Union labor in peace and war

Foreword

THE next time you ride home on the car between five-thirty and six, look at the man with the dinner pail across the aisle. His finger nails are not manicured; there are no kid gloves on his hands, his clothing is stained with black oil spots and the odor of perspiration betrays the lack of a shower bath. The young person with the imitation seal scarf and the salary of nine a week tries to avoid contact with him, but aside from her penciled and lifted brow he attracts no special attention.

Why should he? His nose, even though it has a black smudge that was not removed by the hasty ablution, is in the middle of his face. He breathes, moves his hands, feet and jaw just like other people, reads his paper, discusses prohibition, the movies, baseball and politics just like you and I. He is made of the same clay, has the same skin, the same elemental hopes, joys, fears, the same bald spot and the same kind of corns as the rest of us. Change his clothes, put him into the hands of a competent barber, and in half an hour you could not tell him apart in a group of our leading citizens.

Yet the man with the dinner pail is a Problem, the biggest problem before us. Multiply him a few million times and he becomes Labor. His stature grows into the sky, his rather commonplace face changes expression, assumes a threatening mien, his relaxed hands contract into gigantic iron fists. As a plain person riding home in a crowded street car between a shop girl and hardware clerk the man with the dinner pail asks for and receives no special treatment; he pays his nickel, takes his transfer, gives up his seat to the woman with the baby and hangs by the strap like any other citizen. But when he becomes a Problem, when he drops his individual capacity and turns into Labor, especially Organized Labor, he loses the aspect of an ordinary citizen.

The change that takes place is analogous to the transformation of the civilian into the soldier. As member of a military force the individual exercises rights and privileges which, performed by a private citizen, would promptly get him into jail. When he dons the uniform and takes the oath, the soldier's status is completely changed. He is removed from the control of the civil authorities; his doings are judged by a special code; his freedom of action is limited; his standard of conduct is radically altered.

A somewhat similar change takes place when the individual ceases to be just a plain worker and, by a process of agglutination, turns into Organized Labor. As a component part of Organized Labor, he claims rights and privileges which he would not vi Foreword

d im of receiving as a common, garden-variety citizen. If he e s dinner in a restaurant, finds hair in the soup, his steak tough, tiis coffee bitter and the bill high he does not rush out, print handbills, paint signs and hire men to keep people from patronizing the place; if he, in his private capacity as an unadorned citizen, has a quarrel with his grocer or butcher because they will not knock five dollars off the monthly bill, he does not endeavor to induce all the patrons of the tradesmen to take their custom elsewhere, nor does he publish lists of the offending merchants in his paper. But as a member of Organized Labor he considers the boycott his own peculiar privilege, fights vociferously against its surrender and complains loudly when it is turned against him.

The merchant who sees his livelihood and his capital take wings because his competitor undersells him, never dreams of hiring pickets to patrol the sidewalk in front of his rival's store, yet Organized Labor claims this extraordinary privilege. Our friend across the aisle would never think of waylaying his neighbor who pays five dollars a month less rent for similar accommodations; it does not occur to him to break his neighbor's ribs, his landlord's head or to burn the offending premises. Such acts would constitute a common black crime like burglary or embezzlement. But when these identical acts are committed in the cause of Organized Labor, their character suddenly changes, they become chameleons, turn pure white and, in the opinion of our friend, are wholly justifiable and a righteous punishment for the wicked.

Of course there is a reason for the colored glasses our friend with the dinner pail wears in his collective capacity, glasses that give him a distorted picture of his relations to his fellowmen. That reason is the balance of power. Just as Belgium was given a certain extraordinary status in the family of nations, a status based upon the country's inability to protect itself against its powerful neighbors, so Labor has been given by common consent a privileged position. Because Labor was weak, because the industrial revolution brought about through the introduction of power-driven machinery left the individual worker helpless in the hand of the employer, society intervened, placed an increasing number of restrictions upon the employer's liberty of action and at the same time released Labor from the necessity of obeying certain statutes which continued to be in force as against all other elements of the population. To put it tersely, society in its own interest shackled the employer with numerous special laws while at the same time it untied the hands of Labor.

Right at this point let us remark that, had society failed to act on behalf of Labor as it did, anarchy, chaos, turmoil and bloody

Foreword .i

strife would have been the result. The special position was corded Labor not because the individual workman was intrins, - ally better entitled to it than the rest of humanity, but becaustri the bitter necessities of the moment made the action imperative and inevitable if society was to continue to exist.

