The trade union* forms the foundation upon which the whole edifice of the American Federation of Labor is built. Like the Federation, each particular trade union has a tripartite structure: there is first the national body called the Union, the International, the General Union, or the Grand Lodge; there is secondly the district division or council, which is merely a convenient general union in miniature; and finally there is the local individual union, usually called "the local." Some unions, such as the United Mine Workers, have a fourth division or subdistrict, but this is not the general practice.
* The term "trade union" is used here in its popular sense, embracing labor, trade, and industrial unions, unless otherwise specified.
The sovereign authority of a trade union is its general convention, a delegate body meeting at stated times. Some unions meet annually, some biennially, some triennially, and a few determine by referendum when the convention is to meet. Sometimes a long interval elapses: the granite cutters, for instance, held no convention between 1880 and 1912, and the cigar-makers, after a convention in 1896, did not meet for sixteen years. The initiative and referendum are, in some of the more compact unions, taking the place of the general convention, while the small executive council insures promptness of administrative action.
The convention elects the general officers. Of these the president is the most conspicuous, for he is the field marshal of the forces and fills a large place in the public eye when a great strike is called. It was in this capacity that John Mitchell rose to sudden eminence during the historic anthracite strike in 1902, and George W. Perkins of the cigar-makers' union achieved his remarkable hold upon the laboring people. As the duties of the president of a union have increased, it has become the custom to elect numerous vice-presidents to relieve him. Each of these has certain specific functions to perform, but all remain the president's aides. One, for instance, may be the financier, another the strike agent, another the organizer, another the agitator. With such a group of virtual specialists around a chieftain, a union has the immense advantage of centralized command and of highly organized leadership. The tendency, especially among the more conservative unions, is to reelect these officers year after year. The president of the Carpenters' Union held his office for twenty years, and John Mitchell served the miners as president ten years. Under the immediate supervision of the president, an executive board composed of all the officers guides the destinies of the union. When this board is not occupied with the relations of the men to their employers, it gives its judicial consideration to the more delicate and more difficult questions of inter-union comity and of local differences.
The local union is the oldest labor organization, and a few existing locals can trace their origin as far back as the decade preceding the Civil War. Many more antedate the organization of the Federation. Not a few of these almost historic local unions have refused to surrender their complete independence by affiliating with those of recent origin, but they have remained merely isolated independent locals with very little general influence. The vast majority of local unions are members of the national trades union and of the Federation.
The local union is the place where the laborer comes into direct personal contact with this powerful entity that has become such a factor in his daily life. Here he can satisfy that longing for the recognition of his point of view denied him in the great factory and here he can meet men of similar condition, on terms of equality, to discuss freely and without fear the topics that interest him most. There is an immense psychic potency in this intimate association of fellow workers, especially in some of the older unions which have accumulated a tradition.
It is in the local union that the real life of the labor organization must be nourished, and the statesmanship of the national leaders is directed to maintaining the greatest degree of local autonomy consistent with the interests of national homogeneity. The individual laborer thus finds himself a member of a group of his fellows with whom he is personally acquainted, who elect their own officers, to a large measure fix their own dues, transact their own routine business, discipline their own members, and whenever possible make their own terms of employment with their employers. The local unions are obliged to pay their tithe into the greater treasury, to make stated reports, to appoint a certain roster of committees, and in certain small matters to conform to the requirements of the national union. On the whole, however, they are independent little democracies confederated, with others of their kind, by means of district and national organizations.
The unions representing the different trades vary in structure and spirit. There is an immense difference between the temper of the tumultuous structural iron workers and the contemplative cigar-makers, who often hire one of their number to read to them while engaged in their work, the favorite authors being in many instances Ruskin and Carlyle. Some unions are more successful than others in collective bargaining. Martin Fox, the able leader of the iron moulders, signed one of the first trade agreements in America and fixed the tradition for his union; and the shoemakers, as well as most of the older unions are fairly well accustomed to collective bargaining. In matters of discipline, too, the unions vary. Printers and certain of the more skilled trades find it easier to enforce their regulations than do the longshoremen and unions composed of casual foreign laborers. In size also the unions of the different trades vary. In 1910 three had a membership of over 100,000 each. Of these the United Mine Workers reached a total of 370,800, probably the largest trades union in the world. The majority of the unions have a membership between 1000 and 10,000, the average for the entire number being 5000; but the membership fluctuates from year to year, according to the conditions of labor, and is usually larger in seasons of contest. Fluctuation in membership is most evident in the newer unions and in the unskilled trades. The various unions differ also in resources. In some, especially those composed largely of foreigners, the treasury is chronically empty; yet at the other extreme the mine workers distributed $1,890,000 in strike benefits in 1902 and had $750,000 left when the board of arbitration sent the workers back into the mines.
