A Key to the Labor Movement

When employers talk about the freedom of labor, it may be that some of them are really worried over the hostility of most unions to exceptional rewards for exceptional workers. But in the main that isn't what worries them. They are worried about their own freedom, not the freedom of wage-earners. They dislike the union because it challenges their supremacy.

And they fight unions as monarchs fight constitutions, as aristocracies fight the vote. When an employer tells about his own virtues, he dilates upon his kindness, his fairness, and all the good things he has done for his men. That is just what benevolent autocrats do: they try to justify their autocracy by their benevolence. Indeed, the highest vision of those who oppose unions is that the employer will develop the virtues of a good aristocrat.

But, of course, wage-earners are not dealing with men inspired by a sense of noblesse or richesse oblige. Henry Ford is a sensational rarity among employers. No doubt there are some others, not so conspicuous. Now, if workers faced only men with such an outlook, I don't think their problem would be solved, but it would take on a very different complexion. This is, however, an academic question, for the great mass of employers show no desire to make big concessions.

Employers are organized for obstruction. There is, for example, the National Association of Manufacturers, embracing four thousand individual employers, who represent a capital of about ten billion dollars. Their constructive program consists of such attractive items as 'unalterable antagonism to the closed shop,’ opposition to eight-hours' bills, and with mild emphasis hostility 'to any and all anti-injunction bills of whatever kind.’ American civilization is also assisted by the National Council for Industrial Defense, an unincorporated body which employs a lobbyist at the rate of a thousand dollars a month. According to the proud words of its late President, this Council 'in the number of members, in the capital which they control, and in the social, industrial and political influence which they exert ...is by far the largest and most powerful league of conservative and public-spirited citizens ever formed in any country of the world.’

There are also a number of national associations in various trades endeavoring to prevent wage-earners from submerging their individuality in unions. They have been known to refuse advertising to papers which were friendly to organized labor? on the highest grounds, of course, such high grounds being a refusal 'to pander to the unthrifty class.’ They have been known to use the black-list, though of course they do not approve of it. They have been known to place spies in labor unions to protect workers against themselves. They have been known to use what revolutionists call the 'provocateur'': in Cleveland during the garment strike there was a glib, plausible person who talked dynamite in an effort to discredit the union. There have been some actual 'planting’ of dynamite as at Lawrence, a little beating up as at Calumet, kidnapping, private armies, gatling guns and armored trains as at West Virginia and Colorado.

It is well known, of course, that newspapers make every effort to enable workingmen to reach public opinion, and make their appeal not to force but to the national conscience. All civil rights are carefully guarded for workers as in Paterson, Lawrence, and the southern lumber camps. Employers are precise in their desire to secure judges who have no bias whatever. And the voters are an active, intelligent body of imaginative democrats fighting at every step to see that justice is done.

The fact is that nothing is so stubbornly resisted as the attempt to organize labor into effective unions. Yet it is labor organized that alone can stand between America and the creation of a permanent, servile class. Unless labor is powerful enough to be respected, it is doomed to a degrading servitude. Without unions no such power is possible. Without unions industrial democracy is unthinkable. Without democracy in industry, that is where it counts most, there is no such thing as democracy in America. For only through the union can the wage-earner participate in the control of industry, and only through the union can he obtain the discipline needed for self-government. Those who fight unions may think they are fighting its obvious errors, but what they are really against is just this encroachment of democracy upon business.

Now men don't agitate for democracy because it is a fine theory. They come to desire it because they have to, because absolutism does not work out any longer to civilized ends. Employers are not wise enough to govern their men with unlimited power, and not generous enough to be trusted with autocracy. That is the plain fact of the situation: the essential reason why private industry has got to prepare itself for democratic control.

I don't pretend for one moment that labor unions are far-seeing, intelligent, or wise in their tactics. I have never seen a political democracy that aroused uncritical enthusiasm. It seems to me simply that the effort to build up unions is as much the work of pioneers, as the extension of civilization into the wilderness. The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

The unions are struggling where life is nakedly brutal, where the dealings of men have not been raised even to the level of discussion which we find in politics. There is almost as little civil procedure in industry as there is in Mexico, or as there was on the American frontier. To expect unionists then to talk with velvet language, and act with the deliberation of a college faculty is to be a tenderfoot, a victim of your class tradition. The virtues of labor to-day are frontier virtues, its struggles are for rights and privileges that the rest of us inherited from our unrefined ancestors.