But society, in extending a helping hand to Labor, in extending extraordinary rights and privileges to one element, overlooked something. It forgot to state that, in return for the extraordinary privileges, Labor should and must balance the account by assuming certain duties. The bargain was one-sided. Labor took and took, but Labor gave nothing in return for the protection it received. Labor gradually arrived at a state of mind in which it believed that it — Labor, especially Organized Labor — actually was society, that no other element counted, that the collective manual workers had a God-given right to further their group interest in any way they pleased, regardless of the welfare of society as a whole.

The best example of the result of this mental attitude is supplied by recent events in Russia.

In Russia the man who works with his hands, carrying the policy of Organized Labor everywhere to its logical conclusion, has proclaimed himself dictator. In Russia the reddist dream of the reddest radical has become reality. For a year the workers have had exclusive control not only of the political government and of the army, but of all industrial processes as well. And all the world knows by this time the results of pure and unadulterated working class control. The theoretical paradise of Karl Marx, Proudhomme and Kropotkin in actual practice turned out to be a sample of red-hot hell.

What will happen in the rest of Europe and in America when the war ceases, when the external pressure is relieved, when the temperature goes down and thirty million men suddenly are thrown back upon their own resources?

Thirty million men and their dependents, equivalent to the total population of the United States, are now being fed, clothed and housed by the belligerent governments. Who can imagine the tremendous upheaval resulting from the sudden unemployment of almost the entire working population of the United States? England by no means has the largest army, yet England is planning to distribute the process of demobilization over twelve months at least in order to forestall chaos and misery. The problem of merely getting the boys out of the trenches and back to the benches is daily assuming larger proportions.

And what will Labor do once the fighting is over?

In every belligerent nation the gigantic pressure of war has speeded up the machines, smashed union shop rules, pushed viii Foreword

aside all limitations on output. In every belligerent country female and unskilled labor in wholesale quantities has displaced the skilled mechanic And in every belligerent country scarcity of men has lifted wages to heights unknown before the war.

Perhaps the well paid woman worker, perhaps the newly trained, highly paid laborer will gladly step aside, hand the returning soldier-mechanic his old job without a struggle; it is possible that the returning veterans, glad to escape the danger and misery of the trenches, will not object strongly to the new regime of higher speed and longer hours. No trouble may arise out of these conditions, but the fixed peculiarities of human nature are bound to make a great deal of trouble the moment a wholesale reduction of the high war wages is attempted. Yet such a reduction must come. International competition, now non-existent, and unprecedented taxation will compel it.

When it comes, what will Labor do?

Nobody knows, least of all Labor itself. Yet the problem of Labor after the war is everywhere receiving deep and anxious thought. Labor has learned to handle dynamite, to eat, sleep, kill and die with it; Labor now knows the feel of its military as well as its economic power. After the war there may — or there may not — be a series of great internal disturbances similar to the Russian upheaval in every belligerent country.

For years to come the Labor problem will be the biggest, the most important question confronting the United States.

To contribute its mite towards the solution of this problem, the author undertakes in this volume to analyze and define the status of both union and unorganized workers on the Pacific Coast. For a study of this subject the Pacific Coast provides an extraordinary wealth of material. It was on the Pacific Coast that the trade unions won their first political victories in the United States; on the Pacific Slope are the only communities in which the craft unions had or have complete control over the machinery of government; on the Pacific Coast the closed-shop doctrine has won its most thoroughgoing victories, and on the Pacific Coast this doctrine has suffered its bitterest defeat. Though the highest wages in the world are paid in the Far West, it has been the scene of perhaps the bloodiest labor struggles in the country, and the problem of the drifting, itinerant worker here is more acute than in the rest of the country.

If this little book succeeds in widening the reader's horizon, if it gives him a clearer, sharper picture of the facts underlying the Labor situation, if it helps him to formulate his own judgment as to the merits of the great controversy, if it should advance the problem by one inch on the road to ultimate solution, its aims and objects will have been fulfilled.

Chapter I Why The Pacific Coast Became The Union Paradise

In September, 1916, four labor organizations with a membership less than the population of one Congressional district cracked the whip, lifted the hoop and began counting:

"One, two, thr— "

Before the count was finished, Congress leaped through the hoop.

It was an historical moment when, in obedience to an ultimatum with a time limit attached, the representatives of one hundred million people hastened to pass a law raising the wages of two hundred thousand men, already the highest paid group of workers in the world, without investigation or deliberation, threats speeding up the legislative machinery as no bonus ever speeded lathe or punch.

When I read of the panicky fear that wrung a chorus of reluctant ayes out of Congress the picture of a brakeman came back to me. He was sitting in the shade of a date palm down in the Colorado Desert, pulling on his pipe and resting while waiting for Number Nine to pass.

