xau : -HASffiSS ROBB1NS ; = -Nero $ork ?tate College of Agriculture JU C$atneU InioersUB Jtl|i«a, ». 1. HD4901.R C r e " UniVerSi,yLibrary ill!?!™ 1 ™!! movem en* and the farmer 3 1924 013 720 838 — 7 rw\ S. a Cornell University WJj Library F3^ The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013720838 THE FARMER'S BOOKSHELF Edited by KENYON L. BUTTERFIELD THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER BY HAYES ROBBINS NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY RAHWAY, n. J EDITOR'S PREFACE The main object of a great farmers' organization is doubtless to represent the interests of the farmers.. But it has, or should have, another purpose almost equally important, to serve as a medium of education of the farmers concerning all questions of national import. One of these questions of first-class importance is the labor question. No matter what one's views may be about the policies or possibilities of organized labor, the labor movement itself is as inevitable as the seed- time and harvest with the farmer. It cannot be ig- nored. Therefore, it should be understood. I am inclined to think that the farmers have tended toward either a general opposition to the labor union idea or to feel that it is not much of their affair. But the very success of farmers' organizations in the last few years brings the farmers face to face with the labor question as well as other problems of like impor- tance. Now no question can be faced fairly unless its main outlines are clearly understood. It has seemed, therefore, that a real contribution might be made if we could have a book in this Farmer's Bookshelf that would describe sympathetically but dispassionately and accurately, just what this labor movement is. It is believed that this book will meet the need: It is written in simple, direct style and, best of all, it aims to tell v vi EDITOR'S PREFACE the truth', to show how and why workingmen have organized for the last hundred years, why they do the things they do, how the remedies they have tried ac- tually work in practice, and what the much-used phrase "industrial democracy" really means. There is a con- cise statement of the various branches of the movement here and in Europe, who its leaders are, and the latest programs of trade unionism, socialism, the I. W. W., and communism. The big central question of all is gone into in plain terms, and in the light of facts, whether a rising standard of living for labor is really to the cost and injury of the rest of the public or a necessary part of the general prosperity and progress. The author, Mr. Hayes Eobbins, has for many years been in close touch with the labor movement and he has written freely and acceptably in this field. He has had the confidence of both employers and labor organizations as is evidenced by his direction of the Civic Federation of "New England, which was devoted to the betterment of relations between employers and employees and which had a membership including the heads of most of the leading New England industries and practically every labor organization of conse- quence. This book should be a valuable and practical help for the Grange lecture hour, for community study clubs, for debates and for supplementary reading in agricultural high schools, as well as for individual reading and study. Kenton L. Bttttebeield. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I How the Labor Question Comes to the Fakm . 3 II If the Farmer Wobked fob Wages ,. 7 III Labob's Long Tbatt, ,. . 15 IV American Tbade Unionism 31 V Radical Movements in the United States . 53 VI European Labob Movements To-day .... 66 VII International Labob Relations ... .88 VIII What Does Labob Want? 97 IX The Public Sitting in Judgment . . ., . 113 X Remedies, Old and New ........ ,. 138 XI Industrial Democracy ...,.: ,, . . 167 XII What Shall We Do About It? . . ,. . .178 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER HOW THE LABOR QUESTION" COMES TO THE FARM Eveey farmer who engages a carpenter or painter, or visits the blacksmith, or pays monthly wages to farm help, meets the labor question face to face. It comes up to him in a hundred other ways, some readily seen, others not so clear. In everything he buys — his cloth- ing, groceries, tools, stock feed — the labor cost is the main item in the making of the price. Whenever he pays the freight bill on a shipment of his products to market he thinks of the wages of railroad men. It meets him at another turn. Young men, raised in the country, do not stay to work the farms. Good help is hard to get; the farmer must compete for it, against the higher wages and shorter working day of the cities and mill towns. In other words, the labor conditions of the outside world come immediately back to the farm in dollars and cents, but not in higher costs only. The immense wage rolls paid every week in the cities and mill towns are in great part the farmer's market. He does not need to be told what this means. When the market is far distant, help may be plentiful and the young men may stay on the farms, because it is difficult to get away, but the labor advan- tage disappears in the long freight haul, commissions and selling expenses. The same industrial centers 3 4 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER that make the farmer's help question harder, as they come nearer to him, mean also a vast population close at home that buys farm products and does not raise them. The hiring and keeping of farm help is a problem upon which the farmer himself can give more informa- tion than the books afford. Industrial labor is another matter. The farm scatters labor, the factory draws it together, and gives us a problem of its own with a his- tory of its own. In that history the reasons appear for the great organized movements which have grown up in every modern country, and the reasons also, which do not commonly show on the surface, for most of the bitterly disputed issues and practices in present-day relations between workingmen and employers. We are accustomed to think of the whole matter quite too much as a thing apart. Merely in naming it the "labor problem" we set it. off as something far removed from every-day life, a matter of endless complicated disputes, lockouts and strikes, to be settled by courts- or police. That is one of the outer sides of the labor problem: another outer side is a commonplace world of industry at peace which seldom gets a newspaper head- line. But the inside of the labor problem any man may find in himself. In his own necessities and motives, in his ambition for something more or better than that he already has, are the roots of all that gives rise to a labor movement or any point to arguments on wages and hours, on trade unions and shop rules, on plans of social reconstruction. And in the modern world these roots have grown HOW LABOR QUESTION COMES TO FARM 5 and spread into a great industrial Fact. The labor movement is here, and is not to be escaped. It knows what it wants, and why it grows stronger with all oppo- sition, and it has the rest of us at a disadvantage be- cause we do not. What it asks of us first is the easiest of all its demands to grant, but in some ways the most important — a patient attempt to understand it, broadly and fairly, as one would wish one's own special difficul- ties in the making of a living to be understood. And it is a request that no man with anything at stake in the industrial world he lives in — and who has not? — can quite afford to ignore. It is as possible for citizens of some one occupation to do their own largest interest serious harm by a mis- judged attitude towards another industrial group as it is to ruin a field with the wrong fertilizer or an orchard by neglect. Farm and factory are bound in- separably together. Men who work at the bench or loom and men who work on the land are citizens of one community. What each may do in industry or in pol- itics can and does powerfully affect the welfare of the other. The farmer who has come to see what this means will take the time, as a matter of ordinary business judg- ment if for no larger reason, to know what this indus- trial labor movement actually is, how and why it arose, what its aims are for to-day and for to-morrow, the reasons for tbe things it does, the effects upon all of us of whatever it has accomplished thus far, what, if anything, he has in common with it, and whether he ought to attempt to destroy it as many have attempted 6 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER before or to cooperate where he can and oppose where he must. It is to help towards this end, if possible, that the story is here related of the industrial labor movement as it is, the' things it believes in from the wage-earner's own viewpoint, the things it is working for, and what we may expect of it in the years next ahead. n IF THE FAEMER WORKED FOR WAGES These are the same differences of opinion on the labor question among farmers as among other citizens — busi- ness men, politicians, clergymen, educators. One nat- urally expects employers to be hostile to trade unions, for instance, but there are in almost every industry important concerns which have accepted the union for many years as the most practical method, as they see it, of dealing with workingmen in large numbers. WHAT DO EAEMEES THINK OF LABOR ? The leading farm organizations have taken unlike i positions on the subject. The Farmer-Labor Party is an attempt to unite wage-earners and farmers in a political movement, of aims apparently too radical to attract at present a large following. A number of farmers' associations, meeting at the call of the National Board of Farm Organizations in April, 1918, adopted a "Win the War Program" in the course of which it was declared "that the interests of all workers are essentially the same, that the apparent differences which separate those who work on farms from those who work in industry are temporary and superficial, and that it is the clear duty of these two greatest divisions of our 8 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER people to work together for the common welfare and general good." The National Grange, on the other hand, sees very little common ground for the farmer and the labor movement. It declared at its Boston meeting, in 1920, that increased wages and decreased hours of industrial workers "influence farm wages and farm hours in the same way, and still further decrease farm production, and increase farm costs," besides adding to the cost of distribution "which in turn is paid by the consumers." Further: "The National Grange insists that no settle- ment of industrial controversies can be fairly made without taking into account the effect of such settle- ment on the greatest of all industries — agriculture." Collective bargaining was favored, but not union-shop contracts on the part of industrial workers. A critical attitude, not necessarily hostile, is also taken by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest and most widely distributed of all the farm organizations. Eesolutions adopted at its national con- ferences in 1919 and 1920 favor "a cooperative attitude toward all movements promoting the welfare of Ameri- can institutions" and recognize "the right of any and every class of our people to associate themselves for material benefit," but maintain that "a large factor in the high cost of living is the curtailment of produc- tion through short hours, lessened efficiency of labor and strikes." The right of every citizen is asserted "to the full and unhampered privilege of disposing of his labor or the products thereof as he may individually desire." IF THE FARMER WORKED FOR WAGES 9 It is clear of course what the chief objections to the labor movement are, in the minds of the f ramers of these resolutions. They are the objections oftenest raised in discussions of the subject everywhere. Are they based on a right statement of the facts ? Do all labor organ- izations practise the methods criticized, or do the abuses come mainly of special causes and traits of character found in every human association? Does it follow necessarily that high wages and a limited working day mean high costs and high prices for the farmer and for everybody else ? The workingman at any rate is fairly entitled to be heard on these matters. They are as important to him as the difficulties and needs of agriculture are important to the farmer, who often has reason to feel as keenly as does the wage-earner that the rest of the community knows little of his side of the case and takes little trouble to judge it fairly. The idea of better prices for farm products gets as little public sympathy, as a rule, as that of better wages for labor. It is, in fact, a common protest of farm organizations and the farm press that the public does not understand agricultural conditions and is opposed in advance to anything that seems likely to cost it something. What is most needed, in working out our relations in industry as they must be worked out if democracy is to endure, is a willingness to put one's self in the other man's place. If people who are not farmers, for 10 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER instance, would seriously attempt to see matters from the standpoint of the man who makes his living on the land, with his crop risks, his market uncertainties, his help difficulties, his early and late hours, his taxes, his high interest rates, the struggle to "make both ends meet," it is probable they would get a quite different idea of the needs of agriculture, of why the farmer de- mands certain constructive measures suited to new con- ditions. And this is exactly what the wage-earner asks of the farmer, as of the whole community. It does not necessarily mean agreeing with all of his demands or assuming that all of his methods are justified. It does mean a willingness to see what lies back of his efforts, to acknowledge that he' is acting, according to his experience and within his limitations, from the same human motives that govern us all. FARM LIFE AND FACTOBY LIFE From the standpoint of farm life on its harder side the mill worker with his regular hours and regular pay often seems to have much the better of it. There is another side of the picture to remember, which accounts in part for many things workingmen contend for, and which the farmer in the nature of the case has little opportunity to see at first hand. The city wage-worker as a rule is a rent-payer. It is true of the great majority that there is no piece of earth and no roof which he calls his own. If he is a man of family his savings are seldom large, and if he loses his job he must "move on." There are no stored crops IF THE FAEMEE WOEKED FOE WAGES 11 in the cellar, no fuel in the shed, no stock in the barn, to tide over a time of misfortune. Practically his all, for himself and those dependent upon him, is staked on his ability to hold his job. The business conditions that make or abolish his job are beyond his control. While the job lasts all may go well, when it is gone all is gone. If sickness or disability exhaust what sav- ings there may be, and the rent is unpaid, again he must move on — but where ? He does not know the drawbacks and hardships of the farmer's "job," but he sees at any rate that it is the farmer's own, that he has not always before him the possibility of discharge on a moment's notice, or indefinite lay-off. The farmer's ownership of the farm or his equity in it, with his stock and tools, are his cap- ital, his anchor to windward. There are many resources to fall back upon before actual destitution comes. For the wage-laborer, in the ranks of the majority, it may be one step from loss of employment to the bread line. His muscle and skill are for the most part his only capital, and it is not capital that can be stored up for to-morrow if it is not used to-day. Earning time lost is his crop failure, never made up. Putting yourself in the workingman's place means also to accept the idea of working for another instead of for one's self. To the normally minded farmer, prob- ably, the sense of independence, of working on his own land with his own tools and according to his own ideas, is one of the chief compensations for the hard labor and relatively limited opportunities of farm life. 'Along with it goes the satisfaction of knowing that improve- 12 THE LABOK MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEB ments made to his property, as opportunity offers, are additions to its value. The results of his planning and labor are constantly before his eyes. The product of the mill-worker is gone the instant his hand leaves it; it is one of the many parts of a finished article which he never sees and could not possibly identify as his own. The conditions ol life in all too many mill towns, especially of the poorer workmen renting small tene- ments in crowded streets, are to be borne in mind in judging their state of mind and some of the things they do. For it must be remembered that the great major- ity of wage-earners are not the highly paid workmen in building trades and other skilled crafts, or the rail- road engineers on favorable runs, whose wages are com- monly quoted in the newspapers. The farmer in modest circumstances who reads of western "farm barons" rid- ing about in high-powered automobiles knows very well that this is not the custom nor within the power of most men engaged in agriculture. Quite naturally he protests at the wrong impression given of conditions in his industry as a whole. It should not be difficult for him to understand the feeling of the workingman who sees the wage rates in exceptional occupations quoted as evidence that wage-earners generally are over- paid and deserve no public sympathy in efforts to main- tain or improve their position. WHY WAGE-EABNEES AND FAEMEES OEGANIZE The workingman turns to organization to afford him something of the defense against ill fortune, something IF THE FARMER WORKED FOR WAGES 13 of the means of bettering his condition, that land and a home afford the farmer. The bulwark which even a small capital might give him he attempts to erect, so far as possible, in the power he finds in common action with fellow workmen to bargain for his labor on some- thing like equal terms. To say that this in itself is a perfectly natural and in many ways a wise course for him to take is not of course to defend the entire pro- gram of the labor movement, but the farmer to-day can appreciate as never before why any great industrial group should feel the need of organization. He has come to feel it himself in late years, in a remarkable degree, and he is meeting much the same criticism and objections to his special program that the workingman long since grew accustomed to. Farmers have sometimes pursued the policy of with- holding certain great staples — wheat, cotton, fruit, to- bacco — from overstocked markets for a time ; they have been indignant at criticisms of this course as an attempt to "corner" necessities of life. They have heard their cooperative buying and selling experiments described as "farmers' trusts," and the effort to legalize collective bargaining for farmers as "class legislation." It is outside our purpose to pass on the merits of these pol- icies. The point is, merely, that it should not be dif- ficult for the farmer to put himself in the place of the workingman who hears his union described as a "labor trust" seeking to "corner" the labor supply. It may actually be that, in some cases, but there still is room for thought of the actual objects he has in mind and the conditions he is obliged to face. 14 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER There is of course no exact parallel between the pro- grams of these two great industrial groups. ~No doubt there is more in some of the policies of each to justify criticism than in their deeper purposes, but this at least should be plain. The problems farmer and wage- worker face in the common necessity of making a living have enough points of likeness that the obligation lies fairly upon each, before passing judgment upon any proposal or aim of the other, to study it with open mind, attempting to see the conditions as the other is obliged to — and this on the common ground of good citizenship. It is not a simple matter at best to weigh justly the claims of other men, or the things they do. It is all but impossible without some knowledge of what came be- fore, perhaps in slow accumulation through many years. How, then, did the labor movement grow up, and why ? It is no dry record of facts and figures but an intensely interesting chapter in human progress. Ill LABOK'S LONG TRAIB There has been a labor question ever since human be- ings emerged from slavery and began to work for wages. It is not entirely as a flight of fancy that Moses is sometimes named as the first labor leader, the refusal of his people to make bricks without straw as the first labor dispute, and Pharaoh's pursuit as the first at-* tempt of government to prohibit strikes ! There was industrial peace of course when men were bought and sold with the land. Labor advocates are quite within the facts in saying that just as soon as a man gains the right to a voice in what he shall do with his own hand and brain the field is open for argument with any other man who seeks his help, and a labor question is born. Before the beginnings of primitive manufacture in England, some seven centuries ago, the only labor ques- tion was the amount of produce to be paid the lord of the manor for the use of an allotment of land. It was a farm workers' question, and it was decided exclu- sively by the lord. There was no issue of wages, much less of hours: the right to organize did not exist. All land workers except free tenants were in some manner bound to the soil. 15 16 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER EABMEBS THE FIEST WAGE-EABNEES The first wage-earners in Anglo-Saxon civilization, forming a distinct class, were farm workers — the cottars, of medieval England. Allotted too little land to pro- vide a living, they hired themselves out for wages to help cultivate the lands of nobles and prosperous free tenants. And the first labor problem worthy the name arose on a question of wages of these "farmers." The scarcity of help after the Great Plague, in 1348, led to a sudden and astonishing rise of wages — not less than fifty per cent. So unheard of a thing was more disturbing to the simple industrial life of the time than the remarkable wage advances following the world war have been to ours. A FAEM-WOBKEBS' STEIKE The first labor unions, but in no modern sense, were combinations of farm workers and tenants in this same period following the Plague. They were mob attempts to resist the nobles in their effort to hold them to the land or to the payment of their ancient dues in produce. And the first "nation-wide strike" was entirely a farm- workers' uprising, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, under the lead of Wat Tyler. There is an oddly familiar sound in the preachings of some of the forerunners of this outbreak — "agitators" like Wiklif and Ball. The wrongs and hardships they denounced were those of farmers rather than of indus- trial workers. "Good people," said John Ball, "things LABOE'S LONG TEAIL 17 will never be well in England so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what right are they whom we call lords greater than we? On what grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? They have leisure and fine houses : we have pain and labor, and the wind and rain in the fields. And yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their estate." The Peasants' Revolt was a more violent affair than the most riotous of labor strikes in our day. There was great disorder and loss of life. It was put down with an iron hand, but the ideas which underlay it had taken deep root and could not be stamped out. Within fifty years, villeinage and serfage in the old sense prac- tically had disappeared from English life. It was a desperate and wasteful struggle, measured in immediate cost, but in the longer view a milestone in the advance of civilization. LAWS TO SUPPRESS FARM WORKERS The first laws to suppress labor demands were chiefly against farm workers. The Statutes of Laborers (1350)' provided that whoever asked more than the old rate of wages should be imprisoned ; those who ran away from the land to which they were attached were to be branded with hot irons. None of these measures succeeded either in keeping wages down or in preventing laborers from deserting to jobs where the new wage rates were paid. More than two hundred years later, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, a very different plan of controlling labor by law was put into effect. Wage rates were fixed 18 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER at regular intervals by justices of tlie peace, in quarter sessions. Both employers and employees were bound to abide by them. Possibly the germ idea of proposals in our own time for compulsory arbitration and indus- trial courts is to be found in this famous statute of 1563. Its professed object was to guarantee laborers at least a living wage, at a time of widespread distress ; the actual effect was to put the control of wages into the hands of the landed proprietors and employers. It has been described as "a conspiracy concocted by the law and carried out by the parties interested in its success." 