The efforts of the unions to adjust themselves to the quickly changing conditions of modern industries are not always successful. Old trade lines are instantly shifting, creating the most perplexing problem of inter-union amity. Over two score jurisdictional controversies appear for settlement at each annual convention of the American Federation. The Association of Longshoremen and the Seamen's Union, for example, both claim jurisdiction over employees in marine warehouses. The cigar-makers and the stogie-makers have also long been at swords' points. Who shall have control over the coopers who work in breweries--the Brewery Workers or the Coopers' Union? Who shall adjust the machinery in elevators--the Machinists or Elevator Constructors? Is the operator of a linotype machine a typesetter? So plasterers and carpenters, blacksmiths and structural iron workers, printing pressmen and plate engravers, hod carriers and cement workers, are at loggerheads; the electrification of a railway creates a jurisdictional problem between the electrical railway employees and the locomotive engineers; and the marble workers and the plasterers quarrel as to the setting of imitation marble. These quarrels regarding the claims of rival unions reveal the weakness of the Federation as an arbitral body. There is no centralized authority to impose a standard or principle which could lead to the settlement of such disputes. Trade jealousy has overcome the suggestions of the peacemakers that either the nature of the tools used, or the nature of the operation, or the character of the establishment be taken as the basis of settlement.
When the Federation itself fails as a peacemaker, it cannot be expected that locals will escape these controversies. There are many examples, often ludicrous, of petty jealousies and trade rivalries. The man who tried to build a brick house, employing union bricklayers to lay the brick and union painters to paint the brick walls, found to his loss that such painting was considered a bricklayer's job by the bricklayers' union, who charged a higher wage than the painters would have done. It would have relieved him to have the two unions amalgamate. And this in general has become a real way out of the difficulty. For instance, a dispute between the Steam and Hot Water Fitters and the Plumbers was settled by an amalgamation called the United Association of Journeymen Plumbers, Gas Fitters, Steam Fitters, and Steam Fitters' Helpers, which is now affiliated with the Federation. But the International Association of Steam, Hot Water, and Power Pipe Fitters and Helpers is not affiliated, and interunion war results. The older unions, however, have a stabilizing influence upon the newer, and a genuine conservatism such as characterizes the British unions is becoming more apparent as age solidifies custom and lends respect to by-laws and constitutions. But even time cannot obviate the seismic effects of new inventions, and shifts in jurisdictional matters are always imminent. The dominant policy of the trade union is to keep its feet on the earth, no matter where its head may be; to take one step at a time, and not to trouble about the future of society. This purpose, which has from the first been the prompter of union activity, was clearly enunciated in the testimony of Adolph Strasser, a converted socialist, one of the leading trade unionists, and president of the Cigar-makers' Union, before a Senate Committee in 1883:
Chairman: You are seeking to improve home matters first?
Witness: Yes sir, I look first to the trade I represent: I look first to cigars, to the interests of men, who employ me to represent their interests.
Chairman: I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends.
Witness: We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting only for immediate objects, objects that can be realized in a few years.
Chairman: You want something better to eat and to wear, and better houses to live in?
Witness: Yes, we want to dress better and to live better, and become better citizens generally.
Chairman: I see that you are a little sensitive lest it should be thought that you are a mere theorizer. I do not look upon you in that light at all.
Witness: Well, we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists, and I have to represent the organization here. We are all practical men.
This remains substantially the trade union platform today. Trade unionists all aim to be "practical men."
The trade union has been the training school for the labor leader, that comparatively new and increasingly important personage who is a product of modern industrial society. Possessed of natural aptitudes, he usually passes by a process of logical evolution, through the important committees and offices of his local into the wider sphere of the national union, where as president or secretary, he assumes the leadership of his group. Circumstances and conditions impose a heavy burden upon him, and his tasks call for a variety of gifts. Because some particular leader lacked tact or a sense of justice or some similar quality, many a labor maneuver has failed, and many a labor organization has suffered in the public esteem. No other class relies so much upon wise leadership as does the laboring class. The average wage-earner is without experience in confronting a new situation or trained and superior minds. From his tasks he has learned only the routine of his craft. When he is faced with the necessity of prompt action, he is therefore obliged to depend upon his chosen captains for results.
In America these leaders have risen from the rank and file of labor. Their education is limited. The great majority have only a primary schooling. Many have supplemented this meager stock of learning by rather wide but desultory reading and by keen observation. A few have read law, and some have attended night schools. But all have graduated from the University of Life. Many of them have passed through the bitterest poverty, and all have been raised among toilers and from infancy have learned to sympathize with the toiler's point of view.* They are therefore by training and origin distinctly leaders of a class, with the outlook upon life, the prejudices, the limitations, and the fervent hopes of that class.
