Labor Unions at the Danger Line: A Consideration of the Public's Safety

DECEMBER, 1923

BY F. LAURISTON BULLARD

I

THE President of the American Federation of Labor some time ago declared, in the official publication of the powerful organization which he has led for forty years, that ‘certain employers’ had undertaken a movement ‘for the reëstablishment of industrial dictatorship’ and for ‘the destruction of the labor unions.’ After several months Mr. Gompers, in an article printed under his own name, reiterated and expanded his charges, alleging the existence of ‘a conspiracy to destroy the trades-union movement,’ naming in his long roster of ‘conspirators’ such bodies of business men as the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the leaders of such vast industrial enterprises as steel, coal, and the railroads, all claimed to be enmeshed within the cunningly woven fabric of the interlocking directorates of our most important banking institutions. To this theme the veteran labor-leader returns again and again. It is his defense to the public when Labor is assailed. It is his challenge to Labor when his followers waver in the ranks.

As a remarkable personality Mr. Gompers compels attention. He is well beyond three score and ten and forty-one times he has been chosen President of the Federation. He has moulded that body upon his own idea of craft unionism. He has prevented the organization of the unions as a political party movement. He wrought manfully for the cause of democracy in the World War. He has opposed the recognition by the Federation of Sovietism in Russia and he has prevented the American '‘eds’ from any measure of success in the sovietizing of Labor in this country. In the annual conventions of the Federation he has stood resolutely for the utmost freedom of radical expression and with equal tenacity he has fought the official endorsement of revolutionary programmes. In the opinion of Mr. William Z. Foster, President Gompers is excessively conservative, and the labor movement is in the control of a ‘reactionary oligarchy.’ There is much to admire in the career of Samuel Gompers. There is thrill in the words he often has spoken, ‘I want the stars in the heavens for my fellow men.’

The more the pity, therefore, that Mr. Gompers is blind, perhaps willfully blind, to the signs of the times. What he describes as a plot to destroy unionism is chiefly the natural reaction of society against the outrageous tyrannies of an intolerant labor-dictatorship. There is no ‘conspiracy.’ The worm is turning, that is all. Once Labor could count confidently upon public support in its clashes with Capital. Labor was the ‘under dog.’ That time is far past. Labor now can count upon public support only when it demonstrates the justice of its case. The economic situation to-day is largely, but not altogether, a war inheritance. Our part in the struggle was a splendid adventure; it also was a demoralizing economic debauch. All the ordinary balances of values were overturned. The United States Government for the first time came into direct bargaining relations with the labor unions. Federal boards negotiated wage scales and standards of working-conditions. A government that needed the coöperation of Labor for the production of military supplies gave Labor a place on government commissions. The country will always be grateful for the patriotic devotion of the war workers. But for their patriotism it is simple truth to say that they deserve no more credit than any other class in the mobilization and unification of all the resources of the nation. The essentials in war time are countless. Labor therefore could get anything it asked. The Government paid a very high price for labor peace.

The war over, Samuel Gompers immediately announced the determination of Labor to keep permanently all it had won. An outstanding fact in the story of the last five years is the resolute stand of Labor against any deflation of wages. The President of the New York Building Trades Council writes the President of Columbia University: ‘You cannot bluff the buildingtrades workers to-day into accepting a wage reduction.’ The sudden decrease in immigration yielded an economic advantage 1o Labor. Revelations of indefensible wastefulness tended first to disturb and then to incense the public. But the war did not produce the tendency to slackness which to-day is one of the most damaging charges against the unions. They had the disease before. Authorized practices that destroy efficiency, limit output, increase costs enormously, produce a labor monopoly, have united to cause that rising tide of resentment which Mr. Gompers calls a ‘conspiracy.’