1 At the same time a "conspiracy" of work- ingmen to improve their condition by uniting or agree- ing "not to do their work but at a certain price" was prohibited, under penalty of the pillory and loss of an ear. This time legal regulation proved more effective. Thousands of acres of land were being enclosed for sheep raising, and great numbers of farm laborers were searching the country for work. In the towns the old guilds were decaying. Both farm workers and artisans were forbidden to organize in self-defense. Wages, measured in purchasing power, declined upon the whole for a century and a half. Pauperism steadily increased, and the attempts to relieve it by poor laws led to still other abuses. It was a common practice, for instance, for employers in one parish or another, through the quar- ter-sessions courts, to reduce wages to such a point that it was necessary to grant to laborers more poor relief than the parish could afford to pay. The deficit, under 1 Six Centuries of Work and Wages (Rogers), p. 398. LABOK'S LONG TKAIL 19 the law, could then be assessed on neighboring parishes. Here again, farm workers chiefly were the sufferers. CBAITSMEIT AND GUILDS It is a curious thing that although the first working- men to create a "labor problem" were peasants — farm- ers — the first workingmen in manufactures were not wage-earners at all. They were independent craftsmen, working in their homes, buying their own materials and selling their own products, very much as the farmer tills his own land and sells his own crops to-day. Each group, going back to the industrial life of old England, has occupied very nearly the position of the other. Still, the old craft guilds had some points of likeness to the trade union of to-day. It is true, the early weavers and carpenters and shoemakers did not work for employers. They dealt with their own customers, but in their guilds were the roots of several ideas com- mon to modern labor organization, as well as some others which might well play a larger part than they ordinarily do to-day. For instance, it is said of the fifteenth century guilds, when every trade pursued by as many as twenty men had a guild of its own, that they "attempted to suppress the production of wares by irresponsible persons who were not members of the craft." Bad work was punished, and night work pro- hibited because it led to poor work. A member was supposed to work not only for his own advantage "but for the reputation and good of his trade — 'for the hon- our of the good folks of such misteries.' . . . The guild 20 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER also took care to secure a supply of competent workmen for the future (and at the same time to restrain compe- tition) by training a limited number of young people in its particular industry. . . . The guild, moreover, exercised some kind of moral control over its members, and secured their good behavior, thus forming an effec- tive branch of the social police. On the other hand, it had many of the characteristics of a benevolent society, providing against sickness and death among those be- longing to it." 1 Six hundred years ago there was practically no such thing as working in a shop for wages, under an em- ployer. By the time of Queen Elizabeth many an Eng- lish village had one or more little factories, usually con- nected with the home of the craftsman operating it. It was still hand work mainly, under this "domestic sys- tem," and the master worked alongside his journeyman. Wages were poor and the conditions often far from ideal, but in this close contact between employer and working- man there was very generally a sense of mutual interest and obligation which all but disappeared with the com- ing of machinery. Only in recent years have there been serious efforts in important industries to restore it. COMING OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM It is almost exactly a century and a half since the first of the great inventions which have made the labor prob- lem as we know it a matter no longer chiefly of farmers and farm laborers but of industrial wage-earners. Five 1 Industry in England (Gibbins), p. 95. LABOK'S LONG TEAIL 21 years before the American Revolution the Englishman Hargreaves patented in 1770 a spinning jenny which enabled him to spin eight times as much yarn at a time as before. Within the next ten years came the still more efficient spinning frames of Arkwright and Crompton, and in 1786 Cartwright's power loom. In the same year Watt's crude steam engine was first used in a factory. The old order passed away. Neither the American Revolution nor the French so changed the future of civilization and the relations of men, both in industry and politics, as these little noticed inventions. At first and for many years they reduced the wage-earner to abject helplessness. A gulf opened between him and his employer, who very often now was merely an ab- sentee owner of the business. In his place came the overseer, charged with the task of getting the last ounce of available working power out of the operatives. Women and children could be Used now in factories as well as men, and they were so used in great numbers, at wages so pitiful that it soon required the earnings of an entire family, working fourteen to sixteen hours a day, to provide the meanest of food and shelter, FACTOEY SLAVEEY The picture given us in many accounts and official reports of the time, of the miserable lot of these unpro- tected laborers of the early factory system, is a terrible one. Manufacturers arranged with the workhouse overseers for supplies of pauper children. They were 22 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEE brought to the factory districts, sometimes by regular traffickers who kept them, often in dark cellars, until the mill-owners could examine them and judge of their strength and endurance, "exactly aa did the slave- dealers in the American markets," says the historian Gibbins : 1 After that the children -were simply at the mercy of their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to feed or clothe properly, because they were so cheap, and their places could be so easily sup- plied. . . . Their treatment was most inhuman. The hours of their labor were limited only by exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly applied to force continued work. Illness was no excuse: no child was accounted ill till it was positively impossible to force him or her to continue to labour, in spite of all the cruelty which the ingenuity of a tormentor could suggest. Children were often worked sixteen hours a day, by day and by night. Even Sunday was used as a convenient time to clean the machinery. The author of The History of the Factory Movement writes: "In stench, in heated rooms, amid the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fin- gers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment, invented by the sharp- ened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness." They were fed upon the coarsest and cheapest food, often with the same as that served out to the pigs of their master. They slept by turns and in relays, in filthy beds which were never 'Industry in England, pp. 389-390. LABOK'S LONG TEAIL 23 cool; for one set of children were sent to sleep in them as soon as the others had gone off to their daily or nightly toil. There was often no discrimination of sexes; and disease, misery, and vice grew as in a hotbed of contagion. Some of these miserable beings tried to run away. To prevent their doing so, those suspected of this tendency had irons riveted on their ankles, with long links reach- ing up to the hips, and were compelled to work and sleep in these chains, young women and girls, as well as boys, suffering this brutal treatment. Many died, and were buried secretly at night in some desolate spot, lest people should notice the number of the graves; and many com- mitted suicide. The catalogue of cruelty and misery is too long to recite here; it may be read in the Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice, or in the pages of the Blue-books of the beginning of this century, in which even the methodical and dry language of official docu- ments is startled into life by the misery it has to relate. So late as the '40's, by the same authority: 1 'We hear of children and young people in factories overworked and beaten as if they were slaves; of diseases and distortions found only in manufacturing districts; of filthy, wretched homes, where people huddled together like wild beasts; we hear of girls and women working underground in the dark recesses of the coal-mines, drag- ging loads of coal in cars in places where no horses could go, and harnessed and crawling along the subterranean pathways like beasts of burden. Everywhere we find cruelty and oppression. . . . Freedom they had in name; 1 Page 423. 24 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE EAEMEE freedom to starve and die ; but not freedom to speak, still less to act, as citizens of a free state. Such conditions cannot be explained entirely upon the ground that greed had suddenly made brutes of English manufacturers as a class. They were men of the same stamp and ancestry who had lived, in the main, in fair and friendly relation with their helpers in the domestic industries for hundreds of years. But the enormous and unaccustomed wealth machinery was bringing to these men blinded most of them to every consideration except that of profits, particularly as they felt themselves justified in this incredible inhumanity on the best of authority. By the standard economic teaching of the time labor must be cheap — the cheaper the better — if England were to win the commercial su- premacy of the world. To the typical business man of the period no aim could be higher than that, espe- cially as h^e saw the lion's share of the benefits of ex- pansion coming directly to himself. From that day to this there have been employers who have shaped their course upon much the same idea. The fact that low wages do not always mean low labor cost, but very often just the opposite, was seen by almost nobody and is not seen by everybody to-day. For more than a century the doctrine of low wages and a long working day stood as a first maxim of business success. On the strength of it, every attempt to raise wages or reduce the hours of labor was bitterly fought. LABOR'S LONG TRAIL 25 GBOWTH OF CLASS HATBBD It is little wonder that workingmen under these cir- cumstances grew to think of the entire employing class as its natural enemy. The early German socialists had no trouble in making out a strong case, for if it were true that profits depended on keeping wages down and working human beings to the limit of endurance, the only hope for labor on the face of the thing would be to abolish capitalism entirely. Socialist and communist doctrines had their rise and first great wave of popu- larity, as one might expect, in the era before the rise of organized labor on the one hand and of competition on the other obliged capitalism to base its own success less and less upon the power to exploit, more and more upon a division of benefits with the community. However, only a fraction of the working-class population under- stood and followed the extreme radical teachings, even with the bitterness of early factory life to goad them. For all practical purposes the wage-earner was help- less. What was to take the place of his old relation with the employer, with some approach at least to equality in bargaining power, now that he no longer counted as an individual but as a part of the new power mechanism merely, to be bought as cheaply as possible, used up and discarded as. machinery is scrapped when it begins to lose efficiency? What was left for him ? The more enterprising could see only the chance that by acting together they might be able to compel some recognition as human beings. Where no notice would be taken of a single laborer, 26 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER many unitedly refusing to work unless conditions were made at least endurable might be able to stop this degra-^ dation which bid fair to force English working people into a condition even worse than that of the serfs of the middle ages. EAELT LABOE UNIONS Unions of wage-earners were not entirely new. They had existed in some trades long before the factory sys- tem, and were distinct from the old craft guilds. Eng- lish commerce grew very rapidly after the discovery of America, and one industry after another reached the point where more capital was needed than the ordinary artisan could supply. Such a man became, more and more, a wage-worker for others, and began to think of his welfare as allied more with that of his fellow work- men than of his employer. Trade unions, in the present- day sense, date back to this first clear separation between the employer, owning the tools and materials, and the workingman owning neither but selling his services for wages. In the century before the industrial revolution unions of wage-earners grew up in a number of trades, chiefly the hatters, tailors, wool workers, silversmiths, gold beaters, hosiery workers and shipwrights. These unions, it is true, were accustomed to stand with their employers on many matters affecting their trades, and on public measures, but about the time of the great inventions the doctrines of "freedom of contract and unrestrained competition" gained great headway, with the backing LABOK'S LONG TEAIL 27 of the powerful new manufacturing class. Nearly all the legislation intended to regulate wage rates and ap- prentices or in any way to protect labor was swept away. The natural effect was to turn the wage-earners even more to combinations for self-defense. Instead of unions here and there in scattered trades, having little to do with each other, there grew up new bonds of com- mon dependence and we had the beginnings of what we have known ever since as the "labor movement." AGITATION AND VIOLENCE But there were only two ways left open of voicing discontent — underground plots and open riots. Public meetings were sedition, combinations were criminal conspiracies. Most of the labor agitation of the early nineteenth century aimed at political power, as a means to regain industrial freedom and to bring the factories under control of law. The only results, for many years, were committees of Parliament, appointed to investi- gate and report. The reports were against doing any- thing, on the ground, as the Select Committee of 1811 put it, that there should be "no interference of the legislature with the freedom of trade, or with the per- fect liberty of every individual to dispose of his time and of his labor in the way and on the terms which he may judge most conducive to his own interest." The same argument, in quite the same language, has served down to this moment in opposition both to trade union policies and to nearly all laws protective of the labor of women and children, and of men in dangerous 28 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE trades. But the industrial liberty these committees be- lieved in was a liberty, apparently, for everybody except the workingman who desired to combine with his fel- lows to improve his condition. Already Adam Smith had remarked that: "We have no Acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it." The first great strike of factory workers occurred in Glasgow in 1812. The cotton weavers had tried in vain to come to an agreement on wages with their em- ployers. They turned to the old laws and demanded that the justices of the peace fix a fair rate. A table of wages was, in fact, drawn up, the workers bearing the expense, but the employers refused to abide by it Some 40,000 operatives quit work, but in the midst of an attempted settlement three weeks later the strike committee was arrested, under the conspiracy law, and the leaders imprisoned. This ended the strike, and with it all further efforts of the workers to gain a voice in fixing the price of their own labor. Next year, in 1813, the law for wage-fixing by judges was repealed. The regulations of apprentices were abolished in 1814. THE HUMANE IACTOBY LAWS But the agitation went on, with gathering force. The horrors of the factory system won to the labor cause some of the English landed gentry and a number of influential philanthropists, Lord Shaftesbury foremost. The Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, formed in 1833, while a short-lived affair, numbered at one LABOR'S LONG TEAIL 39 time three-quarters of a million members. And the humane ideas of Robert Owen, worked out in his own mills, were a direct challenge to the belief that success for the employer depended upon treating labor purely as a commodity. The first of the English factory acts, passed in 1802, did little or nothing for the unfortunate apprentices it was intended to help. In 1819 the labor of children under 9, in cotton mills, was prohibited, and it was limited to 12 hours a day for children between 9 and 15. The ban on conspiracies was relaxed in 1824. The acts of 1831 and 1833 set up new factory hour limits and prohibited night work by any one under 18. In 1847 came the first ten-hour law, applying to women and children, and in 1874 the age limit for child labor in factories was raised to 10. The practical effect of these laws was to limit the working day for men as well, since machinery could not be run after the women operatives and children stopped work. The Chartist movement, demanding for workingmen the right to vote, collapsed in 1848, after a ten-year agitation which spread over all England, but nineteen years later, in 1867, the suffrage was granted to work- ingmen. It was not extended to agricultural laborers, however, until 1884. In 1875 labor associations were relieved of prosecution under the conspiracy laws, so long used to suppress them, and the labor movement took its place as a recognized and continuing part of the industrial system of modern times. "When we look back upon the last half century," says Gibbins, one of the ablest of historians of English industry and 30 THE LABOK MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER labor, "we are inclined to wonder that trades unionists have been so moderate in their demands, considering the misery and poverty amidst which they grew up." * THE BOOTS OP LABOE DISTBUST But in the course of this long and bitter struggle the idea of employer and wage-earner as naturally hostile, the prosperity of one meaning the degradation of the other, sank deep into the minds of the workers. Most of the economic theories that helped so powerfully the growth of this feeling have been discarded, indeed, long since, and the ideas and practices of the majority of industrial employers to-day probably would have seemed radical folly to their forerunners when the factory sys- tem was young. Nevertheless, the fact ought not to be forgotten, in our judging of men and policies and aims of the labor movement as we know it, that the defensive and offen- sive measures of trade unionism which we oftenest criticize as narrow and tyrannical are in the main the bitter fruits, long in ripening, of an era of despotic misuse of the power of capital. That era has largely passed away, but with a legacy of distrust which still underlies and accounts for much that is hardest to over- come in the relations of employers and workingmen to-day. 1 Industry in England, p. 421. IV AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM Long before the labor movement made itself felt in the United States the battle for political liberty had been won. Democratic government was established: prop- erty requirements for voting disappeared early in the nineteenth century. The few trade unions which sprang up after the Revolution, chiefly among tailors, . shoemakers, carpenters and cordwainers, were more concerned with working conditions than with politics, but by 1830 labor was in politics on a larger scale, relatively, than it has been at any time since. FIBST POLITICAL VENTURES In part this was due to class feeling, stirred up by many efforts to outlaw the unions through court prose- cutions based on the English common law against con- spiracies. Agitators for a number of radical ideas joined the movement and helped along the drift to poli- tics. Demands for certain reforms by law had been gathering force for years and furnished other planks for a labor party platform — free common schools, for instance ; restriction of child labor, a ten-hour day in factories, mechanics' liens, the abolition of sweatshops, contract prison labor and imprisonment for debt. 31 32 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER The movement won a few local successes and in- duced the leading political parties to support some of the labor demands, but it drew upon itself increasing attacks from all sides, and lost its driving power through constant disputes within the ranks over rival social theories. It did not outlive the Jackson adminis- tration. Meanwhile, during this political upheaval, the neg- lected trade unions had so fallen off in numbers that the labor demands in matters of wages and hours were making no headway. It was a time of rapid growth of manufactures and trade; the position of employing interests steadily gained strength; "cheap labor" doc- trines, as in England, held sway everywhere. By the early '30's more than half the workers in textile mills in the Eastern States were women. In Massachusetts fully 40 per cent, of the mill employees were under 16 years of age. Immigration was steadily on the in- crease, and so was the farming out of prison laborers under contract. WHAT THE WAGE-EAENEE ENDURED By the testimony of eye-witnesses, factory life in the '20's and '30's was much like that in England. Says Dr. Eichard T. Ely: 1 The regulations of the factory were cruel and oppres- sive to a degree, I think, scarcely known among us at present. Operatives were taxed by the companies for the 1 The Labor Movement in America, pp. 49-56. AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM 33 support of religion; habitual absence from church, was punished by the Lowell Manufacturing Company with dis- missal from employment, and in other respects the life of the employees outside of the factories was regulated as well as their life within them. Windows were nailed down and the operatives deprived of fresh air, and a case of rebellion on the part of one thousand females on ac- count of tyrannical and oppressive treatment is men- tioned. Women and children were urged on by the use of a cowhide, and an instance is given of a little girl, eleven years of age, whose leg was broken with a "billet of wood." Still more harrowing is the description of the merciless whipping of a deaf-and-dumb boy by an over- seer. ... At Mendon, Mass., a boy of twelve drowned himself in a pond to escape factory labor. The wages were small. The "United Hand-Loom Weavers' Trade Association of Baltimore" reported in 1835 that they could earn in twelve hours from sixty-five cents to seventy-one cents a day, which, they said, did not enable them to defray the expenses "of the schooling" of their children. A woman's earnings in this period were estimated at less than $60 per year. The wages of women in Massachusetts shoe factories ranged from 8 to 50 cents a day. The working day in factories varied from 12 to 15 hours. On street railways, commonly, it was 17 to 18 hours, and often not less than that on the steam roads. In Baltimore and New York it was the custom for hakers, once a week, to work not less than twenty-five hours in one shift. A prominent New England insurance company, as late as 1849, refused to take any more applications from factories, on the ground that "such places have been 34 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEB the graves of other companies and we mean to avoid them." labor's battle foe fbee schools Labor attempted to battle with these conditions, after its political venture, by again building up the unions. Then came the panic of 1837, and new political experi- ments in the ten years of hard times following. Dis- sension over programs and policies again split these attempts into fragments, but the agitation for humane factory laws and free public schools went on and bore fruit. Indeed, the