* A well-known labor leader once said to the writer: "No matter how much you go around among laboring people, you will never really understand us unless you were brought up among us. There is a real gulf between your way of looking on life and ours. You can be only an investigator or an intellectual sympathizer with my people. But you cannot really understand our viewpoint." Whatever of misconception there may be in this attitude, it nevertheless marks the actual temper of the average wage-earner, in spite of the fact that in America many employers have risen from the ranks of labor.
In a very real sense the American labor leader is the counterpart of the American business man intensively trained, averse to vagaries, knowing thoroughly one thing and only one thing, and caring very little for anything else.
This comparative restriction of outlook marks a sharp distinction between American and British labor leaders. In Britain such leadership is a distinct career for which a young man prepares himself. He is usually fairly well educated, for not infrequently he started out to study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity. A few have come into the field from journalism. As a result, the British labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more impressive front than the American. For example, Britain has produced Ramsey MacDonald, who writes and makes speeches with a rare grace; John Burns, who quotes Shakespeare or recites history with wonderful fluency; Keir Hardie, a miner from the ranks, who was possessed of a charming poetic fancy; Philip Snowden, who displays the spiritual qualities of a seer; and John Henderson, who combines philosophical power with skill in dialectics. On the other hand, the rank and file of American labor is more intelligent and alert than that of British labor, and the American labor leader possesses a greater capacity for intensive growth and is perhaps a better specialist at rough and tumble fighting and bargaining than his British colleague.*
* The writer recalls spending a day in one of the Midland manufacturing towns with the secretary of a local cooperative society, a man who was steeped in Bergson's philosophy and talked on local botany and geology as fluently as on local labor conditions. It would be difficult to duplicate this experience in America.
In a very real sense every trade union is typified by some aggressive personality. The Granite Cutters' National Union was brought into active being in 1877 largely through the instrumentality of James Duncan, a rugged fighter who, having federated the locals, set out to establish an eight-hour day through collective bargaining and to settle disputes by arbitration. He succeeded in forming a well-disciplined force out of the members of his craft, and even the employers did not escape the touch of his rod.
The Glassblowers' Union was saved from disruption by Dennis Hayes, who, as president of the national union, reorganized the entire force in the years 1896-99, unionized a dozen of the largest glass producing plants in the United States and succeeded in raising the wages fifteen per cent. He introduced methods of arbitration and collective agreements and established a successful system of insurance.
James O'Connell, the president of the International Association of Machinists, led his organization safely through the panic of 1893, reorganized it upon a brr basis, and introduced sick benefits. In 1901 after a long and wearisome dickering with the National Metal Trades Association, a shorter day was agreed upon, but, as the employers would not agree to a ten-hour wage for a nine-hour day, O'Connell led his men out on a general strike and won.
Thomas Kidd, secretary of the Wood-Workers' International Union, was largely responsible for the agreement made with the manufacturers in 1897 for the establishment of a minimum wage of fifteen cents an hour for a ten-hour day, a considerable advance over the average wage paid up to that time. Kidd was the object of severe attacks in various localities, and in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where labor riots took place for the enforcement of the Union demands, he was arrested for conspiracy but acquitted by the trial jury.
When the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers lost their strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892, the union was thought to be dead. It was quietly regalvanized into activity, however, by Theodore Schaffer, who has displayed adroitness in managing its affairs in the face of tremendous opposition from the great steel manufacturers who refuse to permit their shops to be unionized.
The International Typographical Union, composed of an unusually intelligent body of men, owes its singular success in collective contracting largely to James M. Lynch, its national president. The great newspapers did not give in to the demands of the union without a series of struggles in which Lynch manipulated his forces with skill and tact. Today this is one of the most powerful unions in the country.
Entirely different was the material out of which D.J. Keefe formed his Union of Longshoremen, Marine and Transport Workers. His was a mass of unskilled workers, composed of many nationalities accustomed to rough conditions, and not easily led. Keefe, as president of their International Union, has had more difficulty in restraining his men and in teaching them the obligations of a contract than any other leader. At least on one occasion he employed non-union men to carry out the agreement which his recalcitrant following had made and broken.