Men are fighting for the beginnings of industrial self-government. If the world were wise that fight would be made easier for them. But it is not wise. Few of us care for ten minutes in a month about these beginnings or what they promise. And so the burden falls entirely upon the workers who are directly concerned. They have got to win civilization, they have got to take up the task of fastening a worker's control upon business.

No wonder they despise the scab. He is justly despised. Far from being the independent, liberty-loving soul he is sometimes painted, the scab is a traitor to the economic foundations of democracy. He. makes the basic associations of men difficult. He is an indigestible lump in the common life, and it is he who generates nine-tenths of the violence in labor disputes. Democracies of workingmen have to fight him out of sheer self-protection, as a nation has to fight a mutiny, as doctors have to fight a quack. The clubbing of scabs is not a pretty thing; the importation of scabs is an uglier one. It is perhaps true that there is, as ex-President Eliot said, no such thing as peaceful picketing. There is no such thing as a peaceful coast defense or a gentlemanly border patrol. The picket-line is to these little economic democracies the guardian of their integrity, their chief protection from foreign invasion.

Without some security no internal growth is possible. As long as the unions have to fight for mere existence, their immense constructive possibilities will be obscured in the desperation of the struggle. The strike-breaker, then, is not only a peril to the union, he is a peril to the larger interests of the nation. He keeps workingmen from their natural organization, deprives them of the strength that union brings, and thwarts all attempts to train men for industrial democracy. Instead of discipline and preparation for the task of the future, instead of deep-grounded experience in cooperative effort, we shall get, if strike-breakers and blind legislators and brutal policemen and prejudiced judges and visionless employers prevail, despair and hate and servile rebellions.

There are certain preliminaries of civilization which the great mass of workingmen have not yet won. They have not yet won a living wage, they have not yet won anything like security of employment, they have not yet won respect from the government, they have not yet won the right to be consulted as to the conditions under which they work. Until they do, it is idle to talk about industrial peace, and folly to look for 'reasonable’ adjustments of difficulties. Reason begins when men have enough power to command respect; a cooperative solution of industrial problems is possible only when all the partners to the cooperation must listen to each other. Until labor is powerful enough to compel that, it cannot trust to the benevolence of its masters,? it has to be suspicious, it has to cling to the few weapons left it, for labor is right in supposing that no national conscience and no employers' conscience yet exhibited are adequate.

There are certain occupations where workingmen have won these preliminaries of civilized life. The most notable example is in railroading, where the Brotherhoods have become a real part of the industrial structure. They are so powerful that they can't be left out. More than that, they are so powerful that they don't have to flirt with insurrection. It is the weak unions, the unorganized and shifting workers, who talk sabotage and flare up into a hundred little popgun rebellions. Guerilla warfare is the only tactic open to weakness. But where unions can meet the employers on a real equality, as railroad workers can, there you will find very little insurrectionary talk.

You will meet in these powerful unions what radical labor leaders call conservatism. That is a very interesting accusation. The railroad men have won wages and respect far beyond anything that the I.W.W. can hope for. They have power which makes the I.W.W. look insignificant. If the I.W.W. could win for the unskilled anything like the position and responsibility that railroad men enjoy, it would have achieved something that might well be called a social revolution. The fact is that the railroad men are 'conservatives’ in the labor world, just as the Swiss are conservatives among the nations. They have won the very things the lack of which makes rebellion necessary. For if men are ground down in poverty, if the rights of assemblage and free speech are denied them, if their protests are ineffective and despised, then rebellion is the only possible way out. But when there is something like a democracy where wrong is not a matter of life and death, but of better and worse, then the preliminaries of civilization have been achieved, and more deliberate tactics become possible.