fight for universal popular educa- tion was carried on almost single-handed by the labor movement for many years, against the opposition of elements one would have expected to lead in such an effort. The feeling was strong with many manufac- turers, and long persisted with some of them, that "too much education is dangerous." However, a few great humanitarians, William Ellery Channing and Horace !M ann among them, threw their influence in support of the workingmen's efforts. Free schools, of course, would amount to little where they were most needed if children as young as 6 and 7 years were taken into the mills. But the struggle to fix an age limit met the opposition it has faced at every step since. So also did the attempt to cut down the working day of women from 12 and 14 hours to 10. By degrees the ten-hour day became the rule in a num- ber of trades, by the direct efforts of the unions, but until 1874 every attempt to establish it by law was AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM 35 defeated. The whole theory of setting bounds to the labor even of children, in the interest of health and morals and of common humanity, was condemned as an "evil of foreign growth" and "interference with natural laws" which would be certain to drive industry out of the country. "PUBE AND SIMPLE" UNIONISM In the prosperous years of the '50's workingmen turned once more from politics to so-called "pure and simple" unionism. Success this time set the movement at last firmly on its feet. Unions multiplied in all the manufacturing and trade centers. Several expanded to national organizations of their crafts, excluding poli- ticians. These have stood as the first ventures of labor in the national field to outlive their infancy. The na- tional unions of printers, molders, hat finishers, ma- chinists and blacksmiths all date from the '50's. By 1870 there were national organizations in more than thirty crafts, and the total trade-union membership had risen to some 300,000. Organization went on rapidly during the Civil War, in spite of the absence of great numbers of union mem- bers, serving in the northern armies. The emergency demand for labor worked to the advantage of the unions, and by the close of the war the idea of bringing all the labor forces together in one national movement again found many followers. The "National Labor Union" was started in 1866, but it did not prove a mighty weapon for trade unionism. Under the leadership of 36 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER William H. Sylvis its efforts were turned chiefly to the cooperative idea, and many experiments 'were made by workingmen of little capital and no managing ex- perience. All of them failed. The National Labor Union took a hand in the Chi- nese exclusion and the farmers' "greenback" agitations ; it pressed the eight-hour day for government employees, which Congress granted in 1868. It took the first step to connect American labor with foreign movements by sending a delegate to the labor congress at Basle in 1869. His mission, mainly, was to explain to Euro- pean labor our difficulties with immigration, which had increased tremendously under a law of 1864, permit- ting alien laborers to be imported under contract. DISSENSION AND FAILURE But the National Labor Union soon proved itself a rope of sand, like all its predecessors. It was based mpon city assemblies of labor, which had no such bond of common interest in a large way as had the national unions of separate crafts. The old disputes crept in, between the trade unions and socialistic elements which insisted on political action. After the collapse of the National Labor Union in the early 'YO's, and the hard times following the panic of 1873, the labor movement again fell to a low ebb. Added to unemployment and distress, employers in many quarters made a deter- mined drive to break up the movement once and for all. But the instinct of self-defense, unable to act through orderly unionism, found new outlets in secret organi- AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM 37 zations such as the Knights of Labor, and in violence. This was the period of the mine riots, the "Molly Maguires," and the great railroad strikes of 1877, which many feared would end in the downfall of law and order and the break-up of society. In the midst of the turmoil another political movement suddenly took form, the "National Party" of 1878, made up of farmers and workingmen. It polled a great vote in one election but vanished as swiftly as it came. Prosperity was returning, and labor once more attempted to re- build on trade-union lines. SOME PEBMANENT GAINS Meanwhile, a few clear gains had been won. In Massachusetts the first Bureau of Labor Statistics in the world had been created, in 1869, through the efforts of the labor movement, to be followed by the United States Bureau of Labor in 1884, and later by labor bureaus of some nature in practically all the States. In Massachusetts also, after fifty years of agitation and with the help of a number of philanthropists, the labor movement was able to secure in 1874 the first ten-hour law in this country, for women workers and children under 18. Ten hours had been fixed as a day's labor for children under 12 by a Massachusetts law of 1842. In 1867 employment of children under 10 was for- bidden altogether; children between 10 and 15 could work not more than 60 hours a week, and then only if they had attended school at least three months in the year. 38 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEK Here were the beginnings of that great mass of State and national legislation for protection of the health, safety and industrial rights of wage-earners which to-day covers fully 300 subjects and requires, merely to summarize, more than 2500 pages of government digest. After the labor chaos of the '70's, the reviving unions showed a strong disposition to center on industrial de- mands and relegate party politics to the rear. New ideas of organization on business principles were being worked out, which were to have a far-reaching effect. The cigar makers especially, under the lead of Adolph Strasser and Samuel Gompers, were building on a strong foundation of high dues, benefit features, and broad powers to the national organization over local unions. THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOE At Pittsburg, in November 1881, delegates to the number of 107 from many national and local labor or- ganizations formed a "Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada," which in 1886 became the American Federation of Labor. For the first time, a national labor movement was based upon the national organizations of the va- rious crafts, as such, except where only local unions as yet existed. A membership tax of 3 cents per capita per year was levied to assure the expenses of the new movement, which amounted in the first year to $445.31. There were no salaried officers. AMEKICAN TEADE UNIONISM 39 Among the platform demands of this historic con- vention were the aholition of conspiracy laws as applied to labor bodies, no employment of children under 14, compulsory education, uniform apprentice laws, prison labor reform, legislation against the alien contract labor system, a national bureau of labor statistics, a protec- tive tariff, labor representation in legislatures, and legal incorporation for trade unions. The tariff demand was soon dropped, and in the light of later experience the Federation has taken the opposite view of incorpora- tion, for reasons explained in another place. 1 Samuel Gompers, a leading figure in the new move- ment from the beginning, became the first president of the American Federation of Labor in 1886, and has so continued with the exception of the year 1894. Partly through his leadership, and partly because of the many failures of experiments upon other lines, the Federation for now forty years has held to the craft union basis. Tacitly at least, it has accepted the idea of capital as a co-producer with labor, although with immediate interests often far apart. It has sought to build up permanent contract rela- tions with employers, through collective bargaining. Its propaganda through the labor press, organizers and lecture bureaus has grown to large proportions. Its support has been given, morally and often financially, to innumerable contests of member unions. The na- tional conventions of the Federation have served as a melting pot of labor opinion and frequently as a means 1 See page 143. 40 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER of focussing labor effort upon issues of general scope, such as the 8-hour day, maintenance or advance of wage levels, opposition to what it regards as the encroach- ment of courts through injunctions, and to all measures restricting the liberty of workmen to leave an employ- ment when they so desire. It has declined to endorse the revolutionary programs urged in every convention by minority groups, and in so far as it has entered the political field it has been in support of or opposition to the candidates and platforms of existing parties. THE EAILEOAD BEOTHEBHOODS Alongside the American Federation, workingmen on the steam railroads have built up four brotherhoods of great strength, maintaining agreements on wages and working rules with railroad managements throughout the country, and accumulating large insurance and pen- sion funds. The engineers', conductors' and firemen's organizations date from the '60's, the brakemen's (later trainmen) from 1883. The president of the engineers, Warren S. Stone, has become widely known in late years for his advocacy of the so-called "Plumb plan" for public ownership of railroads under joint govern- ment and workers' control, and for his interest in cooperative ideas. The engineers have established, in Cleveland, a cooperative bank with deposits in its first year exceeding $10,000,000. The four brotherhoods have worked in harmony with the American Federa- tion in many matters of common interest, but have remained independent of official connection. AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM 41 GBOWING POWEB OF CAPITAL The period since the American Federation was formed has been one also of immense concentration of capital. Powerful employers' associations have come into being and contested with the labor movement every inch of ground. To get any results with a progressive program, the Federation and the brotherhoods have been obliged to match these tremendous forces, not alone in the industrial field but in the legislative and judicial. Some of the largest unions have been obliged also, as in no other country, to absorb a steady stream of immigrants, speaking many tongues, bringing with them unfamiliar habits of life and race animosities, entirely ignorant of democratic methods and the mean- ing of ordered liberty. It has been necessary to ac- custom these aliens to the idea and practice of majority rule, within the unions, and of negotiating on a busi- ness basis with employers instead of attempting to annihilate them as "class enemies." Whether by choice or not, the unions in a sense have served the purpose of training schools in working democracy, which the late Carroll D. Wright regarded as a highly important contribution of the labor movement in the present stage of our industrial development, and one little appre- ciated. TBADE UNIONS AND UNSKILLED LABOE It has been said of the American Federation of Labor that it is made up chiefly of wage-earners in the 42 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER skilled crafts and is not therefore a broadly represen- tative working-class movement. The Industrial Work- ers of the World attack the Federation on this ground, as did also the Knights of Labor before them. In the earlier years it is true that the new Federation, strug- gling for its own life, felt that it had no means to organize unskilled and migratory laborers or to carry this easily replaced class of workers through a series of costly wage contests. Later on a different view was taken, and for many years now the literature used by Federation organizers has contained this plank: "To maintain high wages all of the trades and callings must be organized; the lack of organization among the un- skilled vitally affects the skilled; general organization of skilled and unskilled can only be accomplished by united action." The rise of the I. W. W. no doubt spurred the efforts of Federation organizers, particularly among mine la- borers, textile workers and packing house employees. It is stated, in fact, that two-thirds of the money raised by the Federation for organizing purposes is spent on work among the unskilled, and that there are single locals affiliated with the Federation, such as the Chi- cago hod-carriers and building laborers, which exceed in numbers the entire membership of the I. W. W. The line between skilled and unskilled labor is not a sharp one. Probably it is true that many occupa- tions are commonly thought of as "skilled" as soon as they become organized, which actually are little if any above the grade of common labor. The large propor- tion of skilled and semi-skilled trades in the American AMEKICAN TEADE UNIONISM 43 Federation may be due less to intention or neglect than to the practical difficulty of building up a continuing organization, dependent on regular payment of dues, among migratory and day laborers, largely aliens and illiterate. Even the I. W. W., working entirely in this field and with every appeal to class hatred, never has been able to hold together more than an insignificant membership. PUBLIC CONDEMNATION The American Federation has survived several waves of public condemnation. The odium of the Chicago anarchist riots of 1886, for instance, was visited upon all labor organizations, lawless and law-abiding, with- out much discrimination. In the failure of the Home- stead steel strike of 1892 and the four years of hard times following, the Federation weathered conditions such as had virtually crushed the labor movement in several earlier crises. By the time the 1907 panic ar- rived, its united stand against wage cuts proved so effective that the period was tided over with very little lowering of labor standards. A sharp crisis arose over the trial of the MaNamara brothers for the blowing up of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910. This tragedy was the climax of a bitter struggle going on in the West and Middle West chiefly, between the iron bridge workers and certain corporations particularly hostile to organized labor. The MaNamaras at first declared themselves innocent, and a large number of unions throughout the country 44 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE contributed to a defense fund to assure them a fair ( trial. After their confession, efforts were made to lay the crimes of these men at the door of the American Federation, but a Federal grand jury, after searching inquiry, exonerated its officials of any knowledge of the dynamiting conspiracy. Public opinion, upon the whole, never took the charge seriously, but recognized that the Federation always had condemned violence as suicidal folly. THE NATIONAL CIVIC EEDEBATIC-N Indeed, before this movement was twenty years old a considerable body of public opinion saw that here was a new type of labor organization and that appar- ently it had come to stay. The possibility of working with it, in an effort for mutual understanding through conference grew upon many public-spirited citizens. Some of these represented large employing interests which were not convinced that the correct attitude on labor was to assume all demands unreasonable and stand against them on general principles. In the late '90's this more open-minded sentiment led to the forma- tion of The National Civic Federation, as a common and public meeting ground for exchange of employer and labor viewpoints and the adjustment, so far as pos- sible, of industrial controversies. Its first president, Senator Hanna, was a prominent exponent of the new employer attitude, in the management of his own large affairs. Later on, under the able leadership of Seth Low, with the support of a large board of busi- AMERICAN TEADE UNIONISM 45 ness men and nearly all the national labor leaders, a further impetus was given to the ideas of collective bargaining and trade agreements. During the same period, boards of mediation and arbitration were set up in a number of States. LABOE US POLITICS In the field of politics, the Federation of Labor in 1906 made an appeal to public opinion with a "bill of grievances" which it kept to the front for several years. Nearly all the legislation sought at the time has since ' been enacted, including the creation of the United States Department of Labor, and a definite recognition in law that "The labor power of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce." The writing of that declaration into the Clayton anti-trust Act of 1914 was hailed as a landmark in the history of labor emancipation. It has become evident since that a gen- eral acceptance of this principle, in the legal relations of employers and workingmen, will be a matter of slow growth. If the two-party system of effecting majority rule were to give way to "blocs," each standing for some one industrial interest or idea and urging its special claims instead of a general program of national policy, labor also without doubt would enter the political field as a separate group. Otherwise, for the present at least, it appears probable that the labor movement will continue to seek its political aims, as farmers for the most part have done, through existing channels. 46 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER LABOE IN THE WOBLD WAE The question whether organized workingmen in this country place class interests or common citizenship first was put to the test at the time of America's entry into the world war. Both trade unions and socialists had been on record for many years against war and in favor of international action of some sort to prevent it, but the two movements took opposite views of the issues raised by the menace of Prussian militarism. On March 17, 1917, a national labor conference in Washington, attended by representatives of nearly all the organizations in the American Federation of Labor and of the railroad brotherhoods, issued a declaration which analyzed the world war as a "struggle between the institutions of democracy and those of autocracy" and pledged the labor movement "in peace or in war, in stress or in storm ... in every field of activity to defend, safeguard and preserve the republic of the United States of America against its enemies whomso- ever they may be." It called upon all fellow workers and fellow citizens "in the holy name of labor, justice, freedom and humanity to devotedly and patriotically give like service." Throughout the war Mr. Gompers served as chair- man of the Committee on Labor, in the Advisory Com- mission of the Council of National Defense. A large number of other leaders in the movement joined in the effort to back up the government's military plans with speedy production of the war materials upon which everything depended. They declined, however, to sur- AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM 47 render the protective labor laws and agreements which 1 had been established in industry or by legislation up to that time, and in this stand they were supported by President Wilson. Labor representatives, both men and women, assisted further in the work of the food and fuel administrations and in the several war industry boards. It was a task without precedent, in our time. If it did not succeed wholly in preventing labor troubles it should be said that, in the judgment of men most fa- miliar with the division of sentiment throughout the country, both on account of race sympathies and pacifist propaganda, the war could not have been won without this massing of labor cooperation during the critical months. Early in the war Premier Lloyd George, at Mr. Gompers' request, sent to this country a delegation of British labor leaders who, joined by a Canadian group, made a tour of important industrial centers in the in- terest of labor solidarity in the supreme effort. On a like errand Mr. Gompers made several trips to Europe. The American Federation's first vice-president, James Duncan, served on the Eoot Commission to Eussia, in the interest of the allied cause. At the close of the war the American Federation joined the labor groups of the allied nations in demands for a code of social justice to be embodied in the peace treaty. In the summer of 1919 it issued a Reconstruc- tion Program, elsewhere summarized, 1 which called for 1 See page 103. 48 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEK a long list of progressive measures and for common recognition of certain principles of broad scope. THE WAVE OF RADICALISM The American labor movement did not escape the wave of radicalism in all countries which followed the war. Determined attempts to swing it to the "one big union" idea, with a revolutionary program, were renewed in many quarters. Such was the underlying motive of the steel strike of 1919, according to one of its prime movers, W. Z. Foster. The Federation of Labor supported the strike, once launched, although Mr. Gompers and other of its chief executives advised against it as premature. The radical leaders respon- sible for it have since been dropped from the unionizing committee of the industry. Thousands of workingmen in Seattle, in Vancouver and Winnipeg, captured by the "one big union" idea, threw these cities into turbulence for a few weeks, and attempted to set up virtually a soviet system. For the most part they have since returned to their former trade-union affiliations. "Outlaw" strikes in the rail- road service, repudiated by the Brotherhoods, showed further the spirit of the moment. Mr. Gompers' leader- ship of the American Federation was challenged in the 1921 convention by John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, not upon the grounds many who sup- ported him desired but unsuccessfully nevertheless. The several attempts since the war to launch labor parties have developed little strength so far within the trade-union movement. AMERICAN TEADE UNIONISM 49 COOPERATION IN PUBLIC SEKVICB Meanwhile, however, the Federation has been taking an increasingly active part in public affairs. In the Unemployment Conference of 1921, in the Advisory Commission to the American Delegation in the Arms Limitation Conference, and more recently in the Na- tional Conference on Agriculture, Mr. Gompers has represented, by appointment, the labor viewpoint. It is noteworthy that a definite move for disarmament was urged by the Federation at its Denver convention in June, 1921. The resolution called upon the govern- ment of the United States "to take the initiative or to cooperate with any other nation or nations for the purpose of a general agreement for disarmament both of the army and the naval affairs of the world," and declared it to be the duty of the Federation's executive council "to call upon the workers and the people to aid in every way within their power and to translate into action the sentiments recommended." After the conference was called, Mr. Gompers took steps to form a General Committee of representative citizens, some two hundred in number, to aid in arous- ing public sentiment for the support and encourage- ment of the American delegation in its efforts for a genuine arms limitation program. The Federation itself cooperated with an extended publicity campaign through the labor press, pamphlets, demonstrations, and a speakers' bureau of several thousand members. Leaders in the movement urged special measures to pro- vide employment for shipyard workers to be thrown 50 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER out of employment by a naval holiday, but the fact that this displacement must occur did not weaken the labor stand in the matter. Mr. Gompers was quoted to the effect that "instead of being engaged in labor for the advancement of destruction, workers will be doing something that is constructive. It is a more construc- tive job to destroy a battleship than to build one, and I believe that in actual numbers more men will be employed after this program goes into effect — if it is adopted by the nations — than are employed now." The General Committee issued an appeal, further, that the United States call an international economic conference. This will be momentous, the committee declared, "in ushering in a new era of peaceful and friendly adjustment of international problems, and will be of the greatest consequence in removing eco- nomic barriers and consequent misunderstandings such as, in the past, have led to war." OEGANIZATION AND LEADEES The American Federation of Labor is organized much