"Ran her up to a hundred and forty-seven bucks last month, " he volunteered by-and-by. "'Tain't so worse, I say. Helluvalot better 'n stacking alfalfa all day for two 'n a quarter. Me quit railroadin' ? What for? Best I ever did on the outside was eighty a month, an' I'd be lucky to get that if I'd quit braking now/'

There are millions of men with better education, with superior skill, men equally intelligent, equally willing and ambitious whose pay envelopes will never reach the opulence of the brakeman's check. What magic elixir lifted the earnings of this man from eighty on the outside to an average of a hundred and thirty on the inside of the railroad ?

Organization; collective bargaining; labor monopoly; the trade union.

Organizations of workingmen reach far back into antiquity. It is recorded that the union of image-makers in ancient Rome strenuously opposed the introduction of Christianity because the spread of the new religion restricted the market of the artisan's product. When the feudal system went to pieces, the craft guilds arose and flourished even in America, where the "shoomakers of Boston" organized the first guild in 1648, its charter significantly denying this organization the power of "inhancing the prices of shooes, bootes or wages." In these craft guilds the journeyman owned the meager, inexpensive tools of his trade and, through skill, industry, thrift or the employer's daughter it was easy for him to climb into the masters' ranks. The modern trade union did not come into being until the steam engine was hitched to gigantic machines and made the craftsman's hand tools worthless.

It is difficult in the twentieth century to realize the full extent of the upheaval brought about through the introduction of machine production in a handicraft age. The entire industrial world was thrown out of joint. Flourishing manufacturers by the score went to the wall because an upstart in the business with the aid of steam and a new machine was suddenly able to produce the goods at one-third of the cost. Wages of hand work were slashed to the bone to meet the machine competition. And the multiplication of the power-driven machines brought about unbridled competition among the owners of the increasing factories, forcing them to cut wages, to increase hours, to employ women and children in order to survive. Unrestricted, unregulated competition among both workers and employers, a condition which, strange to say, seemed ideal to many Americans a little while ago, brought about one of the blackest periods in modern history.

In Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire the English weavers were actually starving a century ago. The power-driven spinning frame had robbed thousands of the hand workers of their livelihood and the business depression caused by the Napoleonic wars had shut down mill after mill. Blaming the new machinery for their distress, the workers went around and smashed the hated frames; nor did the destruction cease until more than a score of the rioters, under the provisions of a special law, had been hung by their scrawny necks, until they were dead.

In this dark period of unorganized chaos men and women often worked sixteen hours out of the twenty-four; children four and five years old were forced to labor ten hours a day and longer. And this condition was not confined to the Old World. The Boston workmen in 1835 struck against the labor period stretching from dawn until dawn. In New England seventy years ago women and children worked thirteen to fourteen hours a day, lived in hovels owned by the company, ate the food sold in company stores or boarding houses and even went to church in edifices company-owned.

In these days when Congress humbly carries out the mandate of labor leaders it is even more difficult to imagine a period in which the laborer could not move out of his district without official permission, in which all political power was reserved exclusively for the privileged classes. The English artisans did not obtain the ballot until 1867. In Germany universal manhood suffrage came into being in 1871, but the English agricultural laborer had to wait fourteen years longer — till 1885 — before he was admitted into the voting booth. Lest we militant democrats preen ourselves too arrogantly, it should be added that the workman in America did not begin to vote in the Northern states until 1830. Before that time he was in the same position officially and legally that the negro laborer of the South occupies unofficially today.

Verily, labor has climbed to the top of the heap with giant's strides in the last eighty years!

The Sherman Anti-Trust law is still in full force and effect; the common law provision against conspiracies in restraint of trade, dating from the time of Edward I, is still binding upon industry and trade, but labor has been expressly relieved from the necessity of observing either. In the discussion of labor's position, of labor's demands and methods, it is important to remember these exemptions, to realize that society has the right to demand a return for the extraordinary privileges it has bestowed upon labor organizations.

In the United States the growth and development of labor unions has been continuous for more than a hundred years, but this development differed in many important features from similar movements in Europe and Australia. Perhaps the principal distinguishing feature of the American movement is the tendency to create an "aristocracy of labor," to widen the gulf between the mass of unskilled and unorganized workers on the one hand and the comparatively small number of skilled and thoroughly organized mechanics on the other hand. The best example of this internal class division is provided by the railroad workers. The skilled and organized train men enjoy a compensation ranging from $100 to #250 a month while the section "hands" have to be satisfied with pay ranging from #40 to $60. The unionized bricklayer of the United States earns $6 in eight hours; the laborer who mixes the bricklayer's mortar worked nine hours and earned only two dollars. No such class stratification within the ranks of labor has taken place in Europe. The English bricklayer and the building laborer work the same number of hours and their compensation is not very far apart; if the bricklayer's wage is, say, thirty cents an hour, the laborer's will be fifteen cents or perhaps even a little more.