The evolution of an American labor leader is shown at its best in the career of John Mitchell, easily the most influential trade unionist of this generation. He was born on February 4, 1870, on an Illinois farm, but at two years of age he lost his mother and at four his father. With other lads of his neighborhood he shared the meager privileges of the school terms that did not interfere with farm work. At thirteen he was in the coal mines in Braidwood, Illinois, and at sixteen he was the outer doorkeeper in the local lodge of the Knights of Labor. Eager to see the world, he now began a period of wandering, working his way from State to State. So he traversed the Far West and the Southwest, alert in observing social conditions and coming in contact with many types of men. These wanderings stood him in lieu of an academic course, and when he returned to the coal fields of Illinois he was ready to settle down. From his Irish parentage he inherited a genial personality and a gift of speech. These traits, combined with his continual reading on economic and sociological subjects, soon lifted him into local leadership. He became president of the village school board and of the local lodge of the Knights of Labor. He joined the United Mine Workers of America upon its organization in 1890. He rose rapidly in its ranks, was a delegate to the district and sub-district conventions, secretary-treasurer of the Illinois district, chairman of the Illinois legislative committee, member of the executive board, and national organizer. In January, 1898, he was elected national vice-president, and in the following autumn, upon the resignation of the president, he became acting president. The national convention in 1899 chose him as president, a position which he held for ten years. He has served as one of the vice-presidents of the American Federation of Labor since 1898, was for some years chairman of the Trade Agreement Department of the National Civic Federation and has held the position of Chairman of the New York State Industrial Commission.
When he rose to the leadership of the United Mine Workers, this union had only 48,000 members, confined almost exclusively to the bituminous regions of the West.* Within the decade of his presidency he brought virtually all the miners of the United States under his leadership. Wherever his union went, there followed sooner or later the eight-hour day, raises in wages of from thirteen to twenty-five per cent, periodical joint conventions with the operators for settling wage scales and other points in dispute, and a spirit of prosperity that theretofore was unknown among the miners.
* Less than 10,000 out of 140,000 anthracite miners were members of the union.
In unionizing the anthracite miners, Mitchell had his historic fight with the group of powerful corporations that owned the mines and the railways which fed them. This great strike, one of the most significant in our history, attracted universal attention because of the issues involved, because a coal shortage threatened many Eastern cities, and because of the direct intervention of President Roosevelt. The central figure of this gigantic struggle was the miners' young leader, barely thirty years old, with the features of a scholar and the demeanor of an ascetic, marshaling his forces with the strategic skill of a veteran general.
At the beginning of the strike Mitchell, as president of the Union, announced that the miners were eager to submit all their grievances to an impartial arbitral tribunal and to abide by its decisions. The ruthless and prompt refusal of the mine owners to consider this proposal reacted powerfully in the strikers' favor among the public. As the long weeks of the struggle wore on, increasing daily in bitterness, multiplying the apprehension of the strikers and the restiveness of the coal consumers, Mitchell bore the increasing strain with his customary calmness and self-control.
After the parties had been deadlocked for many weeks, President Roosevelt called the mine owners and the union leaders to a conference in the White House. Of Mitchell's bearing, the President afterwards remarked: "There was only one man in the room who behaved like a gentleman, and that man was not I."
The Board of Arbitration eventually laid the blame on both sides but gave the miners the bulk of their demands. The public regarded the victory as a Mitchell victory, and the unions adored the leader who had won their first strike in a quarter of a century, and who had won universal confidence by his ability and demeanor in the midst of the most harassing tensions of a class war.*
* Mitchell was cross-examined for three days when he was testifying before the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. Every weapon which craft, prejudice, and skill could marshal against him failed to rule his temper or to lead him into damaging admissions or contradictions.
John Mitchell's powerful hold upon public opinion today is not alone due to his superior intelligence, his self possession, his business skill, nor his Irish gift of human accommodation, but to the greater facts that he was always aware of the grave responsibilities of leadership, that he realized the stern obligation of a business contract, and that he always followed the trade union policy of asking only for that which was attainable. Soon after the Anthracite strike he wrote:
"I am opposed to strikes as I am opposed to war. As yet, however, the world with all its progress has not made war impossible; neither, I fear, considering the nature of men and their institutions, will the strike entirely disappear for years to come....
"This strike has taught both capital and labor that they owe certain obligations to society and that their obligations must be discharged in good faith. If both are fair and conciliatory, if both recognize the moral restraint of the state of society by which they are surrounded, there need be few strikes. They can, and it is better that they should, settle their differences between themselves....
"Since labor organizations are here, and here to stay, the managers of employing corporations must choose what they are to do with them. They may have the union as a present, active, and unrecognized force, possessing influence for good or evil, but without direct responsibility; or they may deal with it, give it responsibility as well as power, define and regulate that power, and make the union an auxiliary in the promotion of stability and discipline and the amicable adjustment of all local disputes."
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