on the plan of the Federal government. Each of the trade organizations in its membership retains full control over matters arising within its own juris- diction. The Federation has no power either to order or to call off a strike. Its executive council may lay a per capita tax to support a contest deemed to be vital, within a particular trade, but not to exceed one cent per week for not more than ten weeks in any one year, and very few such assessments have been actually laid. AMEEICAN TEADE UNIONISM 51 The headquarters are in Washington, D. C, where the Federation occupies a modern office building, dedi- cated in 1916. Its general work is maintained chiefly by a per capita tax of one cent per month per member (yielding at present about $540,000), by subscriptions to its official magazine, and by contributions to special defense funds. For the last business year the expenses were about $850,000, the largest single items being for organizing expenses, printing and publishing. The de- tails of income and expenses are published in quarterly circulars and in the annual convention report. The national conventions are open to the public; the pro- ceedings are reported and published verbatim, and are available to any one interested. In addition to the American Federationist, more than 300 periodicals are regularly published by the various member organiza- tions. Among the Federation leaders best known as spokes- men for the labor cause or in service on public boards and commissions, besides Mr. Gompers, are the former Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson; Frank Mor- rison, secretary of the Federation; James Duncan, of the granite cutters ; John L. Lewis, of the coal miners ; Matthew Woll, of the engravers; James W. Sullivan, of the printers ; Sara A. Conboy, of the textile workers ; William H. Johnston, of the machinists ; Hugh Frayne, of the sheet metal workers; John P. Frey, of the molders; Andrew Furuseth, of the seamen, and T. V. O'Connor, of the longshoremen. There are represented in the American Federation of Labor at present 111 craft organizations of national 52 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER scope, some extending into Canada, with a total of more than 36,000 local unions and a membership slightly under 4,000,000. The railroad brotherhoods, with about 450,000 members, and certain other unions not affiliated with the American Federation, bring the total unionized labor strength close to 5,000,000, estimated as about one-half of all the wage-earners commonly re- garded as organizable in manufactures, mining, trans- portation and the mechanical trades. It is often pointed out, in reply to the criticism that the labor movement speaks for a small fraction only of the population, that five million members represent, on an average basis of wage-earners' families, not less than twenty-five million people. EADICAt MOVEMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES The line between trade unionism and revolutionary movements is much more sharply drawn in the United States than in Europe. There are of course many socialists and communists in the unions, and certain local unions are wholly controlled by them, but in the American Federation of Labor as a whole they are a small minority. The largest single union with a radical program, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, is outside the Federation : it has a membership of about 175,000, and demands complete workers' control of the industry. As in Europe, membership in the radical or revo- lutionary political groups in this country is not limited to wage-earners. Some of their most conspicuous lead- ers are professional men, writers, and men and women of wealth giving their time to the propaganda. The socialist vote always greatly exceeds the enrolled mem- bership of the party, indicating that many elements of unrest and discontent with existing conditions voice their protest in this way, in addition to those who know just what the socialist program offers and fully ac- cept it. Because of the mixed membership of the revolution- ary groups and their small following in contrast with 53 54 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE PAEMEE the trade unions, it is more open to question in this country than it is abroad whether the "labor move- ment," as here understood, properly includes the so- cialist and communist parties at all. They do not par- ticularly claim such a designation : indeed, the socialist program is urged as a social movement seeking its ends through political means, while trade unionism is an industrial movement seeking its ends in the main through economic means. the i. w. w. The case is somewhat different with the Industrial Workers of the World, which is an industrial movement seeking its ends through revolutionary means. It is a loose organization, of uncertain strength, made up chiefly of unskilled and migratory workers. While a wage-earners' group, it is clearly set off from the trade unions by the fact that it does not propose to cooperate with the system of private industry but to overthrow it. Neither has it any faith in the socialist plan of state or collective ownership and management of in- dustry. What it demands is complete control of indus- tries and plant by the workers actually operating them ; an idea long popular in French labor movements as "syndicalism," more recently taken up in England and America as "guild socialism," and, from still another angle, described by Emma Goldman as "in essence, the economic expression of anarchism." Unlike the socialist program, again, the I. W. W. movement discards political methods as useless. It pro- RADICAL MOVEMENTS IN UNITED STATES 55 poses to gain control of industries "by "direct action," destroying the possibility of profits by incessant strikes and "sabotage" — that is, disabling machinery, slacking work and spoiling product. If these means do not bring the owners to abandon control to the operatives, the final step is to be forcible capture, as attempted in 1919 in many of the industrial centers of Italy. As a step to complete workers' control the I. W. W. at- tempt to organize all classes of wage-earners in "one big union," without regard to trade or occupation. The I. W. W. organization was founded in Chicago in 1905. The preamble of its constitution declares that "the working class and the employing class have noth- ing in common. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the wealth and of the ma- chinery of production, and abolish the wage system." The movement has been active chiefly in the Middle and Far West. The membership, probably never above 65,000, and now very much less, is difficult to ascertain because of the "underground" nature of much of the organization's work. All the prominent strikes of I. W. W. origin, in western mining camps, in New Jersey, and in the Lawrence, Mass., textile mills in 1912, have been violent ; and the organization has been in close touch with anarchist groups at various points. Some 95 of its leaders were sentenced, in Chicago in 1917, for disloyal activities during the war, and the founder of the movement, William D. Haywood, is at present a fugitive from justice. The I. W. W. is not affiliated with the Third International and has not en- 56 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMER dorsed the Eussian scheme for a universal soviet re- puhlic, but Mr. Haywood reported to the International in 1921 that : "The one single obstacle in the pathway of I. W. W. progress toward class unity is the American Federation of Labor," "one big union" vs. teadb unions The difference between the "one big union" idea and that of the trade unions is important and far-reaching. Under the former plan, a grievance leading to a strike on the part of any one of the many subdivisions of labor in a plant would take with it the entire force. Workingmen who thus go on strike repeatedly to assist employees in other departments naturally expect the same support in their own disputes. A steady succes- sion of shut-downs brought about in this way could readily, of course, reduce an industry to bankruptcy. Once become a liability rather than an asset to the owners, so the theory goes, the workingmen can take possession unopposed. The particular grievance is a secondary matter so long as there are enough of them to bring about this end. With the trade union, on the other hand, the special object sought by a strike is the important thing. It is looked upon as one more step in the gradual and per- manent improvement of working conditions, or to gain the right to a voice in determining those conditions, but the purpose is not to capture or paralyze a plant as a means to revolution. The unions insist that prac- tically everything labor has been able to gain by its EADICAL MOVEMENTS IN UNITED STATES 57 own united efforts has come through organization by trades. For one thing, when men are so organized on a large scale, it is much more difficult for an employer to fill the places of workmen in a particular trade who are asking more for their labor. For another thing, members of a trade union are the more likely to realize that whatever affects their calling in one locality may affect it everywhere, and to give financial help to fellow members engaged in a contest, who otherwise would be left to make the effort alone. It is possible also, in this way, to unite a large proportion of the workers in a given trade, throughout the country, in some particular demand, such as the eight-hour day. If the demand is won, the very common effect is that unorganized plants by degrees concede it as well, in order to hold their competent help, so that the new system tends to become the standard for all workers at the trade. It is urged on behalf of this method, further, that the bringing together of men of each trade, no matter where employed, tends to a larger sense of responsi- bility and a disposition to get what is possible at a given time rather than to wreck the industry, since working- men regularly employed are loath to quit work in a succession of strikes on petty local issues arising at far distant points. Usually they are brought to the point of a general strike only when the issue is one of gen- eral concern and other methods have failed." Whatever the merits or weakness of this "one thing at a time" plan, it appears to fit in with the economic fact that modern industry, with the help of science and invention, has been able to overcome piecemeal addi- 58 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER tions to labor costs, brought about in this way, where it could not remain solvent in the face of simultaneous demands of all classes of workers, plant by plant, acting as "one big union." As a matter of fact, it has never proved possible to hold together workingmen of all trades in a series of such struggles long enough to accomplish important or lasting results. THE KNIGHTS OF IABOE The underlying ideas of the I. W. W. and the once powerful Knights of Labor have much, in common. The Knights, organized in 1869 by Uriah Smith Stephens, proposed to abolish the wages system and set up cooperative industries. For some years they oper- ated as a secret order, with signs and passwords, in part to offset the spy and detective system used by employers' to break up the trade unions. In the '80's, under the leadership of T. V. Powderly, the membership reached nearly three-quarters of a million. There were many trade unionists in the Order, but the majority were unskilled and migratory workers organized on the "one big union" plan without regard to occupation, and more or less revolutionary in temper. In later years efforts were made to turn to the craft- union idea, but the stronger groups were by this time deserting to the new American Federation of Labor. The Order was not limited to wage-earners, and it be- came the prey of politicians and sponsors for various socialistic and land-tax panaceas. Some legislation is to be credited to its efforts, notably the anti-contract EADICAL MOVEMENTS IN UNITED STATES 59 labor law of 1885, but its few political successes were short-lived and factional disputes finally wrecked the organization. Twenty years after the great strike of 1885 on the Gould railroads, the Knights' greatest suc- cess, only a few ineffective locals remained. COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM In this country, the earliest schemes for rebuilding society on new lines were communistic. They were inherited in part from ideas born in the French revo- lution, in part- inspired by Robert Dale Owen's crusade for industrial cooperation. A little later came the Fourier idea of "associations," producing and sharing in common, which enlisted some mighty champions in jthe generation before the Civil War — Greeley, Dana, 'Channing and Whittier among them. Some forty of these colonies were started, including the well-known Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. They all disappeared within a dozen years. Socialism, as an exact theory of the common owner- ship of all industry, was planted here mainly by fol- lowers of Marx and Engels, driven out of Germany in the '50's. In late years, to a great extent, the name has been wrenched from its original meaning until many people apply it almost at random to all manner of humanitarian reforms, such as the shortening of the working day or abolition of sweatshops, child labor and kindred evils. The socialist movement always has re- sented this confusion of its central idea with measures which logically it regards as "patchwork." From this 60 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE point of view, poverty and injustice are due to the system of private industry: the workers can make no real gain so long as this endures, and attempts to im- prove it only delay its overthrow. In so far as trade unions are endorsed, it is only as means of training workingmen to carry on the future socialist state. There is a group of "intellectuals," however, allied with the socialist movement, who favor immediate reforms but regard them only as steps toward socialism. WHAT SOCIALISM MEANS There is little disagreement between the two schools as to what socialism itself, however brought about, actually means. One of the ablest of its advocates, Morris Hillquit, of New York, in his testimony before the Industrial Eelations Commission in 1914, offered this much-quoted definition, which is substantially that also of the Socialist Party platforms : The socialist program requires the public or collective ownership and operation of the principal instruments and agencies for the production and distribution of wealth — the land, mines, railroads, steamboats, telegraph and telephone lines, mills, factories and modern machinery. This is the main program and the ultimate aim of the whole socialist movement and the political creed of all socialists. It is the unfailing test of socialist adherence, and admits of no limitation, extension or variation. Whoever accepts this program is a socialist, whoever does not is not. KADICAL MOVEMENTS IN UNITED STATES 61 This is the interpretation given also by the Inter- collegiate Socialist Society, recently re-named the League for Industrial Democracy: Socialists hold that to abolish these [stated] evils society must take possession of the socially used means of production and distribution, managing them democratic- ally for the benefit of the entire people. POLITICAL SOCIALISM As a political movement in this country socialism dates from the formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1874, soon followed by the Socialist Labor Party in 1877. The movement drew little public atten- tion until the '90's, when its leader, Daniel DeLeon, a man of force as a revolutionary agitator, brought its voting strength up to the high level of about 80,000. Only wage-earners had been admitted to the Socialist Labor movement, but in 1901 the party split, largely on this issue. A faction joined itself to a new Social Democratic Party which had been organized by Eugene V. Debs after the collapse of his American Eailway Union. This party had given Debs 87,000 votes for President in 1900. The groups so united were there- after known as the Socialist Party, with Mr. Debs as its candidate in every presidential election since except that of 1916. During tbat period the party has elected two of its candidates for Congress, Victor Berger, of Illinois, and Meyer London, of New York, a member of the present Congress. 62 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEE By 1912 the Debs vote very nearly touched 900,000. In that year a party membership of 120,000 was re- ported ; by 1919 it had fallen to less than 110,000, and at the party convention of 1921 it was placed at about 17,000. In 1920, the normal increase in population and the addition of women as voters might have been expected to give Mr. Debs a vote approaching two mil- lions; his actual poll was a little under 915,000. The decline in strength is largely explained by the party's attitude during the war, and by the loss of a large communist faction after the war. In May, 1917, the socialist convention at St. Louis had adopted this resolution, later confirmed by referendum : We brand the declaration of war by our government as a crime against the people of the United States and against the nations of the world. In all modern his- tory there has been no war more unjustifiable than the war in which we are about to engage. No greater dishonor has ever been forced upon a people than that which the capitalist class is forcing upon this nation against its will. In the following months the campaign carried on by prominent socialists and by the party press was con- sidered obstructive of the government's war measures, including the draft, and upon these grounds many lead- ers, including Mr. Debs, were convicted and sentenced to prison. A group of "intellectuals," including Charles Edward Kussell, J. G. Phelps Stokes, John Spargo and William English Walling, resigned from the party and EADICAL MOVEMENTS IN UNITED STATES 63 formed the Social Democratic League, supporting the government upon the grounds already taken by the American Federation of Labor. NEW EADICAL GBOTTPS But after the war the new bolshevist wing attempted to carry the party farther than it cared to go. Certain sections were expelled. The socialist convention of 1920, it is true, had endorsed the Third International but without approving a "dictatorship of the prole- tariat." Because of this action the Moscow leaders denounced the Socialist Party as allied with capitalist society and an enemy of American workmen. The so- cialists promptly responded. At the party convention of 1921 speakers who had strongly championed the Rus- sian revolution now denounced the soviet government as a "wrecking crew" and "murderers of the socialists of Russia." International alliances were repudiated. Meanwhile the communist factions, meeting in Chi- cago in September, 1919, had formed the Communist Party, from which in turn, almost immediately, a con- siderable group seceded and formed the United Com- munist Party, which is officially approved by the Third International. Many of its members have been de- ported for activities having the avowed object of over- throwing the government. Still another radical group, politically, is the Farmer- Labor Party, which grew out of the formation of the Labor Party of Illinois in November, 1918. A year later the idea was carried farther and a national con- 64 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE vention called in Chicago. More than one thousand delegates attended, representing various labor, farmer, cooperative and social reform organizations. A plat- form was adopted, in many respects like that of the British Labor Party, demanding nationalization of all public utilities and basic industries and of all unused land, abolition of the United States Senate, limitation of individual incomes, international solidarity of labor, and general disarmament. Taking the name of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1920, its candidate for Presi- dent, Parley P. Christensen, received some 270,000 votes. The movement has won no official support from the American Federation of Labor, nor from the leading farm organizations. Upon its heels there has come still another political venture of radical sentiment, the "Workers' Party," formed in New York in December, 1921, designed "to permeate the trade unions with truly revolutionary ele- ments" and to "work for the establishment of a work- ers' republic" in the United States. The I. W. W. were represented at this convention, but promptly re- pudiated the Workers' Party as an enterprise not of actual wage-earners but of politicians. Factional differences and party splits in the radical movement as a whole have been fatal to material po- litical headway. The defeat in 1921 of four of the five socialist members of the New York legislature, who had been expelled and once reelected, is credited to division among the socialist, communist and farmer- labor factions. However, the Attorney General of the United States in his annual report for 1921 gives warn- EADICAL MOVEMENTS IN UNITED STATES 65 ing that the underground propaganda of the Third In- ternational, through communist and other revolutionary groups in this country, is meeting with marked success in many lahor unions. To whatever extent this is the case, the American Federation of Labor in resisting it will at least he on familiar battle ground. vVI EUROPEAN LABOE MOVEMENTS TO-DAY The world war and the Russian revolution threw the lahor movements of Europe very nearly into chaos, in Italy entirely so. The socialist parties especially, and the trade unions only less so, were torn with dissension hetween war-supporters and pacifists, the flaming parti- zans and bitter opponents of bolshevism. Trade union- ists very generally and the majority groups of socialists dropped the international idea for the time being and stood by their home governments; they still remain strongly opposed to either the Eussian program or Rus- sian dictatorship. But the extreme "left wing" radicals, in every instance, broke off in new political and labor groups and are now working for world revolution through the Third International. The year 1920 saw the crest of the wave. Discour- aging events in Russia and the sudden end of the "war boom" in industry began to tell. A growing caution in the minds of German workingmen, the breakdown of the triple alliance in England and of the French rail- road strike, the failure of efforts to fan the steel, coal and "outlaw" railway strikes in the United States into a general labor war, the Fascista movement in Italy, all marked a turn of the tide, not necessarily to reac- tion or surrender of aims but to other than revolutionary ways and means. 