II

That building labor deserves the reprobation to which now it is exposed no one who knows the record can doubt. The bill of particulars would fill many volumes. No applicant can become a member of the plumbers’ union ¹ unless he is the father, the brother, or the son of an existing member. To cut a small door through a hollow-tile partition in an office building requires twelve classes of labor, three weeks of time, and $250 in money. Any person of ordinary intelligence can operate an electric converter, merely throwing a switch, ‘turning on the juice.’ and lubricating the apparatus with a little oil; running such a machine night and day nets two men $280 a week and they average about two hours of toil to twenty-two of smoking and gossip. No nonunion X-ray expert may work on the same job with union electricians, but after they have wasted a full fortnight of time — at regular union rates! — the expert, by some special dispensation, is permitted to return, and in eight hours he completes the transfer of the X-ray outfit from one hospital unit to another. For oneand twofamily houses the union fiat requires three coats of plaster, although the law contemplates but two, and the difference in cost is oppressive to tenants.

Hoisting engineers close their books against new members, but allow excluded craftsmen who obviously are eligible to membership to work week by week on the warrant of a ‘permit’ card for which a sizable fee is assessed. One Inside Electrical Workers’ Union thus collected $250,000 in one year. St. Patrick’s Day is not a national holiday, but a union including men of all nationalities and creeds fined the members who worked on that day. All who were Irish took the day off; all who were not paid the fine. Union painters must use brushes of prescribed dimensions, and on a union job no time-saving paintsprayer is permissible. Pulsometers pump water from excavations; when a pump is relocated two steamfitters, two plumbers, three ironworkers, and one engineer are required to do what two men could do as well and more rapidly.

Many of the building trades do work somewhat similar in character. The organization intends to delimit rigidly the boundaries of each union, but the frontiers overlap and jurisdictional conflicts result. The classic instance of such altercations emerged at the hearings of the Lockwood Committee. A power house under construction involved a total expenditure of $30,000,000. The laying of certain pipes and connections amounted to $165,000, or one two-hundredth of the whole cost. Both the steamfitters and the plumbers claimed that detail. There was a strike, then an arbitration fiasco, finally a defiance by a local union of the authority of its superior officials. Not a stroke of work could be done on the whole plant until that dispute was adjusted. On the witness stand the plumbing contractor testified that all his life he had been a union man, that his sons were union men, that he cared not which of the two unions might win in the present controversy, that he had begged repeatedly for a decision, and that now, having lost $25,000 on this contract, he was marked for life as a man who had had ‘trouble’ with Labor, and could look forward only to ruin. On the stand also Mr. Gompers, under the keen and relentless examination of Mr. Samuel Untermyer, conceded the facts of this case, confessed its iniquity, admitted his inability to rectify such indefensible practices — and refused absolutely to agree to the desirability or the necessity of rectification by any outside agency. The unions themselves must correct these wrongs, if ever they shall be corrected. ‘God save Labor from the courts,’ he said.

Easily these illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. They lead into the midst of an astounding maze of arbitrary rules, penalties, and indefensible exactions. The construction industry is now generally accepted as second only in size to agriculture in this country. Its 2,000,000 workers are mobilized in some thirty unions, and one person in ten of the entire population is dependent upon their labor. The Chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Construction Council holds building to be the barometer of our industrial life. Its total of annual operations in great cities and small towns, in homes, business blocks, factory plants, bridges, warehouses, wharves, and manifold other varieties of construction, never has been accurately computed; the mean of the available estimates stands at $2,000,000,000. We buy goods that are sold in buildings, stored in buildings, and manufactured in buildings, and all the costs of all these buildings are paid ultimately by the final consumers of these commodities. And this vast industry in most of our large cities has been so cunningly manipulated as to assess upon the citizens a system of graft that out-Tweeds Tweed.

For recruiting this industry the country needs many thousands of skilled workers and plain laborers every year. We are not getting them. In the last census-decade, while the male population was increasing 14 per cent, the number of construction craftsmen gained but 10 per cent. In the decade the brickand stone-masons lost 43 per cent in their total of apprentices, the plasterers 39 per cent, the roofers and slaters 17 per cent, the painters, the glaziers, and the varnishers 39 per cent, and the paperhangers 62 per cent. The craftsmen themselves are dwindling in number, the apprentices far more rapidly. In 1910 we had 669 plasterers’ apprentices; in 1920 there were less than 400 in the entire United States! The one trade which has gained in apprentices is the electrical. That craft lures the young men. Labor alone is not to be charged with this alarming dearth of prospective craftsmen. Public indifference must bear some of the blame. The shortsightedness of building employers is partly accountable. The liking of young men for white-collar jobs has much to do with it. But in the final analysis Labor is chiefly responsible. By deliberate manipulation for the purpose of reducing the supply, the unions seek to increase the demand for skill. More work for fewer men must yield higher wages, they reason. They play for an artificial prosperity to-day and let to-morrow take care of itself.