Immigration has been the cause of this growth of a class within a class. The newest race of immigrants was ever willing to perform the hardest tasks for the lowest pay. They "scabbed" on the earlier arrivals. Men from northern Europe underbid the native worker until they were Americanized. Slavs underbid the Germans, the Irish and the Scandinavians. The Slavs, in turn, found the Jews elbowing their way into their jobs, and now the Jew, in the clothing trade for instance, is yielding before the Italians.

Furthermore, there was open to the American labor leader an avenue for the improvement of his position practically unknown in Europe. Through his actual or imaginary control of large blocks of vote the American union general was — and is — constantly tempted to go into politics, to abandon the meager legitimate rewards growing out of the field of organized labor and to climb after the large, juicy plums dangling invitingly in the foliage of city, state or national politics.

For more than twenty years after the discovery of gold California had no labor "problem" in the present sense of the term. Owing to the isolation of the Pacific Coast and the resultant heavy cost of importing both goods and labor, the employer and his workers had things their own way. The country was rich, growing like a mushroom, money was abundant and competition was practically non-existent. If the workmen demanded an addition to their already high wages, the manufacturer or the contractor granted it readily and passed the cost on to his customers. For decades after the beginning of labor unions on the Pacific Coast their relations with the employers were free of the bitter antagonism that causes the two factions to glare at one another with suspicion and hatred today. Only once in a while, when the demands of the unions became exorbitant, did the employers fight to a finish.

A notable example of such an exorbitant demand is the strike in San Francisco of the bakers' union in 1863. The organized bakery workers decided that it was time for another raise. They knew that the master bakers were helpless. It would take months and cost enormous sums to import new workers by stage-coach or by way of Panama and in the meantime the city had to have bread. So they demanded an increase of #35 a month and struck. They got the money, but the master bakers gritted their teeth and stuck their heads together. Six months later a few score German bakers arrived from Hamburg. Bakery wages immediately did some fancy ground and lofty tumbling.

While the blue smoke from the campfires of the gold-seekers was still rising above the plains, unions of printers, carpenters and other trades were organized in San Francisco and Sacramento. Their demands encountered little opposition. In the early days everybody worked with his hands, everybody hoped to be rich day after tomorrow, everybody gladly recognized labor's right to good pay. When labor in 1853 demanded the ten-hour day,

The Union PaIiadise the California legislature passed the law almost without opposition. As early as 1867 the building trades of San Francisco obtained the eight-hour day. The first free employment bureau anywhere in the United States was opened in San Francisco in 1868. When a new state constitution was hammered out in

Denis Kearney, first of the labor agitators on the Pacific Coast, and foe of the Chinese

1879, one-third of the builders were delegates elected by the Workingmen's Party. As soon as labor demanded the exclusion of the Chinese, the public rallied to its support. The worker's right to organize, to demand ample pay, reasonable hours and good working conditions was conceded.

6 Union Labctr in Peace and War

So it came about that the Pacific Coast, more especially California and San Francisco, became the focal point of the American trade union movement, the locality in which organized labor reached the zenith of power, wealth and influence. But the typical employers' association of the Pacific Coast resembled a shrapnel shell; in the very act of downing its opponent it resolved itself into its original fragments and disappeared.

The Union Pacific was completed in 1869. Thousands of men employed in its building streamed into San Francisco; other thousands came from the East and with them came trainload after trainload of Eastern commodities manufactured by men receiving far less than the standard California wages. In addition the Nevada mines began to decrease their output and, when silver was demonetized, the financial structure of the Far West swayed in the furious blast. San Francisco was overrun with hordes of unemployed men, many of them hungry. But they did not lay the chief blame for their hunger, for the decreasing wages and increasing hours on the employers. They turned the vials of their wrath on the Chinese instead, listened to the first of the outstanding labor leaders, Dennis Kearney, while he denounced coolie labor on the sand lots, and their distress prompted Henry George, then in San Francisco, to seek the solution of all social ills in the abolition of private ownership of land. In their agitation against coolie labor, against land monopoly, against corruption in public life, against the domination of politics by public-service corporations, they had the sympathy and support of the public, of the majority of employers.

In the decade between 1880 and 1890 the Chinese were excluded, business conditions improved, Andrew Furuseth founded the Coast Seamen's Union that was to make him famous, and organized labor in California took hold of a new weapon, the use and abuse of which was to have far-reaching consequences.