66 EUKOPEAN LABOR MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 67 Conditions are still highly unsettled. On the Con- tinent especially there are frequent changes in party lines, leadership and policies. We are still too close to the shifting scene for an exact picture. Whatever one may say of the labor situation in European coun- tries at the moment will be almost certainly disputed, according to the estimate placed upon each new de- parture by its partizans. It is only possible here to show the main divisions of the movement, the drift of the currents to-day, which may indeed set in quite another direction to-morrow. LABOE IN GBEAT BEITAIN In the fifty years since trade unions were legalized, in Great Britain, they have grown to a membership of more than six millions. About one million are repre- sented in the General Federation of Trade Unions, an organization formed in 1899 for advisory and educa- tional purposes and to pay strike benefits. It does not include certain large unions, notably the railwaymen and the miners. An earlier and larger body of British labor is the Trade Union Congress, dating from 1868, but with no distinct program other than to hold annual conferences and adopt resolutions on current issues. It has a par- liamentary committee, looking after the interests of labor in legislative matters between the sessions of the Congress. The trade unions proper still form the un- derlying strength and supply most of the funds for labor activities in Great Britain, political as well as 68 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER industrial, but in late years they have been much less in the public eye than the British Labor Party. In 1899 the trade unions started a movement to se- cure better representation of labor interests in the House of Commons, and out of this effort has grown the Labor Party. Limited at first to wage-earners, it now admits all workers "by hand or by brain." The influence of a prominent group of "intellectuals" in the party appears in its demands and policies of recent years, many of which have little relation to what we usually have in mind as a trade-union program. The Labor Party was reorganized in 1917, on account of war developments. It has now a three-fold member- ship of trade unions, socialist and cooperative groups, and individuals. There are represented in its national councils the Independent Labor Party with an out- right socialist program, the British Socialist Party, dating from 1883 but of small political importance, the Fabian Society, founded in 1884, and the Woman's Labor League, demanding direct representation of women in Parliament. There are also among the radical groups the "guild socialists," who propose that the government acquire by degrees all industries and public services, ultimately annihilating all claim of the private owners. Unlike the political socialists, they would have each industry or service managed directly by the workers who oper- ate it. This latter idea is that, substantially, of the French syndicalists and the Industrial Workers of the World, but under the guild name it has attracted new attention. Apparently it is taken more seriously in the EUROPEAN" LABOE MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 69 United States than in England, although the scheme of government ownership with workers' control has been for some time the program of the British coal miners, endorsed by the Labor Party. The political strength of the British Labor Party has varied greatly ; perhaps it is at present about 1,500,- 000 votes. There have been labor members in Parlia- ment since 1874, when two were elected; twenty-five years later there were eleven. At present the labor representation is seventy, in a House of Commons of 707 members. In 1906 John Burns became the first labor member of a British cabinet, as president of the local government board. The first coalition government formed during the war (1915) contained three labor members; there were eight in 1918, when the Labor Party demanded their withdrawal. Four obeyed; four remained, and were dropped from the party. The great mass of British workingmen loyally supported the war, although some of the most conspicuous leaders of the Labor Party maintained a critical attitude towards the measures of the government and repeatedly pressed it for statements of war aims. The labor members in Parliament voted against some of the war credits, but supported con- scription, against the orders of a Labor Party conven- tion. The party attempted to send delegates to confer- ences of labor and socialist groups from all the nations in conflict, including Germany, with the object of stop- ping the war. Arthur Henderson, who resigned from the Cabinet when it disapproved the proposed Stockholm conference, 70 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER is secretary of the Labor Party. Coming from the iron molders' union, he is regarded as a connecting link in the party between the trade unions and the intellec- tuals. Hardly less influential, and better known in this country, is James H. Thomas, secretary of the National Union of Eailwaymen, a notable orator, and since 1900 a member of Parliament. Mr. Thomas strongly sup- ported the government during the war, and visited the United States in 1917, delivering the war message of British labor to American workingmen. In 1921 he attended the Denver convention of the American Fed- eration of Labor. He is president of the International Federation of Trade Unions, succeeding W. A. Apple- ton, the leading figure and general secretary for many years of the British General Federation of Trade Unions. One of the most popular men in the British movement is J". E. Clynes, who also stood with the gov- ernment in its war measures and made a successful record as Food Controller. In the more radical group is Bobert Smillie, head of the Miners' Federation; in the conservative, Havelock Wilson, head of the Seamen's Union. Among the intellectuals of the socialist wing are J. Bamsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and Sidney Webb, the latter one of the founders of the Fabian Society. BEITISH LABOE PAETY PBOGEAM The Labor Party thus states its objects : To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable dia- EUROPEAN LABOR MOVEMENTS T O-DAY 11 tribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service. Generally, to promote the political, social and economic emancipation of the people, and more particularly of those who depend directly upon their own exertions by hand or brain for the means of life. In 1918 the party issued a reconstruction program un- der the title "Labor and the New Social Order," which has been widely discussed. In some quarters it was hailed as a far-sighted plan for the rebuilding of so- ciety ; in others, minimized as a restatement of familiar ideas applied to a time of worldwide unsettlement. It is described by Sidney and Beatrice Webb as "from be- ginning to end essentially socialist in character." * This program, in its revised form, declares the task of social reconstruction to lie not in a "patchwork jerry- mandering" of the capitalist system but in "a gradual building up of a new social order, based not on classes, subject races or a subject sex, but on the deliberately planned cooperation in production, distribution and ex- change, the systematic approach to a healthy equality, the widest possible participation in power, both eco- nomic and political, and the general consciousness of consent which characterizes a true democracy." It is held to be of supreme national importance that there should he no degradation of the standard of life of the population, but that "the standard of wages in all •History of Trade Unionism, p. 698. 72 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE trades should, relatively to the cost of living, be fully maintained"; that the government, as the largest em- ployer, should set a good example in this respect ; that the existing legislation for protection of the standard of life and limitation of working hours in various in- dustries, and for workmen's compensation, housing, pub- lic health and education, should be extended and uni- versally applied ; that the conditions, rules and customs won by trade unions before the war and temporarily modified should be fully restored, and all restrictions removed on the right of workingmen to strike for resto- ration of these conditions; that compulsory arbitration should be limited strictly to the war period; that ex- tensive government works be undertaken and other measures adopted to forestall periods of unemployment ; that the government unemployment insurance be restored and increased in amount. It is demanded further, in this program, that com- plete adult suffrage, with equal rights for both sexes, be established ; that education be nationalized and made universal, on a basis of social equality ; that the govern- ment undertake a campaign of house building through- out the country at public expense ; that the coal mines be taken over by the government permanently and the supply of coal, iron and other minerals "henceforth be conducted as a public service (with a steadily increas- ing participation in the management, both central and local, of the workers concerned) " ; that the entire func- tion of life insurance be taken over by the state, "with equitable compensation to all affected"; that "the Gov- ernment should resume control of the nation's agricul- ETJEOPEAN LABOK MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 73 tural land," by a combination of large government farms, small holdings made accessible to practical farmers, municipal enterprises in agriculture, and farms let to cooperative societies and other tenants "under covenants requiring the kind of cultivation de- sired." In all industries left in private hands, it was de- manded that the war control and publicity of the "processes, profits and prices of capitalist industry" be continued; that the "unearned increment" of land values be taxed so that the land itself "shall belong to the nation, and be used for the nation's benefit" ; that in view of the enormous war debts "an equitable sys- tem of conscription of accumulated wealth should be put into effect forthwith," in the form of a direct graduated levy, not alone on income and profits, but on the private capital of every one who owns more than £1000. By these means the Labor Party program pro- posed to move towards the end, identical with that of socialism, of "the future appropriation of Surplus, not to the enlargement of any individual fortune, but to the Common Good." BECENT LABOE EVENTS IN ENGLAND It was freely predicted at the time this manifesto appeared that Great Britain would have a labor govern- ment within two years. The course of events since has been, instead, towards more conservative ideas of re- construction. At the same time, the industrial depres- sion and widespread unemployment have lessened the 74 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE militant spirit of labor for the time being. In April, 1920, Arthur Henderson declared that never in his long association with organized labor had there been "such a general reluctance to embark in industrial conflict." At that time the coal miners were on strike against wage reductions and the withdrawal of war-time control of the mines. The railway and transport workers were to have joined with them in a demonstration of the power of mass action. At the last moment this "triple alliance" abandoned the attempt, when the miners re- fused to discuss certain new proposals with the em- ployers. The public very generally supported the gov- ernment's plans to keep the industries in operation, as the feeling grew that the objects sought in the coal strike were more political than economic. It is quite possible, therefore, in this instance at least, that the effort to force the mines into the hands of the government, as proposed in the Labor Party pro- gram, were a principal cause of the dissension and loss of public support which led to a settlement on term3 very unlike the original demands. Some of the British labor leaders have urged that the outcome of this strug- gle illustrates a serious weakness in the effort to ad- vance labor interests chiefly through separate political action, in that it arouses against labor not alone the employer element, to be reckoned with anyway, but the hostility of other political, industrial and consumer interests in the community which might otherwise re- main at least neutral. However, the political movement of labor in England EUBOPEAN LABOE MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 75 is as yet too young to warrant final conclusions on the part it is to play. The Labor Party commands thus far the political support of barely one-fourth of the organized wage-earners of Great Britain. Most of its proposals are of a sweeping nature, and it is not clear how, if at all, some of them can be reconciled with the freedom of private initiative and security of ownership in property which the English race fought through many centuries to establish. On the other hand, the Labor Party refuses to commit itself to the revolution- ary program of Russian communism. At the last gen- eral conference of the party, in June, 1921, an applica- tion from the Communist Party for admission to mem- bership was refused by a vote of almost twenty to one, after a hot debate. The arguments which apparently settled the question were, that the Communist Party is affiliated with the Third International, its members pledged to take their orders from Moscow; that it en- ters any political group, not with the idea of observing its decisions or aiding in its policies, but to capture it for the revolutionary movement ; that it stands for dic- tatorship of the proletariat, demands an armed militia of workingmen, and seeks its ends by force. LABOE IN FRANCE Political socialism always has played a larger part in French labor activities than in either Great Britain or the United States. The industrial labor movement found itself soon after the legalizing of trade unions in 1884. They had been forbidden under severe penalties 76 THE LABOK MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMER ever since the French revolution, although indulged for a time by Napoleon III. as a means of winning the support of labor elements for his unsteady throne. After the Paris Commune of 1871, violent measures were again taken to suppress unions. They reappeared, by degrees, and a series of national organizations fol- lowed, torn by rivalries and largely controlled by so- cialists. It was not until 1895 that a permanent body of French wage-earners as such came into being. The General Confederation of Labor, formed in that year, excluded politics but approved the idea of a general strike to bring about direct control of industries by the workers engaged in them. Before the war the General Confederation never had more than 600,000 members ; it has now upwards of two millions. During the war it gave its aid unreservedly to the government, and since the war it has stood firmly against bolshevism : the Coun- cil of the Confederation confirmed this position, in February, 1922, by the almost unanimous vote of 92 to 3. It was drawn into the strike to force nationalization of the railroads, however, during the high tide of radi- calism early in 1920. The General Confederation at first condemned this attempt, foreseeing failure, but endeavored to gain some concessions from the manage- ments. The object of the railwaymen was not conces- sions but full control, and on this issue public opinion was against them. The General Confederation at length called a general strike on all French railroads, but the government drafted the strikers into military EUEOPEAN LABOE MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 77 service, thousands of civilians volunteered to take their places, and the movement collapsed. In November, 1918, the General Confederation of Labor put forth a reconstruction program, demanding a League of Nations, reparation but not reprisals, gen- eral disarmament, a place for labor at the peace table, an international labor congress, workingmen's represen- tation in industry, the eight-hour day, compulsory edu- cation, national economic councils on reconstruction, with labor members; "collective control as opposed to private ownership of everything pertaining to the gen- eral welfare" ; government control of production, profits, insurance, wages and labor conditions; no discrimina- tion against union workingmen or foreign labor, and reduction of the national debt by taxes on income, war profits and inheritances. FEENCH SOCIALISM The French socialist movement increased its voting strength heavily after the war, polling some 1,700,000 votes in 1919. A large faction has since gone over to communism, affiliating with the Third International in 1920. This group is now known therefore as the French Communist Party : the more moderate elements continue as the Socialist Party, with a smaller membership than the communists but a larger delegation in the Chamber of Deputies. The influence of the war in bringing all labor ele- ments into closer relations for the time being has had the after effect, except among the communists, of a 78 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER stronger disposition to rely upon political reform meas- ures and negotiations with employers in regard to in- dustrial conditions. Before the war a large proportion of the French peasantry and many wage-earners as well were small investors of savings, and these naturally have been slow to join movements looking to the con- fiscation of private property. Leon Jouhaux, the lead- ing figure in the General Confederation of Labor, has declared recently that the time for. revolutionary phrases is past, the time for practical reorganization is at hand. It was Jouhaux who urged French workmen and em- ployers during the war to join hands for : "Maximum production in minimum time for maximum wage." Both Jouhaux and Albert Thomas are of the moder- ate wing in French labor and socialist movements. M. Thomas, minister of munitions during the war and now director of the international labor office set up by the Treaty of Versailles, is perhaps the most influential of the conservative leaders. At the other extreme is the majority socialist leader Jean Longuet, a grandson of Karl Marx, and bitter critic of the government's war policies. It is an interesting circumstance that Presi- dent Millerand and former Premiers Viviani and Briand, all three, were in their earlier and more radical years prominent in the socialist movement. Sebman labob atto socialism As in other countries on the mainland of Europe, the labor movement in Germany was chiefly political rather than industrial, for many years after the revolutionary EUROPEAN LABOE MOVEMENTS TO-DAYi 79 uprisings of 1848. That is, the ends desired were sought more through government means than hy direct pressure upon employers. In Germany especially, the home of the famous socialist leaders Marx, Engels, Liehknecht, Bebel and Lassalle, the early workingmen's movement was almost wholly socialistic. It took per- manent form in 1863 in the Universal German Work- ingmen's Association, followed soon after by the Union of Workingmen's Associations, both groups uniting in 1875. This "Social Democratic Party," so formed, by the time of the world war had attained a membership ex- ceeding one million, with a voting strength of nearly six millions and 113 members in the Eeichstag. The Independent Socialist Party, a more radical group, formed during the war, had in 1920 a member- ship of 850,000 and a voting strength approaching five millions. It endorses the Russian program but has refused to connect itself with the Third International. A large section has deserted to the Communist Party, which in Germany is an outgrowth of the Spartacus league, well remembered for its violent outbreaks dur- ing and soon after the war. The voting strength of the Communist Party in 1920 was a little under 450,000. In August, 1921, the dues-paying membership was re- ported at about 161,000. A still more radical element has since separated from this group and formed the Communist Labor Party, but with a very small fol- lowing. Trade unions proper, in Germany, were of little im- portance until after the repeal of the laws against com- binations, in the '60's. They were independent of the 80 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMER political socialists, but on many measures of public policy in more or less close relation with. them. The German unions make much of the education of their members; they support educational work among the various trade groups, as well as a free trade-union school in Berlin. In 1921 these so-called "free trade unions," compos- ing the General German Trade Union, numbered about eight million members. The "Christian trade unions," standing for just conditions of labor and moderate so- cial reforms, together with certain unions of public employees, form another group with a membership in 1920 exceeding one million. Among the minor labor bodies are the "Hirsch-Duncker" unions, believing in harmonious relations with employers, and a small body of so-called "yellow unions," organized by employers within their own plants. Both the trade unions and the socialist movement in Germany supported the government at the outbreak of the war, a course on their part bitterly condemned by socialists and labor bodies in other countries. The unions declared an industrial truce with the employers, and the socialists in the Reichstag immediately voted for the war credits. Nevertheless, disagreement arose within the ranks and led to the formation in 1917 of the Independent Socialist Party, a group which the government suppressed by force so far as possible. DECENT AIMS OF GEBMAN WOBKINGMEN Both trade unionists and socialists, during the revo- lution following the armistice, formed "workers and EUROPEAN LABOR MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 81 soldiers councils," not so much with the Eussian idea of taking over the government as to control it. These councils practically disappeared with the adoption of the new German constitution. In their place, although quite unlike them in purpose, have come the "works councils," formed under the law of January, 1920, whereby councils of employees may be created in any in- dustrial plant employing more than twenty people, with the object of "looking after the interests of the workers in the fulfilment of the purpose of the works." One or two members of these councils may sit on the board of directors of the company, to represent the views and wishes of the employees. There has been a struggle to develop these new councils along the lines of trade unionism, in spite of a determined effort of the social- ists to prevent this. The latest Reichstag elections have shown a consid- erable loss to both the majority and the independent socialists and a gain to the conservative groups. The demand for general and immediate taking over of all industries by the government apparently has lost some of its popularity. A German labor writer, L. Erause, says of the state of mind of German trade unionists in 1918 and 1921 : At the beginning almost all of them were on principle in favor of socialization, but very soon the conviction broke through that socialization to such an extent as the independent social democracy wanted was not practicable, considering that the future lucrativeness of the concerns to be socialized was not to be disregarded. Various under- 82 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER takings brought up by the state or by towns since the revolution, such as tramways, have been working with great lasses since that time. And so have the post office and railway administrations which announced deficits of many milliards. In the course of the discussions about the question of socialization most trade unions agreed in recognizing the particular difficulties to which it would give rise in their own branches of industry, but, on the other hand, they declared other industries, especially mining and metal works, ripe for socialization. Finally they declined a general socialization as being inopportune and voted in favor of developing "working communities." Since the death of the socialists Karl Liebknecht and Kurt Eisner, and of Karl Legien, for thirty years leader of the free trade unions, the outstanding figures in the German working-class movements are not well known outside of Germany. Many of them hold official positions in the present government, notably Gustav Bauer, vice chancellor. Karl Kautsky stands foremost among the radical leaders. LABOE AND BEVOLTJTION IN ITALY The labor struggle in Italy, as an organized move- ment, dates from a congress of printers at the time of the revolutions of 1848. Various federations of unions, by trades, and local chambers of labor which arose later in many Italian cities, Tinited in 1905 to form the pres- ent General Confederation of Labor, with a member- ship difficult to learn in the present chaos of the Italian EUROPEAN LABOK MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 83 labor situation. Probably it approaches two millions, or four times its strength before the world war. While the Italian unions deal directly with employers, in the effort to force concessions, their general program is socialistic and they have an understanding with the Socialist Party whereby the political proposals of labor are supposed to be handled by the party while the latter lends its help to the trade unions in their industrial struggles. A faction of the trade unions opposed to political action but favoring general strikes to gain complete control of industry for the workers broke away from the General Confederation in 1912 and formed the Italian Syndicalist Union, with a membership recently of about 150,000. Some of the largest trade unions in Italy, the railwaymen, seamen and port-workers, are not connected with the General Confederation but are strongly inclined to the syndicalist idea. The move- ment does include, as in no other leading European country, a large union of agricultural laborers, to the number of nearly 800,000. Italy's agricultural popu- lation is almost double its industrial. The Italian Socialist Party, dating from 1892, to- wards the end of the world war adopted the Russian communist program. In 1919 its candidates carried more than one-fourth of the communes in Italy, al- though the actual enrolled membership probably did not exceed 200,000. A bolshevik organization mainly, it has nevertheless declined to accept the orders of Mos- cow on the question of control of its own membership, and therefore has not joined the Third International. 