The unions reason also that it is to their advantage to fix by arbitrary decree the amount of work that shall be done by a single craftsman and to prevent any ambitious workman from exceeding the limit either by speed or skill. All the men in the same classification shall conform to the same dead level. Any man who doubles his product leaves the man next with nothing to do. Even a score of years ago the United States Commissioner of Labor reported himself to have found in the building trades ‘a very general feeling that by working slower the job will be made to last longer.’ Various unions under heavy penalties forbid ‘rushing.’ Others prohibit ‘an unreasonable amount of work by any member.’ The Employers’ Association of Indiana computes that in 1921 it cost more than three times as much to lay a thousand bricks as five years before.

In the cities the consequences of these oppressive restrictions come to their fullest development. The story of San Francisco’s fight for freedom is almost an epic. No city in the United States ever has been more completely under the control of labor unions than for twenty-five years was San Francisco. The unions dictated every detail in industrial conditions, twice captured the city government, always had representatives in many city departments, ejected from political life any public man who offended them, and often compelled the governor of the state to sit in council with them. Year by year their rules became more exacting. Industries that naturally would go to the Bay District went elsewhere. Some big concerns dismantled existing plants and announced that labor tyranny was driving them out of town. In striketime pickets actually organized a union and struck for more pay. When the port was completely tied up, and merchants were begging for permits to remove perishable goods from ships, no one could penetrate the lines without an order signed by the union leader. The Government of the United States had to obtain a ‘passage through all picket lines’ in order to go aboard a vessel and unload and haul specie to the subtreasury. At last the president of the Building Trades Council, long accustomed to act as sole arbitrator in all times of ‘trouble,’ calmly repudiated an award of a board of arbitrators and dismissed them — a Catholic archbishop, a Supreme Court judge, and an industrial expert. Then the businessmen rebelled; after an all-day and all-night session they announced their purpose to have no more dealings with the labor czar and began a campaign for liberty.

Better known is the story of Chicago. At the end of a prolonged struggle the building unions accepted Judge Landis as an arbitrator and agreed to abide by his award. He did no perfunctory job. He scrapped all the ‘make work’ rules. He denied the unions the right to ‘own’ both the foreman and the job steward, a system which left the owner with no representative on the building he was paying for. Nonunion men might work on union jobs when union men were scarce. The award was like a declaration of independence. And the unions flinched, hesitated, evaded, and nine flatly refused to abide by their pledge; only four stood loyally by their word. Now for many months the Citizens’ Committee to Enforce the Landis Award, backed by a large measure of public opinion, has been striving mightily to make good the liberty of which the award was a stirring manifesto.

The revelations of the Lockwood Committee have scandalized the nation. The closed-shop system in New York City afforded the opportunity for such a combination with certain contracting groups for purposes of profiteering as have hardly been equaled in this country. One man, the ‘absolute despot’ of the building unions, operated the system of extortion known as ‘Brindellism,’ a system both inimical to the public welfare and grossly unjust to the rank and file of labor unionists. One union was found to be ‘a unique combination of employee and employer’ in the same organization, creating a deplorable condition of confusion and extravagance. Where two unions existed in the same craft, one was disclosed to be merely a dummy, a tool of the contractors, maintained to foment strikes. More than a year ago the nineteen definite demands of the Lockwood Committee — presented in a document which reads like a philippic, not because it is rhetorical in style but because its masses of facts march upon the conscience like an army upon the field of battle — won the unanimous support of the public. The unions capitulated. Rather than defy the threat to compel them to incorporate, they agreed to inaugurate the proposed reforms. Yet in its final report the Committee had to announce that, while some unions had complied in large measure with the requirements, the more important unions had refused to conform, and the abominations, publicly pilloried and exposed to the execration of all decent citizens, still continue.