That new weapon was the boycott. Aggravated by the sympathetic strike, it so irritated the employers, inflicted upon them so much unnecessary loss, that they combined and inflicted upon the unions a crushing defeat. The introduction of the boycott ushered in the era of violence, dynamiting, of "class consciousness" and direct action still in crimson bloom.

The boycott is a method of punishment. What is more natural than the act of a union which forbids its members to purchase the product of, say, a cigar manufacturer who will not accede to the "closed shop"? What is more natural than the act of a union which, to inflict greater loss, to bring greater pressure to bear upon a stubborn employer, asks that all other unions likewise penalize members who buy this employer's goods? And from this extension of the pressure it is an easy and logical step to appeal to the general public for aid and sympathy, to proclaim the misdeeds of the offending employer on handbills, posters, transparencies, to post in front of his establishment pickets charged with the duty of shooing trade away from the "Unfair" house.

To Pacific Coast residents the boycott seems as natural, as inevitable and commonplace a phenomenon as freckles on a boy's nose. Most of us are so familiar with its manifestations that we no longer notice the posters, pickets and handbills. Yet I believe most of us would open our eyes very wide, would stop, look and listen intently if the retailers' association of Portland, Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco should throw picket lines across the entrance of Meier & Frank's department store, warn pedestrians against patronizing Bullock's or the Emporium and have sandwich men parade in front of the Bon Marche urging the public to stay out of the store because it was "unfair to the organized retailers." We did not become very indignant when the union of retail clerks during a wage controversy endeavored to bankrupt the chain of Owl drug stores along the Pacific Coast. Suppose the competitors of the Owl stores used the same tactics as the striking employees; suppose every group of merchants hurt by the lower sale prices of another group should employ pickets, handbills, posters and sandwich men in an effort to destroy the business of their competitors. The result would be incessant strife and chaos, a complete disorganization of the orderly processes of production and distribution.

In the beginning the Pacific Coast unions had used the boycott to discourage the use of Chinese-made goods by organized labor and its friends. It was the fight of California's trade unions against oriental labor that gave birth to the union label when the few remaining white cigar-makers in the sixties placed a white poster on every box of their product to distinguish it from the "yellow" output. The union label was effective. So was the boycott. So effective was the boycott that it seemed a shame not to use this weapon against neutrals to make them fall in line against the enemy. And so arose the secondary boycott, the classic example of which is to be found in the trade-union blockade of a certain Vancouver Island colliery in 1891.

The miners of this colliery, having struck for shorter hours and against the company-store graft, appealed to the Federal Trades Council in San Francisco for help. It was given willingly. The Council at once declared a boycott against the "unfair" coal and appointed a committee to see that the consumption of this fuel in California was reduced. The job was done thoroughly. Purchasers of the "unfair" coal all over California were spotted, bombarded with pleas, demands and threats. If they did not yield, if they persisted in buying the boycotted product, they in turn were placed under the ban, loyal union men were commanded, the general public was exhorted, not to patronize the "unfair" establishment. Thus one primary boycott might, like a redwood tree with its circle of scions, surround itself with a dozen offshoots. In the case of the "unfair" British Columbia coal the striking miners settled their differences with the colliery late in the year, but the boycotts in California continued merrily for months after the original bone of contention had been buried.

Unfortunately, the boycott, like the proprietary nostrum, cured nothing. An overdose of the boycott medicine merely aggravated functional disorders. It irritated the employers, scared the merchants, produced a feeling of uneasiness throughout the commercial community. Nobody knew when and where the next boycott blow was to fall; no one felt secure in signing a contract for supplies, raw material or merchandise.

In 1891 the boycott mania aroused the employers to action. They organized the Board of Manufacturers and Employers of California, the first central association of its kind on the Pacific Coast, raised a fund and tossed their collective sombrero into the ring. The excessive use of the boycott had driven them into the trenches, a fact shown plainly in the "Manifesto on the Boycott" issued by the organization.

"The manufacturers do not complain of wages," says the Manifesto. "... If permitted to do business in peace the manufacturers could pay these wages and prosper. It is the element of uncertainty that kills. . . . The boycott is the crying evil of our times. . . . A boy cotter is in all respects an industrial wrecker. He is a highwayman. His single and simple proposition is, 'stand and deliver.' "

The employers' association did not question the right of the workers to organize and to obtain the best possible terms through collective bargaining; neither did the association endeavor to bar union members from employment, but it did insist that the arbitrary action of the labor leaders, the declaration of the boycott on flimsy pretexts, the calling of strikes upon the slightest provocation, must be stopped. On these issues the employers went to war.