84 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE On this issue about one-third of the membership se- ceded and has formed the Italian Communist Party, with a program much like that of the Anarchist Union. Outright anarchism, in fact, has had an active following in Italy and some influence in nearly all the labor groups during the half century since Bakunin sowed the seed of violent revolution broadcast through Europe. The movement at present is suppressed by the government and its leaders are in prison. A small group of conservatives left the Socialist Party on the general war issue and took its stand with the government, two of the leaders entering the Cabinet. The majority of the labor elements, both in the Social- ist Party and the trade unions, opposed the entry of Italy into the war and attempted to remain "neutral" throughout. The radical unions were represented at the Zimmerwald socialist and pacifist conference in 1915. Bolshevik agents from Bussia were active in Italy from 1917 on, and some of the Italian leaders were arrested and convicted of inciting riots at a time of national peril. The Socialist Party and the General Confederation of Labor united in a reconstruction program, in 1918. It demands continuance of the "class struggle" as an international movement of the workers ; universal dis- armament, various administrative reforms, nationaliza- tion of water-power and minerals, a general insurance system, energetic taxation of inheritances and the grad- ual socialization or taking over by the government of all land; universal compulsory education, a minimum wage, eight-hour day and other protective labor legis- EUROPEAN" LABOR MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 85 lation, to be based upon "effective acknowledgment of the right of all workers to a decent and human exist- COMMUMTSTS AND PASCISTI All moderately radical programs were swept away after the war in a wave of revolutionary uprisings over the greater part of Italy, particularly in the north. Strikes were incessant, usually with violence; railway and telegraph service was repeatedly stopped and city lighting systems were cut off. Interdicts were issued, virtually denying the means of life to citizens who re- fused to accept the regulations of the socialist leagues. Industrial plants were taken by force, and the attempt made to operate them by Soviets of the workers. But control of the factories did not mean control of either raw materials or markets, and the experiment led almost immediately to shut-downs, unemployment and distress. The government was able to bring about an agreement between the metal workers and employers in northern Italy on a plan of "trade-union control," which never went into effect, however. A government measure took its place, more on the lines of the works councils in Germany. Meanwhile, violent excesses brought on the violent counter-attacks of the Fascisti. Socialist headquarters and printing plants were wrecked, strikes broken and revolutionary meetings scattered. The Eascisti move- ment, made up of ex-soldiers, students, middle-class business men and non-socialist workmen, was no doubt 86 THE LABOK MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE assisted by employing interests and certainly was not discouraged by the government, but it is hardly prob- able that it could have swept the country except as a spontaneous revulsion, in the main, against the forcible attempt to overturn the government and set up a Kus- sian soviet system in Italy. In the riotous May elections of 1921 the National Union Party (anti-socialist) and the clericals returned 374 members of the Italian chamber of deputies, the socialists 140 and communists 15, a reduction of 16 in the total representation of revolutionary groups. The socialist and labor movements have been so weakened by the breakdown of the expected revolution, the con- flict with communists within the ranks and attacks of the Fascisti without, that for the present at least they are of little influence in the shaping of reconstruction policies, except as a latent threat. There has been re- cently a steady drift within the Socialist Party towards the "right wing," or less revolutionary group. Leaders of the conservative following in the Italian socialist movement are Filippo Turati and Leonida Bissolati, the latter a cabinet minister during the war, and founder of L'Avanti, the leading Italian socialist paper. Foremost in the revolutionary wing are the secretary of the Socialist Party, Constantino Lazzari, and Menotti Serrati, who was imprisoned in war time on the charge of sedition and at present is editor of L'Avanti. The picturesque anarchist, Enrico Mala- testa, of noble family, agitator and plotter all over Eu- rope, is now in exile. EUROPEAN LABOE MOVEMENTS TO-DAY 87 LABOE IN OTHEB EUROPEAN COUNTRIES In Belgium the trade-union and socialist movements are closely allied. During the German occupation the organizations were kept alive hy refugees in France, Holland and England, working as a unit in behalf of victory for the allied cause. The labor movement of Holland is best known through the secretary of the Federation of Trade Unions, Jan Oudegeest, who is also secretary of the International Federation of Trade Unions. Of the labor movement in Spain, and most of the small nations of central and southern Europe, it may be said that they have little of trade-union or- ganization as we know it but are largely revolutionary. In Spain, at least, this may be explained in part by the backward state of industrial development, the gov- ernment ban on normal labor activities, and propaganda from the strong socialist and communist movements in other European countries. Most of the labor struggle that comes to the surface in Spain takes the form of anarchistic outbreaks on the one side and military sup- pression on the other. Trade unions in Russia, repeatedly suppressed under the czars, made a sudden and rapid growth after the revolution of 1917. Under the bolshevik regime they exist merely as agencies of the soviet system, without the right to strike and with none of the independent powers of bargaining on terms and conditions of labor, exercised by members of trade unions in countries where organization of labor is free. VII INTERNATIONAL LABOE RELATIONS The idea of common action by wage-earners of all countries took form in a definite way in 1864. In that year the "First International" was organized in Lon- don, on a plan drawn up by Karl Marx. By 1870 the movement included labor groups from most of the Euro- pean countries and the United States. The earlier ef- forts were limited mainly to aiding labor struggles in any one country by contributions from the trade unions of other countries, but in 1869 the socialists gained full control and demanded, as a first step, collective owner- ship of land. The First International was wrecked by a violent dispute between the followers of Marx and of the anarchist Bakunin, and by the fall of the Paris Commune, in which it had taken a leading part. THE SECOND INTEBWATIONAL The Second International was formed in Paris in 1899, and during the next fifteen years it held nine congresses. It was always strongly under German in- fluence, and leaned to reformist measures more than to revolution. "The final aim is nothing," Edward Bernstein declared: "the movement is everything." The program of the Second International pledged the socialists of all nations against war under all circum- 88 INTERNATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS 89 stances, but all the majority groups in 1914 supported the war measures of their home governments. Thereupon the Second International, for the time being, practically ceased to exist. Some of the minority factions continued to work against war, on the theory that it was purely a capitalist affair. A conference of labor and socialist delegates holding this view was held at Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in 1915 ; the attempt was made to hold another at Stockholm in 1917, but with- out result on account of the refusal of the British, French and Italian governments to grant passports. The French socialists and the British Labor Party endorsed the Stockholm project but the American Federation of Labor condemned it, on the ground that attempts to negotiate with labor groups of enemy countries could have the effect only of delaying or imperiling the out- come of the war. It held that neither democratic civil- ization nor the future of the labor movement could be secure until Prussian militarism was destroyed. The American Federation took part, however, in a confer- ence on war aims, of labor and socialist groups of the allied nations, in September, 1918. An attempt to revive the Second International was made at Berne in 1919, and at Geneva in 1920. The Geneva meeting, chiefly of British and German dele- gates, put forth a new platform of socialism to be achieved through labor control of governments, and con- demned the Russian program of terrorism, dictatorship and suppression of democracy. The British Labor Party is endeavoring to rebuild the Second Interna- tional, which still holds also the majority socialist par- 90 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER ties of Germany, Belgium, Holland and Sweden. At the Amsterdam meeting of the International, in 1921, it was attempted to bring about joint action with cer- tain other labor and revolutionary groups, on repara- tions, but without result. The American Federation sent no delegates either to Geneva or to Amsterdam, on the ground that the Second International, while hos- tile to holshevism, nevertheless aims to overthrow the system of free industry and labor and establish state socialism, a program the American Federation has op- posed for many years. THE THIED IKTEENATIONAL The Third International was formed at Moscow in March, 1919, to carry on throughout the world the Eussian propaganda of revolution by force. Besides the bolsheviki, the Norwegian Labor Party and the communist groups of Germany, Hungary and other cen- tral European countries were represented. At the sec- ond meeting, also at Moscow, in July, 1920, delegates of revolutionary parties were present from nearly every country on the Continent. This congress repeated the familiar bolshevik demands for the overthrow of capi- talism, dictatorship of the proletariat and an interna- tional soviet republic. It was at this meeting that the much discussed "twen- ty-one conditions" of membership in the International were adopted, the net effect of which has been, in every country, to widen the split between the extreme revolu- tionaries and the socialist groups which object to turning INTERNATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS 91' over control of their internal affairs to the Moscow leaders. The congress declared that : "The class strug- gle in almost every country of Europe and America is reaching the threshold of civil war," and according to a leading American socialist the whole scheme of organ- ization of the Third International is hased on this "fan- tastic assumption." x In the European socialist groups, the reports of in- vestigators of their own persuasion, returning from Bus- sia, have turned sentiment strongly against the type of social reconstruction there in force. In 1920 the Ameri- can Federation of Labor, in convention at Montreal, re- pudiated the Eussian program in this resolution : That the American Federation of Labor is not justified in taking any action which could be construed as an assistance to, or approval of, the soviet government of Russia as long as that government is based upon authority which has not been vested in it by a popular representa- tive national assemblage of the Russian people; or so long as it endeavors to create revolutions in the well- established, civilized nations of the world; or so long as it advocates and applies the militarization of labor and prevents the organizing and functioning of trade unions and the maintenance of a free press and free public assemblage. INTEBNATIONAL TEADE UNIONISM Eegular relations between trade unions of different countries sprang from the First International, which 1 From Marx to Lenin (Hillquit), p. 148. 92 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEK rapidly drifted into a socialist rather than an industrial labor movement. It was not until 1901 that an Inter- national Trade Union Secretariat was formed, at Copen- hagen, to hold conferences every other year of the na- tional secretaries of trade-union centers. In 1913 this organization became the International Federation of Trade Unions, with a membership estimated at more than seven millions, in twenty-one countries, including the United States. The Federation did not put forth a common program for the trade unions of all countries. It exchanged information and financial help and appeals, and advocated social legislation in behalf of labor. Po- litical issues were debarred. Besides this general move- ment, there have been and are a number of international associations by separate trades or industries, having much the same objects and methods. The International Federation went to pieces during the war, but was reestablished at Amsterdam in July, 1919, with fourteen countries represented. The Ameri- can labor movement was affiliated with the International Federation until 1915, and was represented at the Am- sterdam conference; it has declined thus far to renew its connection because of programs and policies adopted, under political and socialist influence, which it regards as revolutionary and as attempts to dictate the course of national labor bodies. The Denver convention of the American Federation, in 1921, declared itself "im- pressed with the great need of lending all possible as- sistance to the trade-union movements of other nations" and as ready to affiliate with the International Federa- tion "whenever the laws are amended so as to preserve INTERNATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS 93 the integrity, the right to self-government and determi- nation on the part of each trade-union center." In evidence of the attempt of controlling elements in the International Federation to commit the trade-union movement in all countries to a revolutionary program, there was cited a manifesto issued in the name of the [Federation in 1920, headed: "Down with Keaction! Tip with Socialization !" demanding socialization of the means of production as the "one aim on which they must focus all their efforts." A declaration has been made also for "mass action by means of a general strike" against war. American opponents of this proposal point out that with no better guaranty of united action than a similar idea afforded in 1914, such a pledge could have the effect only of putting the countries whose working- men lived up to it at the mercy of any war-making nation in which the strike was not carried out. From the bolshevist standpoint, on the other hand, all labor movements which oppose proletarian dictator- ship are betrayals of the worker. There was formed, in July, 1920, a "Bed International Council of Trade Unions," with headquarters in Moscow, expressly to wage war against the International Federation of Trade Unions and the International Labor Bureau created by the peace treaty, and to turn the trade-union movement in all countries to revolutionary communism. LABOB AND THE LEAGUE OP NATIONS In the Treaty of Versailles it was sought to provide an outlet for the common aspirations of labor by an 94 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAKMEK international bureau, to advise the member nations on suitable measures of uniform legislation for maintain- ing fair and humane labor standards. There had been treaties among various European nations covering uni- form laws on certain conditions of employment, espe- cially affecting health, but in no previous general treaty of peace had the needs of labor been deemed important enough for special attention. The Versailles Treaty expressly justifies the labor clauses on the ground that the social unrest growing out of the hardships and in- justices of wage-earners may imperil the peace of the world. The international labor office is founded, there- fore, on the principle, as the treaty reads, "that the well-being, physical, moral and intellectual, of indus- trial wage-earners is of supreme international impor- tance." The principle of free association of labor is recog- nized, as well as the desirability of regulation of work- ing time, prevention of unemployment, provision for a living wage, protection of children and women, voca- tional education, and insurance against sickness, injury and old age. The international labor office is in charge of a governing body of twenty-four members, twelve representing governments, six representing employers and six representing employees; while its annual con- ferences are made up of two government delegates, one labor and one employer from each member country. The "United States has no membership in this bureau, but the first meeting nevertheless was held in Washing- ton in the fall of 1919, with thirty nations represented. Several countries sent only government delegates; les3 IFTEENATIONAL LABOE EELATIONS 95 than one-half were employer and labor representatives. A number of recommendations were agreed upon, bear- ing on the health and working conditions of labor, and including the question of immigration. Further pro- posals were adopted at the second and third confer- ences (Genoa 1920 and Geneva 1921). Great Britain Las ratified four of the six proposals of the Washington meeting, but not the most important one, providing for the eight-hour day. Some of this legislation has been passed in thirteen countries; about half of the forty- nine member nations have not as yet carried out the treaty pledge to submit the agreed recommendations to the competent authorities for action. At Geneva the most important debate turned on the question how to induce the various governments to put in force the conference's decisions, and very little light was shed on the question. It was openly declared by some of the delegates representing workingmen that continued in- action by the governments would destroy the confidence of labor in the international office. Two years before, at the Washington conference, Mr. Barnes, of the British delegation, had pointed out that the compelling force behind the recommendations would be that of public opinion in every country. Thus far, apparently, public opinion has shown no such interest or agreement in support .of the conference proposals as would be necessary to carry out the really important reforms not already in effect in leading industrial na- tions. Even among the great labor groups represented in the international office there is a deep-seated reluc- tance to give over to any hands other than their own the 96 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMEE choice of policies or of methods for enforcing plans of labor betterment. The French labor leader, Albert I'homas, himself director of the international office, in- sisted at the Washington conference that the work of reconstruction must be "carried out with the aid of the great trade unions," and E. John Solano, formerly of the British ministry of labor, while favoring uniform standards of labor legislation in all countries, takes the ground that enforcement will depend on the power of organized labor. The present prospect is that the international labor office will serve more largely as a means of investigation, information and exchange of ideas than as a controlling influence on labor legislation. Agreement upon uniform standards, among nations of very unlike conditions and in many different stages of industrial development, offers many serious difficulties. Probably there must come first, especially in the less advanced countries, a further working out of the labor movements in contact both with employers and the governments. VIII WHAT DOBS LABOR WANT? We have been following the struggle of industrial labor in modern countries, through many years, and gather- ing an idea of its present strength, its aims and meth- ods. How shall we account for the tremendous extent and energy of the movement to-day ? The most appall- ing conditions that helped to drive wage-earners to- gether in self-defense a century ago have passed away. What is it that gives us an immensely stronger labor movement now, and in the very countries especially where the wage-earning population already has made the greatest advance in general conditions of life and work ? What is back of it all ? THE MEANS OF ADEQUATE LIFE The common instincts of all humanity are back of it, in the first place. It is absurd that we need to remind ourselves of this, whenever we discuss the labor ques-' tion. What the wage-earner wants and what he main- tains a labor movement for is, in the great essentials, what the farmer, business man, financier — every man — wants. First, it is adequate means of life. But in the modern world that no more means to the workingman merely the means to exist than it does to anybody else. The standard of life is an elastic and changing thing, depending much upon the civilization of the time and place, Ideas of what is sufficient are fairly similar 97 98 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEB among men of similar occupation and surroundings. The least that is asked by any group, so far at least as it makes itself heard, is the means to rear a family ac- cording to modern ideas of the essential comforts and decencies, with a margin for education, recreation and saving. It is not a matter to put into set terms by tables of the cost of an agreed list of necessities. Many serious attempts have been made in this way to arrive at a "proper wage" by schedules of average living expenses. But the workingman insists that such a basis is to be considered, not as a measure of reasonable desires but as the least a man can receive without actual degradation of life. His view of it can be understood at least by the farmer who hears the complaint that prices of his products are too high when, in good times, he is able to add some unaccustomed comforts to his scale of living. It has taken us some time to become reconciled to the idea of workingmen receiving $4 and $5 a day. Twenty years ago it took us quite as long to accept the thought of $3 a day, and somewhat earlier we were dis- turbed for the future when dollar-a-day mill hands be- gan to earn a dollar and a half and worked ten hours instead of twelve or fourteen. A salary of perhaps $3,500 to the manager who directed these men set him on a peak of distinction in his community hardly equaled by his $10,000 successor to-day, and a man was wealthy with $50,000 who is merely well-to-do at present with half a million. But it is safe to say that neither the $10,000 manager nor the half-million capitalist who is alarmed at $5 WHAT DOES LABOR WANT? 99 a day labor regards the change in the status of his own group as in any way remarkable. We need not be sur- prised that workingmen do not take seriously, nor al- ways kindly, the labor views of the man who expects other men to bring up and educate families according to American standards of decency, behavior, intelli- gence and good citizenship on half the amount for an entire year that he' spends without a thought on a new automobile or a summer vacation. They may not dis- pute his right to the automobile — in fact, much of the bitterness against men of means, as such, is more ap- parent in radical literature than it is among actual wage-earners — but there is keen resentment of the dis- position to condemn other men's efforts to realize a standard of life which is meager at best, in contrast. HUMAN BEINGS OE "CLASS PBOBLEM" ? There would be less of that disposition, and less of the ill will it breeds, if it were not so difficult for many people to think of the workingman as first of all a hu- man being, an individual. Just so soon as we make a "class problem" of him we unconsciously think of him as a being in a different world, and when his special demands and ambitions are up for argument we bridle against them. Workingmen are twice as well off as they were in the old days, we say; they ought to be con- tented with what they have. To a great extent, appar- ently, we flatter ourselves that what they have gained thus far was freely bestowed, that the credit is somehow ours. They were obliged, in fact, to make the same 100 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FABMEE' struggle for it that arouses our indignation when they attempt, now, to take another step forward. Neither the employer nor the community, upon the whole, has yielded up to labor anything of material value any more willingly in earlier days than we are disposed to to- day. If the workingman resents the attitude so commonly taken towards him and towards his efforts it is because there are some things, among his wants, which lie deeper than matters of wages and working conditions. He has been trained too long in the ideas of equality, at least of rights and opportunities, of human considera- tion and just treatment, not to sense it when he does not find them in the actual relations of man to man. Even with the man at the bottom of the industrial scale, unlettered and unskilled, it is the things which he feels but cannot put into words, much less into constructive ideas, that turn his mind and his hand either against the community or for it. To be legally free means much, but there is little to remind the man of it, day by day, who still sees next above only the face of the arbitrary and all-powerful overlord. The right to a voice in determining the conditions of a man's own life and labor lies at the heart of the democratic idea. It is at the heart also of the labor movement. It means the right to have a larger outlook, and to work towards it in one's own way, in common with one's fellows of like aim. "In one's own way" is a chief bone of contention. It cannot of course mean in ways that deny the equal right of others. But it is a common habit of many WHAT DOES LABOK WANT? 101 well-meaning people to set forth programs and methods such as they believe workingmen ought to want as being What they actually do want. There are those who in- sist that "what labor wants" is revolution, and there are others who offer solutions which have a much larger sup- port among employers, or among social workers, writers or politicians than among the wage-earners for whom they are planned. THE STANDAEDS IABOB DEMANDS Suppose we take the labor movement itself as author- ity upon what the largest audible group of workingmen actually want, rather than the employer or the doctri- naire. What unorganized workingmen want we have no definite means of knowing, but it seems not unreason- able to infer that if their voice could be heard it would be found much the same, in the main human require- ments at least, as that of other workmen who have united to realize those requirements in larger measure. At present, in this country, the most representative expression of authorized labor opinion in a large way is that of the 36,000 trade unions, approximately, as- sociated in the American Federation of Labor. In these unions are now some four million industrial wage-earn- ers, and in the railroad brotherhoods nearly a half million more of like aims and very similar methods. The program of the socialist movement we have stated, 1 but its enrolled following is too small, thus far at least, 1 See page 60. 