Mr. Gompers endured a prolonged inquisition about these practices. The protagonist of the unions never appeared to such poor advantage. He fenced, parried, sidestepped. He had no constructive policies to advocate. Of but one thing was he positive. If Labor needs reforming, the reforms must come from the inside. No external compulsion could be tolerated. ‘There is no patent road to the elimination of all the mistakes of people. . . . We must be patient. . . . I think the legislature should not interfere with the matter at all, bad as the conditions may be.’

The lamentable fact is that reform in New York City seems nowhere in sight. The unions manifest no disposition to clean house. As to the relations between the council of the craftsmen and the association of the employing contractors, even Mr. Untermyer said: ‘I believe that there is evidence of criminal conspiracy there, but it would be a herculean task to conduct that prosecution, and by the time it was over the present contract would be ended and the law of supply and demand in the labor market would have solved the problem.’ The monopoly continues.

And what is more significant, no relief came from the legislature. In the opinion of Mr. Untermyer many of the abuses exposed by the Committee can be corrected only by regulatory laws. He advocates the regulation of tradesunions by law. But not a member of his committee would sign the recommendation, although he had gone forward with his probings on the assumption that they would do so, and he had to put in his bill on his own responsibility. Is this a token of the political power of unions? Moreover the Committee’s final report was submitted to the legislature on its opening day; this bill came up for passage sixty days later, but no way could be found to secure the printing of the report in time for the legislators to read it and arrive at some notion of why the legislation was sought. And in spite of a wide and insistent demand for copies of this report it has been possible to obtain the printing of but a very small number.²

III

Now this enormous industry is in an exceptional way related to the consuming public. The builder produces goods to order; the owner bears the risk and collects his investment in many installments as rent, or in a single sale price. The manufacturer produces goods for a competitive market; he faces the risk of being undersold or surpassed in quality of product; his orders are contingent and variable. The shoes produced in Brockton compete with the shoes made in St. Louis. Not so as to construction work done in Boston and Chicago. The building contractor estimates on the basis of conditions at a definite time and place, and passes on the bill to the owner. The manufacturer cannot pass on the bill to any employing owner; he owns the plant and the product and he must produce goods in Massachusetts that can compete with similar goods produced in North Carolina under very different conditions. The ‘pull’ of self-interest causes the manufacturer to keep a wary eye on his cost sheets. The builder pays the bills for labor and materials and collects from the man who commissions him to execute the job. Building practices may be wantonly wasteful, but they have no immediate relevancy to the contractor’s welfare. He tends therefore to compromise. A cost-plus contract is eminently desirable; it leaves him little to worry about. If he reaches an ‘understanding’ with Labor for mutual advantage, he only succumbs to a very human temptation. Vast as is the building industry it is decentralized, each job a unit by itself. The workmen are not brought into the intimate and sustained contacts of the factory. Each set of craftsmen is split up into a hundred gangs scattered about the city. Their uniting link is the business agent, the walking delegate. Once in office he is comparatively secure in the possession of unusual power. Brindell could procure the ejection from the union of a member who had merely criticized his expense account. In this industry the opportunities for a man of sinister aims are endless. Nowhere else in the whole industrial field is the need for simple honesty so great — and I am tempted to complete the obvious contrast and affirm it to be nowhere else so rare.

The President of the Building Trades Department of the American Federation of Labor understands these facts. Not only does he confess them but he hammers them home at the annual conventions of the Federation. ‘Our movement has lost the confidence and respect of the public,’ he says. ‘It must pledge a greater service. . . . We have for years allowed the conscienceless and hired disturber to lead us into preventable and unjustifiable strikes.’ He proposes a ‘small central agency’ in which alone shall be vested the power to call strikes, a localization of authority. Comes then to view the fact that Mr. Donlin himself does not possess the authority of a real executive. He is powerless to initiate the reforms the necessity of which he concedes. He exposes and excoriates but achieves nothing tangible. For the great Federation is merely a loose aggregation of separate unities. It is a rope of sand. Actual power in all vital matters is lodged in and jealously guarded by the local organizations. In a careless moment Mr. Hugh Frayne confessed that the Federation itself has no effective authority, for ‘each union is guaranteed its local autonomy.’