The I.W.W., the anarchists and the syndicalists know this. That is why the reformer is an object of special hatred amongst them. They say, quite rightly, that reform undermines the revolutionary spirit, and substitutes for flaming impatience and heroic moods, concrete adjustments and grudging change. They say that only passionate revolt can redeem society from stagnant mediocrity. They prefer the atmosphere of temporary rebellion to the somewhat slow-footed and generally uninspired method of a clumsy democracy. Thus the I.W.W. makes no real effort to build up permanent unions. That is to say, it does not look with favor upon the cohesive power of funds and fraternal benefits. I have heard Haywood say that when a union had something to lose, the spontaneity of rebellion was gone. He hopes to unite wage-earners by militant feeling, rather than to knit them together by common discipline and common interests. The I.W.W. prefers revolt to solidarity—of course, it imagines that it can have workers united and militant too. But in practice it is quite ready to destroy union for the sake of militancy.

Syndicalists and anarchists half recognize the fact that only a small minority of the workers can be aroused to bitter revolt. So they have begun to sing the praises of a 'conscious minority.’ In other words they have abandoned the path of democracy, because it is incompatible with the temper they most admire. Workers who were really effectively organized would produce great changes in our social structure, but they would have to act with a deliberation that no temperamental anarchist can stomach. This is the paradox of the labor movement, that those who can't overthrow society dream of doing it, while those who could, don't want to. If there is one occupation where syndicalist tactics might work, it would be on the railroads. A small minority could paralyze the country and precipitate a General Strike. But American railroad men are not likely to do this because they don't need to. They have a stake in the country, a genuine representation in public opinion, and they can at all times secure a respectful hearing. If that were taken away from them, if their unions were disintegrated, they too might take to conspiracy.

It is a commonplace of radicalism that power makes for peace. It is deeply true of the labor movement that the alternatives before it are powerful peace and weak insurrection. Thus if the I.W.W. should succeed in organizing the unskilled on any extensive scale, the I.W.W., as we know it, would have abolished itself. For the unions which were created would inevitably seek a different type of leader: men of administrative capacity who can wield power without exhausting it. The extreme weakness of the unskilled workers has made them listen so eagerly to the large hopes of men like Haywood, Ettor and Giovannitti. Wherever democracy is feeble vague insurrection is its dream. And so the civilized hope for labor is conditioned upon its conquest of power in the life of the nation. This alone will make peaceful adjustments possible, not the moral guardianship of the employers, not the charity of the community. It is the rich who don't need ready cash, it is the strong who don't have to fight.

I know how offensive all this will be to refined and sensitive people. Those who believe in disarmament have come to think that the possession of power is a temptation to use it. Perhaps that is true. But wage-earners have no choice in the matter. If they abandon power, employers will not abandon theirs. To preach mere peace, then, is to preach a docile exploitation. Perhaps when society has learned to respect labor, then society and labor will disarm. But that day is not our day. It is not pleasant, but it's true: if labor turns the other cheek, that cheek will be smitten without much compunction. For the Golden Rule works best among equals.
So the real peril to the nation from the side of labor is the existence of great masses of unorganized, and perhaps unorganizable, workers. From them will come most of the street-fights, the beatings and the sabotage.

They have no share in the country, they have 'nothing to lose but their chains.’ But with the tactics open to them they haven't 'a world to win.’ They can parade and shout, call the police 'cossacks,’ and talk revolution. But they have to put up with the pettiest gains.

To the weakness of all labor is to be ascribed its lack of interest in the efficiency of industry. An employer will tell you in one breath that he will stand no interference with 'his’ business, and in the next that his employees take no interest in that business. Of course they don't. They haven't any interest. They are unconsulted outsiders. You might as well expect an Indian peasant to be interested in the administrative efficiency of the British government. What possibility is there for a sense of craftsmanship when you are a mere hired hand? What incentive have wage-earners to take a personal interest in the problems of industry, when nobody asks their advice, and everybody resents it? If labor is apathetic, hostile to efficiency, without much pride, it is because labor is not a part of industrial management. People don't take a sympathetic interest in the affairs of state until they are voting members of the state. You can't expect civic virtue from a disfranchised class, nor industrial virtue from the industrially disfranchised.

The labor problem, then, is at bottom the effort of wage-earners to achieve power. And that effort points, neither to insurrection nor inefficiency, but to a correction of the weakness and unimportance which make rebellion necessary and destroy an interest in work. This is what the fighting and turmoil are about. Employers will tell you that they don't mind raising wages half so much as they mind giving unions 'something to say.’ Yet 'something to say’ is just what the workers want. They know that better conditions are very elusive unless they have the power to enforce them, to see that what is given with one hand is not taken away with the other. The great battles of labor are for recognition of the union or to maintain its integrity. It happens that the great battles of American history have also been fought for independence and union.