102 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE to be taken as the voice of a representative working- class movement. Many conventions of the American Federation of Labor, many declarations of its authorized spokesmen, have proclaimed "what labor wants" during the last forty years. There has been disagreement within the movement on some of these demands; many have re- lated to special issues and conditions of the moment, but the central proposals upon which there has been general accord are these : Wages adequate to a rising standard of living. 'A working day of not more than eight hours. The right to organize, to bargain on employment con- ditions through representatives of labor's own choosing. 1 Abolition of child labor, better provision for educa- tion, protection of working women, equal wages for men and women in the same employments. No court injunctions in industrial disputes. Popular election of judges. The initiative and refer- endum. Safe and sanitary work-places, protected machinery. Prompt and adequate compensation for accidents dur- ing employment, the cost to be borne by the industry. Voluntary methods of insurance for sickness and unemployment. Scientific program for reducing unemployment. Eestricted and better selected immigration. Freedom of speech and of the press, with due re- sponsibility for consequences. International measures to prevent war. 1 See page 140. WHAT DOES LABOE WANT? 103 An employment relation and a legal status which counts the worker as a human heing and not as a com- modity. An effective voice for the workingman in the shaping of the industrial and political conditions under which he lives. LABOE's EEOONSTEtrCTION PEOGEAM The Eeconstruction Program adopted by the Ameri- can Federation convention in 1919 may lie taken as the most comprehensive statement thus far put forth of what labor wants, at the present stage of industrial progress in this country. It is more conservative in tone than the program of the British Labor Party, but the outlook is broad and some of the demands far-reaching. The proposals this manifesto offers, summarized, are these : That the principles of democracy should regulate the relationship of men in all their activities. "That the workers should have a voice in determining the laws within industry and commerce which affect them, equivalent to the voice which they have as citi- zens in determining the legislative enactments which shall govern them," and, to this end, "that the workers everywhere should insist upon their right to organize into trade unions." That "just wages will create a market at home which will far surpass any market that may exist elsewhere and will lessen unemployment." 104 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER A living wage for skilled and unskilled, "which will enable the worker and his family to live in health and comfort, provide a competence for illness and old age, and afford to all the opportunity of cultivating the best that is within mankind." A working day of not more than eight hours "except under the most extraordinary emergencies." Equal pay for men and women for equal work, and no tasks for women which will impair their physical strength. "An immediate end to the exploitation of children under 16 years of age." Further development of cooperative buying and sell- ing, with the active support of trade unionists, both to reduce unnecessary costs and to "prepare the mass of the people to participate more effectively in the solution of the industrial, commercial, social and po- litical problems which continually arise." Freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and of association. "To attain the greatest possible development of civil- ization, it is essential among other things that the peo- ple should never delegate to others those activities and responsibilities which they are capable of assuming for themselves. Democracy can function best with the least interference by the state compatible with due protection to the rights of all citizens." The right of congress and of legislatures to reenact and make effective any law which a court has annulled as unconstitutional. Continuation of labor's non-partizan political policy, WHAT DOES LABOE WANT? 105 through which during the past generation "the workers of America have secured a much larger measure of fun- damental legislation, establishing their rights, safe- guarding their interests, protecting their welfare and opening the doors of opportunity than have been secured by the workers of any other country. The vital legis- lation now required can be more readily secured through education of the public mind and the appeal to its con- science, supplemented by energetic, independent politi- cal activity on the part of trade unionists, than by any other method. . . . The rules and regulations of trade unionism should not be extended so that the action of a majority could force a minority to vote for or give financial support to any political candidate or party to whom they are opposed." Ownership, operation or regulation by the government of public and semi-public utilities "in the interest of the public." Development of public waterways, encouragement of the merchant marine, with full protection to the rights and welfare of seamen; ownership and operation by Federal and State governments of "all water power over which they have jurisdiction. The power thus gen- erated should be supplied to all citizens at rates based upon cost." Graduated taxation of idle lands suitable for use; legislation to enable tenant farmers and others to pur- chase land upon favorable terms and at low interest. Irrigation and reclamation projects ; government ex- periment stations. 106 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER Federal licensing and strict public control of corpora- tions. More adequate workmen's compensation laws, with State management of employers' liability insurance. Immigration restricted to "the nation's ability to as- similate and Americanize the foreigners coming to our shores," and entire exclusion during times of abnormal unemployment. Prohibition of all immigration for at least two years after the declaration of peace. "A progressive increase in taxes upon incomes, in- heritance, and upon land values of such a nature as to render it unprofitable to hold land without putting it to use, to afford a transition to greater economic equality and to supply means of liquidating the national indebt- edness growing out of the war." .Greater opportunities for advanced education, and for industrial education with representation for the workers on all boards "having control over vocational studies or training." The right of teachers to organize. Trade-union and employer supervision of the conduct of public employment agencies. Housing projects carried on by States and cities, and credit systems to assist workingmen to build their own homes. A "voluntary citizen soldiery," organized and con- trolled upon democratic principles so that it may never be used to jeopardize the liberties of the people. Unal- terable opposition to "militarism" and a large standing army. Government help to returning soldiers and sailors in finding work under fair conditions, their pay to be .WHAT DOES LABOK WANT? 107 continued in the meanwhile, but not more than one year : opportunities, also, for easy access to the land, with capi- tal supplied for its development. IS AMERICAN LABOB WITHOUT IDEALS? Such a program reflects of course more conservative ideas than those of most European labor bodies. For this reason, the American labor movement is often criti- cized as a commercial aggregation of wage-workers, without vision or ideals beyond the needs of the hour. Such an impression probably is due to the intensely prac- tical character of the efforts of organized workingmen in this country, since their earlier and futile ventures in political utopianism. But it is not possible to explain or understand a work- ing-class struggle of the scope and achievements of the American labor movement as inspired by sordid motives merely. Running through all its manifestos, its litera- ture, the philosophy of its best known leaders in thought or deed, from the days of Ira Steward and George E. McNeill to John Mitchell and Samuel Gom- pers, there is a current of idealism, of forward looking to a better civilization, a democracy of human welfare rising out of the painful and halting effort of many generations of men to bring it, bit by bit, into being. Much of this underlying motive force has been lost to public comprehension in the incessant, day by day struggle of labor along a far extended line to realize some of its ideals for the men, women and children not alone of to-morrow but of to-day. It is not the com- 108 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE plaint of employers, at any rate, that organized work- ingmen are too "business like"; rather, that they are too much under the sway of theories and sentiment. In replying to a fear once expressed by Miss Jane Addams that the practical methods of trade unions en- danger their idealism, Mr. Gompers suggested that after all the test of the ethical lies very largely in the prac- tical deed. "To make contracts and stick to them, even when they limit or take away the right of striking out of sympathy, is not to sacrifice idealism. To consult actual conditions and the dictates of reasonable expe- diency before striking or making demands upon em- ployers is not to abandon any ideal ever proposed by in- telligent unionists. The idealism of the labor move- ment," he continued, lies in the fact that in striving for better conditions and more equitable treatment here and now it is "really battling for social and industrial progress." Twenty years ago, in a convention of the American Federation, Mr. Gompers said: That we are still far from the goal for which the human family have been for ages struggling is due to our own shortcomings. There is no reason why we should not realize the highest hopes of an ideal life, where man's worth shall be measured by his real utility to his fellows, where his generosity and sympathy, rather than his cu- pidity and rapacity, shall receive the encomiums and re- wards of a nobler manhood. In the closing months of the world war he saw the approach to that goal in this wise: WHAT DOES LABOR WANT? 109 American labor . . . has not ignored reconstruction problems; it is false to say that it is untouched by the higher democratic idealism that is stirring the world to- day. It realizes deeply that the work we are doing to-day will be the basis of organization to-morrow. No recon- struction program can wholly separate itself from the life of to-day and the future, but it must be built upon the institutions of the present and in accord with practi- cal principles that have enabled us to make progress from the past. It should be remembered that the elements repre- sented in the American Federation comprise strictly a wage-workers' movement. It is of, by and for the wage-workers, but it holds the belief nevertheless that to raise the level of life for millions of the less fortunate is not to burden the rest of the community but to lay broad foundations for the common prosperity and se- curity. Its choice of methods to this end it bases upon its own experience, in contrast with the practical re- sults of various revolutionary movements. Any one familiar with what goes on within the meetings of cen- tral labor bodies and at national conventions of labor is well aware that a significant new proposal from any source — 'British, Russian or American — has its ardent champions and expounders. If it is not adopted, it is not at any rate because the members are permitted to remain ignorant of its nature or of the arguments in its behalf. Local unions here and there frequently do en- dorse schemes much more radical than the larger bodies are willing to accept. Programs of a revolutionary leaning, wholly or in 110 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE part, are very common among the interwoven labor, socialist and political movements of Europe. In the view of many whose own views tend in the same direc- tion, they are the mark of superior intelligence and pro- gressiveness on the part of European wage-workers. To other observers they represent chiefly the views of in- tellectuals and social propagandists of ability and force, who have taken leadership of the labor movement. "Whether or not such leadership is to the advantage of labor is a hotly disputed point, on both sides of the water. The ideas of the intellectuals are by no means un- heard or unknown to American workingmen, but the decision and direction of policies in the labor move- ment is limited to actual wage-earners. This position is based upon the danger of opening opportunities to poli- ticians and visionaries of no industrial experience to exploit the wage-workers' movement for personal or propagandist ends, dividing its counsels and frittering away its united effort for objects attainable in dissension over the unattainable. The reality of this danger is a bitter chapter in American labor history, but it has been felt in England as well. In their discussion of industrial democracy, Sidney and Beatrice Webb have pointed out in much detail "how dangerous it may become to the strength and authority of a trade union if any large section of the persons in the trade are driven out of its ranks, or deterred from joining, because they find their con- victions outraged by part of its action. 1 * History of Trade Unionism, p. 627. WHAT DOES LABOK WANT? Ill In the opinion of an American observer long active in the socialist movement and closely familiar with the labor and radical movements of Europe, "American labor is to-day more united than labor of any country of the world with the possible exception of Great Brit- ain. And this unity has been won and held againsf stronger influences making for division than exist in any other nation, since America has been the battle- ground of all the theories as well as all the prejudices of the workers of all Europe. Yet we are better united. The reason? Labor tends to unite on all labor ques- tions ; labor tends to divide on all the non-labor questions that take up so much of the time and energy of the po- litical parties of Europe. The word 'solidarity' is more widely used in Europe; actual solidarity is more ad- vanced in the United States. ... It is due to this good fortune of our history and not to an inborn su- periority of American workers that the American labor movement is the only labor movement in the world to- day that is built consistently on a democratic founda- tion, has an exclusively democratic policy and goal, and has never departed from democratic policies." x ONE STEP AT A TIME Whether the American labor movement's faith in reformist measures as the necessary means of social advance implies a narrow vision depends of course on the point of view. The difference between the American and European movements in this respect, quite prob- 1 William English Walling, in American Federationist, Sept. 1921. 112 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE ably, relates more to methods and programs than to ultimate ideals for humanity. The hardness of the struggle may have limited the outlook of the American movement too closely, sometimes, to the "next thing ahead," but it would not be a just or intelligent estimate to say that it has no idea where it is going. In brief, the American movement as it sees matters to-day is not convinced that a radically new and experi- mental system can at any time be fitted successfully to the infinite variety of human conditions, or that the man of the moment is able to plan the industrial and political order which will seem just and equitable and efficient to the man of a century or a half century hence. It is content that the future framework of society be such as may suit the temper and needs and will of the humanity which is to live within it, enlightened by all the experience it shall have gathered on the way. Mean- while it acts upon the theory that eternal vigilance is the price of progress no less than of liberty. "Men are not necessarily free," as Mr. Gompers puts it, "because Declarations of Independence so declare. Men are not necessarily free because the Constitution guarantees freedom." At another time: "I want the stars in the heavens. My aspirations know no limit for my fellow men, but ... I am not going to give up voluntarily the labor movement with its achievements of to-day for the chimerical to-morrow. . . . We prefer to go on in this normal way of trying to make the con- ditions of life and labor better to-day than they were yesterday, and better to-morrow and to-morrow's to- morrow than each day that has gone before." IX THE PUBLIC SITTING IN" JUDGMENT No one thus far has been able to draw the line, accepted by everybody as just and proper, between the public's rights and interests and those of each of the many groups of which that same public is made up. It is the oldest problem of government. The labor group, as many people see it, is a chief trespasser against the public interest, but the same ques- tion arises in every direction. Western farmers are no more willing to accept the views of certain eastern newspapers and politicians on the agricultural policies which are and are not in the public interest than work- ingmen are willing to govern themselves by employer ideas of the general welfare. Business men, in turn, resent particularly any attempt of "the public" to regu- late prices or to decide what is a fair profit. In a condition of free industry and free markets the line gets itself drawn, after a fashion, with no par- ticular theory on the subject. Any group overreaching too far or too long either loses so much of the public's patronage or stirs up so much hostile legislation that eventually its own prosperity, even its security, depends upon drawing back to some line at which private and public interest more nearly balance. Within this de- batable ground the give-and-take, the testing-out, always 113 114 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER is going on. It is not a perfect method, but it prevails no doubt because men never have been able to agree upon any fixed standard or rule by which, as citizens and consumers, to limit themselves as individuals and pro- ducers. For the public is of course only the sum total of all its groups ; the same people counted together in- stead of separately. By the old Jeffersonian doctrine, every individual should have free play up to the point where he oversteps the equal rights of others. By a popular modern doc- trine, on the other hand, in all industrial relations "the rights of the public are paramount." Somewhere be- tween the two, we are trying to work out a practical code that shall come as nearly as may be to justice. It sounds on first statement like a rule upon which all could agree, that the rights of the public always are paramount. At once we find, however, that what we really mean by "the public" in such a statement is — > the majority. But we do not of course mean that a majority may do whatever it pleases. There are those of course who do so believe; for instance, that it may and ought to confiscate all private property on the ground that the public right is "paramount." And there are others who believe that this paramount right justi- fies fine and imprisonment for wage-earners or farmers who combine to sell their labor or their products on better terms. Clearly the rule does not solve the prob- lem. We are still obliged to decide what we mean, THE PUBLIC SITTING IN JUDGMENT 115 to draw lines and set bounds to the rights of the indi- vidual on the one hand and of majorities on the other. To secure the rights of the individual was the whole struggle of the English people for some centuries after the granting of Magna Charta. The power of govern- ment passed in the meanwhile from kings to parliaments, but it was hardly less necessary to secure man-rights against majority oppression than against the autocrat. The great basic guaranties of our own system of govern- ment are those of the right to life, to liberty, to the safe holding of property, to a voice in the conduct of government itself. A vital part of the duties of our courts, indeed, is to enforce these guaranties as against any "paramount" right of majorities to do what they will with the liber- ties of minorities. Very probably the labor bodies which just now are demanding that legislatures have the power to reenact laws declared unconstitutional by a court may not fully realize that, in clearing the way for legis- lation desired at the moment, the bars are thrown down at the same time to the hostile measures of some un- friendly political majority which, freed of all constitu- tional checks, might very possibly fix itself in power by a chain of legislation which only revolution could break. PUBLIC NECESSITY AND EOECED XABOE How far the public's needs or comfort entitle it to coerce those who furnish necessary supplies or services is a question not likely to be settled by argument. We may expect it to adjust itself by degrees as the whole 116 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE PARMER method of reaching agreements in industry works out in some systematic way, upon a basis of mutual confi- dence — evidently a long process. Before we decide that compulsion is the only remedy, we can at least see what it means if we put ourselves in the other man's place. To take an extreme case, often cited : does the farmer who believes that railroad men ought to be compelled to accept wages they object to, in order to run trains supplying a city with milk, believe also that dairymen ought to be compelled to produce and ship the milk at prices they object to? It is, indeed, no simple prob- lem. The question of public rights in a labor dispute has come up strongly, as a rule, only in the case of necessary industries or services, such as railroads or coal mining. The idea is urged, however, that every labor contest in some degree affects the public welfare and ought therefore to be settled by a government agency in the public interest. What, then, has the public at stake in a labor dis- pute? First, the maintenance of