The country the last few years has had a rather liberal education in the coal industry. As the commerce of the United States is now conducted coal is a basic industry. The machinery for the production of anthracite consists of an operators’ monopoly always at war and often in deadlock with a labor monopoly within the boundaries of one state and beyond the jurisdiction of the United States. The bituminous supply is distributed over many states, financed in hit-or-miss, free-for-all fashion, and incompletely unionized. Competition is intense, violence frequent, walkouts and lockouts are common, as might be expected in so overdeveloped an industry. The United Mine Workers, affiliated with the Federation, have sought for years to complete the unionization of the bituminous fields. Open warfare several times has ensued. Shootings and dynamiting, the destruction of much property, armed marches, ambuscades, the loss of many lives, belong in the record. The dearest wish of the United Mine Workers is to achieve somehow the control of the important nonunion fields in West Virginia and Kentucky.

It is difficult to avoid the conviction that John W. Lewis and his backers intend to establish a monopoly of all coal-mining labor. Anthracite exists only in Pennsylvania. Mining anthracite is skilled toil. A hard-coal mining force cannot be extemporized. The Pennsylvania certification laws make it practically impossible for any man not in the union to dig hard coal. Brawls and armed clashes between scabs and unionists do not occur in the anthracite region in strike-time, for the kind of labor necessary to mine anthracite cannot be imported. In the softcoal fields the unions have the checkoff— a device, galling to any business man no matter how friendly he may be to unionism, which compels him to collect at his own expense the dues, assessments, and fines imposed by the union upon its members, and to pay these sums over to the union treasury. Thus the union makes its financial position secure. The employer serves as the collection agency. The miners have no choice but to pay. If the check-off could be submitted to the union members themselves it is an open question if the majority would approve it — on a secret ballot.

Nobody knows what amounts thus are realized. It is known that the union paid $400,000 for the destruction of the Willis Branch mine in West Virginia and that in Illinois alone it raised $875,000 as a Herrin ‘defense fund.’ Let us note in passing that the Coal Commission, having rendered the fairest and most dispassionate statement of the tragedy at Herrin that I have seen, goes on to add: ‘All these charitable excuses furnish no justification for the brazen audacity with which subordinate officials and members of the United Mine Workers defended the crime and the criminals. That they were espousing the cause and defending the lawbreakers is further shown by the fact that they have since bought the mine where the tragedy occurred, and have paid therefor $729,000.’ The Fact Finding Commission also includes this most significant item in its analysis of the present situation: ‘We believe that the Union is facing a critical transition period. It has gone through and won the struggle to become powerful. The challenge confronting it now is whether it can use great power in a responsible way to serve social ends.’

A striking example of conflict between union advantage and public interest appears in that extraordinary demonstration of the influence of railway labor which the country witnessed in war time when the leaders of the Brotherhoods held a stop watch over Congress and obtained the Adamson Law. These five unions, not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, are considered the best organized, ablest managed, and most abundantly financed labor bodies in the world. In March 1916 they made their formal demands. The order of succeeding events was: negotiations, deadlock, strike vote under the referendum rule of these unions, further negotiations, another deadlock, intervention by the President, conferences at the White House, sending out a secret strike-order effective Labor Day, denial of the President’s appeal for its withdrawal, notice that the law must be passed by midnight of September 2 or the strike would start, and, at the President’s behest, the hasty enactment of the required law barely in time to avert a national calamity of the first magnitude. I do not know whether the charge is true that the strike ballots read in such a way as to prevent the men from expressing their sentiments on the arbitration alternative. But I am sure that when the usually astute leaders of these five unions made the enormous blunder of ordering again a strike vote in September 1921 the president of one of the Brotherhoods left a sick-bed to tell the others that ‘they were trying to kid the men into thinking they were voting on time-and-ahalf by putting out a lot of camouflage,’ and that he was prepared to send out ‘a separate ballot that would tell the truth.’