When these prime conditions are achieved, labor's demands tend toward an increasing share of control. The right of summary discharge is the issue in many a strike. For unions will encroach more and more on matters of discipline: they are seeking to raise themselves to a partnership in the management. It is no idle guess to suppose that they will come to demand the right to choose their own foremen, perhaps to elect some of the directors, and to take not only wages, but a percentage of the profits.

It is obvious, of course, that this assumption of power cannot go to indefinite limits. There are people concerned about industry besides the workers in it. The consumers will have a control, and the state, which while it includes workers and purchasers is larger than particular groups of them, the state too will have a say about the control of industry. It is one of the immense problems of the future to adjust these conflicts and to reach some working plan. But that problem has only outlined itself dimly as yet. Labor is far from having achieved anything like its legitimate influence in the conduct of industry, and the best hope for future adjustment lies in the immense discipline that power will enforce upon the worker.

In this movement to eat into economic absolutism, very perplexing questions, of course, arise. What is the proper structure for a union? Shall it be organized by crafts, or occupations, or industries? With amalgamation or by federation? How shall the unions be governed: by representatives or by direct vote? In fact, there is hardly a problem of constitutional government which doesn't appear in acute form among the workers. And in passing, one might suggest that scholars who wish to see sovereignty in the making cannot do better than to go among the unions. They will find the initiative and referendum in constant use. They will find all phases of corruption and misrepresentation: the disappointments of indiscriminate democracy and the blight of officialism. There is a long history of bickerings over sectional interests as against national ones, home rule, devolution,? for all of these matters are, under different phrases, of course, the daily subject of union discussion.

The solutions are of very great interest to the nation. For on the capacity of labor to develop an efficient government for itself hangs the decision as to how much responsibility the unions can afford to assume. It is the development of a citizenship in industry that the labor movement has before it. It will have to work out the intricate problem of popular control in relation to technical administration. Any useful kind of industrial training, then, has got to serve this need. It is obvious that mere skill at some one process is no preparation. Nor is a generalized knowledge of industry enough. There must be added to it an understanding of what may be called the political problem of labor, the questions that arise in its efforts at self-government, in its adjustments to the world that surrounds the industry.

There is nothing simple and perfectly reassuring ahead. With wage-earners about one-tenth organized, unionism has a gigantic problem before it. And there seems to be no limit to the methods by which organization is thwarted. Race is played against race, religion against religion, there are spies, black-lists, lockouts, thugs, evictions, the denial of free speech and the right to assemble. Things are done in America today which are more lurid than melodrama. After thinking of the promise of the labor movement, you have to turn back to present realities, to that brutal struggle in West Virginia, for example, where a gatling gun mounted on a railroad car was run through a mining village at night, 'spitting bullets at the rate of two hundred and fifty a minute.’

You think of the powerful organizations ready to combat every sign of unionism, of the congestion of immigrants in the labor market, of the hostility of courts and newspapers to the preliminaries of industrial democracy. I don't know, no one knows, whether labor can realize its promise. The odds seem to be overwhelming. There is a real struggle, a trial of strength. It is not yet a matter of justice in which 'there is much to be said on both sides.’ Labor is still fighting to be admitted to the sphere of human society where it is possible to talk of adjusting difficulties. A few workers, like the skilled railroad men, have just about climbed in. But the great mass has not been made part of that world where decisions are made and policies formulated. The unions are struggling to give the wage-earners representation, and that is why the hopes of democracy are bound up with the labor movement. Bound up, not with its words and dogmas, but with the purpose which animates it. Labor needs criticism, needs inventive thought, needs advice and help. But no one can give any of these things who has not grasped with full sympathy that impulse for industrial democracy which is the key to the movement. Without this sympathy the crudity of labor is shocking, the intrigue of labor politics disgusting, the tone of labor discouraging; but with an understanding that a new interest is rising to power it is possible, I think, to find a glimmer of meaning in the bewildering intricacy of the whole matter.