law and order: on this there need be no argument. Second, the regular supply of necessaries. Third, the general advantage in a business way of having all industries go on without interruption. The strike is an interruption. It may and often does occur with no violation of law and order, but simply as an interruption it may and sometimes does bring serious loss and distress to some part of the community. Probably it stands first among the causes of prejudice against the labor movement. THE PUBLIC SITTING IN JUDGMENT 117 Workingmen might acknowledge all that is to be said against the strike and still protest that a majority of the citizens in the community cannot justly, even to serve their own necessities, enforce upon other citi- zens labor which they would not consent to have im- posed upon themselves. In this view, for instance, a majority may no more rightfully require a thousand men to dig 2oal, in the pay of a private employer, because they have already dug coal for a dozen years or a month or a day, than to commandeer any other thousand men and set them at the job. In other words, if it must have an industry or a service continue, it may as justly at- tempt to compel some men, as employers, to pay the wages necessary to obtain labor as to require other men to perform the labor upon terms dictated by either the employer or the community. In soviet Kussia, it is pointed out, the business and middle classes have had ample opportunity to know the meaning of work under duress upon fixed terms, for the public good as seen in this instance by a proletarian government. The results have exhibited to socialists of other countries very generally the futility of labor im- posed upon any group by the will of another, however large. Masaryk, the socialist president of Czecho-Slo- vakia, tells his people: "Proletarians would in vain compel the bourgeois to work, if they themselves are unable to control the work." In point of fact, no way has yet been found of en- forcing continuous service, among free citizens, except under prison sentence or military draft. Even if the Constitution did not prohibit involuntary servitude, the 118 THE LABOB MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER fining or imprisoning of men who insist upon quitting work, jointly or singly, does not of course do the one thing the public wants done — keep the industry going. To prohibit a strike is not to make men work. Instead, it may very possibly intensify resentment and breed new perils for old. Such at least are the main lines of the labor argu- ment in this matter. If all negotiations for voluntary settlement fail, if public opinion has no effect, if pen- alties for striking do not actually keep an industry go- ing, the public has the last resort alternative of taking possession for the time being and operating it with vol- unteers or troops, as it might in a military crisis. In point of fact the extreme emergency, such as this, be- comes a reality much less often than we expect. What happened in the threatened triple alliance strike in Eng- land, as in the "outlaw" railroad strikes in this country, suggests unforeseen resources of the community in its own protection. In transportation, for instance, the immense growth of motor-truck facilities for moving food and fuel, with the oncoming possibilities in air navigation, are object lessons which can hardly be lost upon either railroad managements or employees. The very attempts, indeed, to abolish strikes by remedies which might spread the disease rather than cure it sig- nify an increasing pressure of sentiment which ought not to be without effect in the working out of other means of composing differences. THE PUBLIC SITTING IN" JUDGMENT 119 WHERE THE MOBAL OBLIGATION LIES There is indeed, in every vitally necessary occupation, a moral obligation which is not sufficiently felt as yet by either workingmen or managers. To accept em- ployment at all, in an industry or service upon which numbers of one's fellow men depend for the necessaries of life ought to carry with it a sobering sense of re- sponsibility, a determination to exhaust every reasonable means, a willingness to endure more for the time being than men need be expected to endure in purely private occupations, before taking the final step and quitting work. But the same obligation rests, too, on the em- ployer. It is one of the chronic oversights in the public judgment, embittering to workingmen, that the blame for whatever happens is so commonly laid to a selfish and anti-social attitude on their part, with little or no heed to an employer attitude which may have had quite as much to do with the break in good relations. They would perhaps respond more quickly, when warned to remember their duty to the community, if convinced that the employer were being made to feel the public eye equally upon him. The sense of moral obligation must be mutual. It is a product of moral forces. The product of compulsion is a sense of injustice, backed with resistance. VIOLENCE AND INJUNCTIONS Facts do not bear out the charge, less often heard than some years ago, that the labor movement encourages 120 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE violence in strikes. Local unions of strong radical leanings sometimes do, but the counsel of national lead- ers and the literature of the movement steadily warn against it. It is no uncommon thing for strike commit- tees to direct the members of a union to keep away from the vicinity of the plant affected. In many cases of strike rioting, investigation has shown the greater part of it to be the work of hoodlums drawn to a point of anticipated trouble. Lawlessness probably never won a contest for labor ; it has lost many. So well known is this that employing concerns have been charged in various instances with promoting outbreaks in order to bring odium upon the strikers or to throw the matter into the courts by application for an injunction. Because of its objection to injunctions, the labor movement comes in for severe public criticism. In much of the comment it seems to be taken for granted that what labor wants is free license to riot and destroy property. The actual objection is that legitimate efforts of labor may be and frequently are defeated by court orders against acts in themselves lawful but forbidden if done in concert, according to the views and at the discretion of the judge who both issues the writ and punishes its violation. Disorder and destruction of property, if these are feared, are for the police to pre- vent and the criminal courts to punish. These are the legal remedies provided for crime, and if they are not adequate they can be made so. Acts of violence are al- ready forbidden by law. To forbid them also by injunc- tion is to make possible the fining and imprisoning of men charged with crimes, without trial by jury, since THE PUBLIC SITTING IN JUDGMENT 121 the punishment is not for the act as a crime but as contempt of court. This view was supported recently by a New York judge who, in refusing to issue a de- sired injunction, took the position that the penal code is the most effective injunction against violence and that "there should not be imposed upon it [a court of equity] the performance of police duty." The injunctions are sometimes very sweeping, and forbid persuasion of any kind, by voice or printed word, the holding of meetings, payment of strike benefits to members of a union, and use of the public streets near a plant where a strike is in progress. Frequently they are issued when little or no disorder is in evidence, but upon complaint of an employer that his business is be- ing injured or may be injured by a strike of his work- men or by efforts to organize them. To this the emphatic protest is made that an injury to business by reason of refusing to work for an em- ployer or persuading other men not to work for him no more justifies the outlawing of an effort to secure better terms of employment by these means than the taking away of a merchant's customers justifies legal restraint upon his competitors who are, undoubtedly, injuring his business. There is, it is contended, no more property right in the labor of another man than in his patronage. The subject is much too involved for discussion here, beyond an attempt to state fairly the labor position in the matter, frequently misunderstood. The belief that many equity courts have carried the injunction power much beyond its original scope and intent is by no means 122 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER confined to workingmen. It was shared by President Koosevelt, and is the view of many judges, both in State and Federal courts. There have been dissenting minor- ity opinions in the United States Supreme Court in most of its important decisions involving this question. Labor injunctions of the character familiar in this coun- try are not issued in England, under the Trades Dis- putes Act, and it was the intent of the Clayton anti- trust law of 1914 to limit their operation here. How- ever, there is apparently little change thus far in their scope and practical effect. They have been issued in restraint of farmers' organizations also, in a number of instances, but dismissed upon further hearings. THE LABOR VIEW OF STEIKES There is no love for the strike as such among work- ingmen, except in revolutionary organizations which welcome every outbreak as a blow at capitalism. Wage- earners have reason to know better than any one else the losses and privations of long idleness. They are aware tbat the public suffers severely in some strikes, and they cite many evidences of prolonged effort to compromise, of strike orders withdrawn and issues post- poned or waived in deference to public opinion. They protest that the chief end of a trade union is not to foment strikes but to gain some real and substantial benefit for wage-earners, and that the only actual power workingmen possess to that end, in the bargain with employers, is the reserve or last resort power of quitting work in a body. THE PUBLIC SITTING IN JUDGMENT 123 It is a negative step, taken in the hope or belief that the employer, rather than hear the loss of an idle plant or the cost of finding and training new men, will con- cede at least in part what is asked. It is not "class war," in the sense understood by revolutionaries, since the object is neither to capture nor destroy the industry but to regain employment in it upon better terms. The immediate cost may be heavy, in lost production and wages, but, so labor contends, a higher level of welfare once established is a permanent gain for the years to come. In point of fact, it is a small proportion of industry as a whole that is involved in strikes at any given time. With the help of press headlines, we have grown into the habit of thinking of all modern industry as a battle- ground: normally, ninety per cent, of it is at peace. If it were not so, we should be in a continuous business and financial panic. Agreements are found upon in- numerable grievances and demands in the daily run of the nation's industry, for every one that ends in open contest. But so long as free men unite to produce wealth, be the method private industry or socialism or communism, there is the possibility that not all will agree without dispute on what is a just division. The strike, for the time being, is an incident of these differences in industry, as is the lawsuit an incident of commercial disagreements, and the partizan compaign a phase of political differences under democratic govern- ment. Our civilization has yet to outgrow many things that are a standing reproach, the strike among them, but we are not to assume that it will not or cannot do so. 124 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE UNION SHOP AND "OPEN SHOP" Much the same may be said of the so-called "closed shop" or "union shop" question. It is a product of in- dustrial conditions which are here, but not necessarily here to stay. Trade unionists do not, as is commonly supposed, always and everywhere demand employment of union members only. A bona fide "open shop," with no discrimination, the union men dealt with collectively as they prefer and the non-union men individually, does exist in some instances, although it is not ordinarily an easy thing to manage. As a rule, labor spokesmen point out, the "open shop" employer is unfriendly to unions, and will neither rec- ognize nor deal with one, even if he permits employees to join it. In such case the ignored union, unless it re- sorts to a strike, gets no attention for its requests and is unable to gain any benefits for its members. For all practical purposes the shop is non-union. On the other hand, where employer and union attempt to work under a contract, it is found that the presence 7 in the shop of men Who refuse to join with their fellow workmen to maintain what they have gained, perhaps after long effort, commonly means friction and ill feeling. It en- ables the employer, also, if so disposed, to increase the non-union proportion of men in the shop until the or- ganization is destroyed. It is for these reasons mainly that union men so generally object to working with non-members. That objection may prevent the non-unionist from getting a job in a particular shop, when the employer does not THE PUBLIC SITTING IN JUDGMENT 125 care to lose his union help in order to hire that man. On the other hand, it is pointed out, to insist that the union men are under ohligation to remain is to say that one man's right to work for whom he pleases is greater than another man's right to work only with whom he pleases. In any event, from this viewpoint, a labor contract limited to a certain group of men is not different in principle from commercial contracts for the entire out- put of a factory, or for the sale of goods of a certain make or brand, and of no other. A manufacturer or wholesaler cannot sell "to whom he pleases" if his in- tended customer has decided, for reasons of his own, to buy only of some one else. In a Minnesota case it was held by the court that: "It is a part of every man's civil rights that he is left at liberty to refuse business relations with any person whomsoever, whether the refusal rests upon reason or is the result of whim, caprice, prejudice or malice. With his reasons, neither the public nor third persons have any legal concern." The whole argument is part and parcel of the always unsettled problem of private rights in relation to public rights. It would be more important if it had to do with a permanent or fixed condition, but the forces in human character which alone work out abiding relations of democratic cooperation lie far deeper. For that matter, even now the number of strikes based on a "union shop" demand is a small proportion of the whole. The great majority are upon issues of wages and hours. Labor advocates insist that the "open shop" drive, much in evidence during the after-war period of de- 126 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER pression and unemployment, has been for the purpose of breaking up or so weakening the unions that no re- sistance can be made to heavy wage reductions or to working conditions dictated by the employer. They are not alone in this view. An investigation of present conditions in industry, by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, leads that association of business men to say: A movement is now on foot which, misusing the name of "open shop" and "American plan," is smashing labor organizations throughout the country by locking the unions out and forcibly deunionizing the workmen. ... It is undermining the confidence of labor in employers and ruining the foundations for. cooperation between them. Similar campaigns in former periods of depression have only resulted in redoubled growth of unionism and the adoption by it of more extreme measures in the periods of prosperity which followed, and there is no reason to believe that the results of this campaign will be different. Campaigns of this nature are playing into the hands of the revolutionary element. Thus the cycle continues, with the participants in continuous and senseless warfare. Two years earlier the Boston Chamber of Commerce, perhaps foreseeing such a situation, declined to approve an industrial platform proposed by the United States Chamber of Commerce upon the ground in part that : The principles favored by the committees are in the main antagonistic to organized labor and are bound to be so regarded by labor men generally. ... It would be un- fortunate, to say the least, if the National Chamber were THE PUBLIC SITTING IN JUDGMENT 127 deliberately to take a position that would be reasonably sure to endanger its future possible and probable useful- ness in the solution of labor problems, of which there are many yet to come. On the other hand, there are many employers who make less of the union-shop idea in itself than of the vexation and waste of arbitrary shop rules and petty impositions which have frequently grown up under rigid labor contracts. Limitation of output, limitation of apprentices, "jurisdiction" disputes between unions claiming the same work, opposition to improved machin- ery — each has counted heavily against labor, both in dealings with employers and in the public judgment. Each has a history which throws ljght upon at least the original "reasons why." JURISDICTION DISPUTES The jurisdiction question, for instance, is by no means an invention of modern trade unions. The ob- jection of workmen to having jobs they look upon as part of their own trade taken by other workmen is very ancient, and very human, however exasperating in many a modern instance. Evidence of it is as old at least as the early craft guilds, which were devised, according to a fifteenth century authority, "that everybody by them should earn his daily bread, and nobody shall interfere with the craft of another." * No one problem brings •History of Trade Unionism (Webb), p. 20. 128 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE FAEMEE more trouble to national trade-union officials than the task of arbitrating these disputes, and there is no argu- ment between these men and employers as to the harm they do both to the labor movement and the industries affected. Outside the building trades, however, they are comparatively rare. APPEE1TTICES AND MACHINEBT The limitation of apprentices, another ancient prac- tice dating back to the English guilds, has back of it in our time the habit credited to many employers of training a succession of boys, not in a knowledge of the trade, but in specialized machine-tending jobs, displac- ing adult workmen, and at wages of beginners without families to support. There are signs, however, that the issue on this point has been growing somewhat less acute with the widespread attention now given to in- dustrial and vocational training, through the coopera- tion of progressive employers, labor bodies and boards of education. Opposition to improved machines and methods is virtually a thing of the past. In the early days of the factory system workingmen saw only the first effect of a labor-saving device, in throwing men out of work. How the new machines actually created employment instead of reducing it, in the tremendous growth of in- dustry itself, became clear as time went on, and the labor movement's view of the matter has entirely changed. Whatever opposition crops up now, in special cases, is centered on the "speed-up" or "stop-watch" THE PUBLIC SITTING IN" JUDGMENT 129 features of certain efficiency systems, or attempts to require more in effort or skill, of the operators of new machines, with very little sharing of the added product. But the later drift of lahor ideas on efficiency has been apparent in recent conferences of industrial engineers with national labor officials and in labor resolutipns, expressing, as Mr. Gompers told the convention of me- chanical engineers in 1920, "appreciation of the value of the technicians of industry and the desirability of the labor movement's availing itself of scientific aid in all possible ways." LIMITING THE OUTPUT Where workingmen have attempted to slow down the pace, or put a fixed limit to the amount they would produce in a day or for a given pay, and where they have specified in working agreements how many appren- tices should be trained in a shop in proportion to the adult journeymen, the object is commonly interpreted as monopoly — to keep all the work to be done strictly within the hands of the group already holding the jobs. Without a doubt there has been this motive in the minds of many union men, just as the monopoly or "cornering" idea has captured the imagination of many a business promoter and financier, operating in larger fields but seldom with lasting success. But the idea of limiting output arose in the main from a different cause. It was intended as a check on the taskmaster or driving type of employer, working his men at an overtaxing pace or attempting to make 130 THE LABOE MOVEMENT AND THE EAEMER the speed and skill of the hest workmen in a shop the test or standard by which all were to he paid. The system of grading pay according to capacity, under piece-work, has much in its favor when honestly ap- plied. The labor objection has grown out of the tend- ency, very common in earlier days at least and not unknown to-day, to fix the piece-rates at a point such that only the fastest, strongest or most experienced men can earn a fair living wage. An interesting comment not without point in this connection was made at the convention of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in December, 1921, by its former president, Fred J. Miller: Too many there are who would blame inefficiency en- tirely upon the employee. Production has been and is restricted by workers, organized and unorganized, and most of such restriction is wrong, economically, if not ethi- cally. In most industries, however, I think it can easily be shown that restriction of production by workers is in- significant compared with the restrictions caused by fi- nancial juggling; by avoidable irregular employment of labor and of plant; by unnecessarily large inventories; by inadequate control of the movement of material through the works; by inadequate or entire absence of provision for teaching or training; and by absence of effective means of recording attainments of workers. There is support for this point of view, from one quarter at least, in the testimony offered by two of the largest contracting companies in the country, during the New York building trades investigation of 1920-21, the Public sitting in judgment 131 that by the records of important construction works their union workmen were found from twenty-five to thirty per cent, more efficient than the non-union. ,Whether this is a common experience or the exception, it may at least indicate that the restrictive policies credited to certain trades in particular are not always practised by the rank and file, when relations with employers are on a basis of fair dealing and good will. CONSPIRACIES AND GEAFT Nevertheless, the building trades in New York and other large centers have been for years the breeding places of the worst abuses to be found in employment relations in this country, yet having nothing to do with any vital principle of the working-class movement. At first a domination of bosses over workmen, then of unions over bosses, they became a joint imposition of contractors and unions upon the public. Since the recent overhauling of this situation by a legislative committee and through efforts of the American Fed- eration of Labor, there is an end in sight of many of the practices which had, in moral effect at least, harmed the labor cause even more than the prosperity of the building industry. The labor movement of the State gave formal pledge that certain of the working rules and customs chiefly complained of would be discon- tinued, and a similar agreement has since been reached, through the Attorney General of the United States, with the national organization of bricklayers, masons and plasterers, whereby workmen are neither to restrict 132 THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE FARMER output nor refuse to handle material from any source. Labor "graft," as it emerged in the New York situa- tion, holds a large place in the public judgment of trade unionism. It is cited quite commonly as the prevailing state of affairs among labor organizations generally. If such were the case in fact, it is quite probable that the whole scheme of modern industry would have broken down long ago, for some employing interest is necessarily a party to every corrupt labor deal. In a more temperate view, instances of graft and abuse of power on the part of certain labor bosses and unions do not convict the entire labor movement of crime, nor are illegal combinations, profiteering, "fake" stock promotions