The shop crafts and other unions affiliated with the Federation have persisted in opposing the reforms in the interest of economy and efficiency which were costing many millions a year. The National Agreements authorized by the Railroad Administration simply capitalized waste. All the tales of the ridiculous and extravagant practices prevalent in the building trades can be duplicated in the railway shops. Two years ago these agreements were abolished. The Labor Board directed the crafts and the roads to make individual agreements, the national rules to remain in force meantime. I am informed by railway presidents that the men obstructed the needed reforms in every possible way, a suggestive illustration of the difficulty of procuring labor reforms from inside the unions. What negotiation could not do the shop-crafts’ strike of last year in some measure accomplished. The roads which substituted new men made new rules; one New England line now has seven shop rules instead of one hundred eighty-one. But many of the roads that compromised with their striking employees find themselves almost as inextricably entangled as four years ago and have had to give additional increases in wages.

IV

Further to illustrate the tendency of unionism to defend limitation of production, I may cite the strike of two years ago in the ladies’ cloak and suit trade of New York City. The issue was befogged at the time. The truculence of the spokesmen of the union was rather more than matched by the surprising ineptitude of the employers, who allowed a cause fundamentally just to go before the public so vaguely stated that the actual issue was generally misunderstood. The manufacturers were widely charged with violation of their agreement with the union; and they virtually sacrificed an unimpeachable cause by making the technical blunder which gave the unions their eagerly awaited excuse for declaring a general strike, and furnished the ground on which they went to court and enjoined their employers by that injunction process which always has been assumed to work both ways, although Capital often, and Labor rarely, has employed it. Thorough search by competent investigators brought to light no documentary evidence to substantiate various charges made by the unions, nor has it ever been shown that the employers intended to bring back the sweatshop. ‘Autocratic fixing of prices by the employer’ had disappeared from New York and for a long time a committee, chosen by his workers, had bargained with each employer in fixing rates for piecework. The real question in this intricate case was whether the industry must continue to pay the boom wages of the 1920 ‘peak’ for a notoriously inefficient production. The union objected both to decrease of wages and to increase of output. At the time of the strike a joint committee of employees and employers was seeking a way out of the seeming impasse.

That was a local clash, but the conflict involved a vital issue in all industry, that of adequate production for an accepted wage. Whether upon weekwork or piecework, the prosperity of a business is bound up with commensurate output. A union that tolerates underproduction works to the detriment of its own members, for their welfare is interwoven with the prosperity of the industry. Competition is so keen in the manufacture of cloaks and suits that seemingly trivial money differences in labor costs decide whether Baltimore, Rochester, or New York shall make the goods and get the business.

The most recent and one of the most flagrant examples of labor-union indifference to the orderly processes which enable business, industry, and society in general to function is the strike of the newspaper pressmen of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Mr. Gompers himself declares that strike an ‘awful blunder.’ From Portland, Oregon, where the annual convention of the Federation was about to assemble, he telegraphed a long message which distinctly does him credit, asking: ‘If plighted faith of organized Labor is given to an agreement with employers, or if, while negotiations to reach an agreement are pending, the members enter upon a strike, how can we expect any agreements to be reached between organized Labor and employers?’

It is an instructive tale, and a disquieting one. A new contract was in process of peaceful negotiation between the President and Directors of the International Printing Pressmen’s and Assistants’ Union and the Publishers’ Association. One vexed difference had just been amicably adjusted. A committee of Web Pressmen’s Union No. 25 of New York City arranged to present this proposition to the union at a meeting called for Monday evening. September 17. The committee failed to keep the appointment, whereupon less than 300 pressmen of a union of 2000 members voted to strike, and at five minutes after midnight, an hour when the press-room of a metropolitan newspaper is a place of intense activity, all the pressmen, except some foremen and assistant foremen, quit work on practically every newspaper in Greater New York. Obviously an outlaw strike. A strike without notice and without presentation of any demands whatever. A strike in definite disloyalty to local and international union compacts. A strike illegal under the rules of the union itself. And a strike precipitated by the action of a hot-headed minority who seized upon a favorable opportunity at a routine meeting to ‘put over’ a treacherous action which may or may not have been plotted in advance. And for a week all the New York dailies carried the head ‘The Combined New York Morning’ — or ‘Evening’ — ‘Newspapers,’ with the name plates of all the papers affected in orderly array under these streamers, and each plant following its usual rules as to typography and make-up in other particulars.

