military or other means to aid the railways to transport food, fuel, and other things, more or less essential, it prevents that very "paralysis" which is the necessary object of every strike. Industrial warfare of this critical kind must indeed be costly to the whole community, often endangering health and even life itself, but the workers are almost unanimous in believing that a few days or weeks of this, repeated only after years of interval, costs far less in life and health than the low wages paid to labor year after year and generation after generation. They demand the right to strike unhampered by any government in which capitalistic or other than wage-earning classes predominate. Only when the government falls into the hands of a group of wholly non-capitalist classes—of which wage earners form the majority—will they expect it to grant such rights and conditions as are sufficient to compensate them for parting with any element of the right to strike.
The great British strike, then, had a double significance. It showed the tremendously increased strength of labor when every class of workers is organized and all are united together, and it showed an increasing unwillingness to allow separate agreements to stand in the way of general strikes.
The strength of the strikers in the British upheaval of 1911, however, has been grossly exaggerated on both sides. There is no doubt that the aggressive action came from the masses of the workers, as their leaders held them back in nearly every instance. There is no question that the various unions coöperated more than usual, that vast masses of the unskilled were for the first time organized, and that these features won the strikes. The advance was remarkable—but we can only measure the level reached if we realize the point from which the start was made. As a matter of fact, the unskilled labor of Great Britain until 1911 was probably worse paid and less organized than that of any great manufacturing country—and the advance made by no means brings it to the level of the United States.
Since the great dock strike of 1886, led by John Burns and Tom Mann, unskilled labor has tried in vain to organize effectively unions like those of the seamen and railway servants, the majority of whose members were neither of the least skilled nor of the most skilled classes, had an uphill fight, and were only able to organize a part of the workers. Five dollars a week was considered such a high and satisfactory wage by the wholly unskilled (dockers, etc.) that it was often made the basis of their demands. The Board of Trade Report shows that 400,000 railwaymen, including the most skilled, had from 1899 to 1909 an average weekly wage varying from $6.35 to $6.60 per week. The railway union found that of a quarter of a million men 39 per cent got less than $5 a week, and 89 per cent less than $7.50. Seamen at Liverpool received from $20 to $32.50 a month.
If then the Liverpool sailors received an increase of $2.50 a month, while the wages of other strikers were raised on the average about 20 per cent, what must we conclude? Undoubtedly the gain was worth all the labor and sacrifice it cost. But it must be remembered, first, that these wages are still markedly inferior to those of this country in spite of its hordes of foreign labor; and second, that the increase is little if any above the rise in the cost of living in recent years, and will undoubtedly soon be overtaken by a further rise. The great steamship lines increased their rates on account of the strike almost the same week that it was concluded, and the railway companies gave in only when the government consented that they should raise their rates. But the larger part of the consumers are workingmen, and their cost of living is thus rising more rapidly than ever on account of the strikes. Finally, the unions of the unskilled are as a rule not yet recognized by their employers, while the railway union is probably as completely at the mercy of the government as ever.
In a word, the point reached is by no means very advanced; on the other hand, the material gain made in view of the former backwardness of the railwaymen, seamen, and dockers is highly important for England, while the methods employed, the movement having originated from below, and having been sustained against conservative leaders (only a few radicals like Tom Mann and Ben Tillett being trusted), is of world-wide significance. The unions as well as their common organizations, the Trade Union Congress, the Labour Party, and the General Federation of Trade Unions are drawing closer together, while the Socialists and revolutionary unionists are everywhere taking the lead—as evidenced, for example, by the election of the most radical Socialist member of Parliament, Mr. Will Thorne, to be President of the 1912 Trade Union Congress.
The success of the new movement as against the older Labour Party and trade union tactics may also be seen from the disturbed state of mind of the older leaders. Take, for example, the attack of the Chairman of the Labour Party, Mr. J. R. MacDonald:—
"The new revolution which Syndicalism and its advocates of the Industrial Workers of the World contemplate has avoided none of the errors or the pitfalls of the old, but it has added to them a whole series of its own. It has never considered the problems which it has to meet. It is, as expressed in the Outlook of this month, a mere escapade of the nursery mind. It is the product of the creative intelligence of the man who is impatient because it takes the earth twenty-four hours to wheel around the sun (sic).... The hospitality which the Socialist movement has offered so generously to all kinds of cranks and scoundrels because they professed to be in revolt against the existing order has already done our movement much harm. Let it not add Syndicalism to the already too numerous vipers which, in the kindness of its heart, it is warming on its hearthstones."[257] [258]
The new revolutionary unionism takes different forms in Great Britain, France, and America. In France it has expressed itself through agitation for the general strike and against the army, the only thing that a general strike movement has to fear. The agitation has completely captured the national federation of unions, has a well-developed literature, a daily paper (La Bataille Syndicaliste—The Union Battle,—established in 1911), and has put its principles into effect in many ways, especially by more numerous and widespread strikes and by attacks on military discipline. But there has been no strike so nearly general as the recent British one, and both the efforts in this direction and those directed against the army have a future rather than a present importance and will be considered in succeeding chapters (Part III, Chapters [VI] and [VII]).
In America the new movement first appeared several years ago in the very radical proposal indorsed at the time by Debs, Haywood, and many prominent Socialists, to replace the older unions by a new set built on entirely different principles, including organizations of the least skilled, and the solid union of all unions for fighting purposes. This movement took concrete form in a new organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, which was launched with some promise, but soon divided into factions and was abandoned by Debs and others of its organizers. It has grown in strength in some localities, having conducted the remarkable struggles at McKees Rocks (Pa.) and Lawrence (Mass.), but is not at present a national factor—which is in part due, perhaps, to the fact that the older unions are tending, though gradually, towards somewhat similar principles.