Rarely has the country witnessed such an illustration of the reckless use of arbitrary power by a labor organization, for the assumed advantage of a few and to the enormous loss of millions of innocent men and women. Nobody ever will be able to compute the direct and indirect money loss of that strike, including wages of workmen, advertising revenues of employers, and portions of the trade of almost all the business houses of the city, from the little shops to the theatres, the banks with bonds to sell, and the great department stores. Home-seekers went without apartments, job-seekers had no ‘want ads’ to scan. From one point of view the most serious damage to the public interest was caused by the lack of news. The highest function of a newspaper in a democracy is to supply the raw material for public opinion. The greatest city in the world for several days was comparatively destitute of that budget of world information which the public accepts quite as a matter of course. One sorry comfort the strike yielded — it was futile. The local lost its charter. Workmen were summoned from many outside cities, and forged telegrams sent out by the strikers failed to stop their coming. Reasonable methods did prevail — in the end. But the episode will long be remembered as an unprovoked interruption of the normal operation of a complicated mechanism under conditions that must prejudice the cause of collective bargaining in the estimation even of the most ardent advocates of trades-unionism.

The unions, true, number but a third of the wage workers of America. But they are a disciplined force, compactly organized, readily mobilized, functioning effectively. They occupy strategic positions through control of key industries, the Gibraltars and Singapores of the industrial world. And how indifferent to public sentiment Labor often seems! No average American can read the pages in the final report of the Lockwood Committee upon conditions in the Jewish Bakers’ Union in New York City without hot indignation. The chief official in a plumbers’ union serves a term in the penitentiary, resumes his former office in defiance of public sentiment, and is named an arbitrator in jurisdictional disputes. The Bridge and Structural Iron Workers relied upon violence to gain their demands, and of the thirty-seven men found guilty by the courts of dynamiting the plant of the Los Angeles Times eleven are ‘now out of prison and back in the American Federation of Labor holding official positions with pay.’ The pickets employed by a branch of the Federation in a New York theatre strike have Rogues’ Gallery records. A member of the carpenters’ union in an official report describes the new technique of strike violence—how professional thugs terrorize the scabs while the strikers look on from the side lines.

V

My object is not to marshal against Labor the charges that focus into a formidable indictment of unionism. I cite these facts to verify my opinion that the unions must be reformed. The ideal would be for Labor itself to perform this duty. The record, alas! justifies no hope that Labor will do so. The Federation had its golden opportunity when America emerged from the war. But the unions had no constructive programme to offer. They tolerate no interference by well-meaning outsiders; they have no use for trained and sympathetic intelligence not stamped with the union label. Their official periodical flatly says: ‘Organized Labor does not want, does not need, and will not accept the kind of coöperation that these persons have offered. . . . It will not be guided or interpreted except by itself.’ The American Federation of Labor manifests no faintest glimpse of the splendid service it might render society as a whole and industry in particular. It is a fighting organization, devoted by its constitution to combat.

Final and just solutions of the problems of Labor and industry will not be won by industrial warfare. When the strike was the one recourse of the oppressed, and when society readily recognized the oppression from which Labor sought deliverance, the method of force was more amiably endured. Society tends to-day, and rightly, to hold that method archaic and intolerable, and perceives, moreover, that strikes are won only occasionally by the more needy groups of workers, while the powerful organizations plan their campaigns and deliver their blows with the skillful strategy of army commanders in war time. Moreover, if the strike be accepted as an established industrial weapon, additional groups will undertake to organize, until in the end we shall have such a struggle for existence and survival of the fittest as will imperil the finest institutions of American democracy. The responsibility for the discovery and the enforcement of methods of industrial adjustment that shall displace and replace the old ways of force rests alike upon Labor, Capital, and the public, but most heavily upon Labor. Some phases of that problem I hope to discuss in an early number of the Atlantic.