LABOR TAKES STOCK

...III Most exciting of all is American labor's role in preserving free unionism against Communist encroachment...

...American organized labor now stands about 15 million strong, although still divided, and leaders like Walter Reuther of the Auto Workers can point to the conquest of substantial old age pensions, a share in the rising productivity of the industry as well as a protection of the real wage, with added favorable features to labor, and, in addition, what will probably amount to the "union shop...

...AMERICANS, especially liberals, are still finding it difficult to view the labor movement of their native land in the proper national and international perspectives...

...They aspired group-wise to "recognition" or the employers' admission that the union was virtually a co-administrator with themselves of the jobs available and had a right to share in the determination of the "rules of occupancy and tenure of job opportunity...

...The New Deal, which the younger generation will never be able to recognize for the profound revolution that it was in a society like America's, has brought all of these to pass plus that most unique of labor laws, the Wagncr Act, under which the age-long stubborn employer resistance to the unionization of the mass production industries was brought to time...

...After the end of the fighting war, labor leaders and most labor economists expected first a recession if not a depression and then an employer counter-offensive...

...By 1948 the American labor movement—both branches—had qualified for that role...

...What was needed was leadership by a national labor movement with firm economic and political ground under its feet and fully aware of what was at stake...

...That struggle was to be a political one by a "third" party, which when victorious, would reopen to the producer-farmer, small manufacturer, and wage earner the abundance of opportunity which Providence had evidently intended he should enjoy...

...The American Federation of Labor was the organizational product, with plenty of "political problems" within itself...

...Among his books are "A Theory of the Labor Movement," "Labor Movements, 1896-1932" (with P. Taft), and, with John R. Commons and others, "A History of Labor in the U.S...

...The old AFL leadership had become too enmeshed in doubt, fear, and sheer legalism even to see the opportunity to extend unionization on a mass scale, to say nothing of taking advantage of it...

...Liberals appreciate imperfectly the intense hatred which the Communists have engendered among the trade unionists of Europe who are still free of their control by their tactics of systematic disruption and treachery...

...The middle classes, especially the farmers, now view the 15 million unionists as another and even less tolerable massing of strength, thus circumscribing labor's otherwise formidable political achievement— an achievement, be it noted, not won through the labor party method...

...The Great Depression washed away the anti-legislation bias...

...In reality, there is scarcely another national labor movement with as absorbing an ideological development as our own, resulting in a distinctively "home-grown" product, all the more intriguing since, as in the puzzle pictures in the children's magazines, one is obliged to twist and turn the page before the eye catches the elephant, monkey or whatever else is included in the jumble of lines...

...The American labor ideology, formulated by Gompers and modified surprisingly little by Murray and Reuther, is a "job conscious" ideology...

...What stands in the way is an ingrained conviction that the American labor movement, especially the AFL, is scarcely better than a "vested interest" and that its program, in contrast with European labor's, is but an insatiable "more now" demand, in no way based on any ideology or social philosophy...

...But here stark tragedy stalked the American labor movement...

...In brief, the anti-monopoly ideology, in whatever form, proved the most serious obstacle to a stable labor movement, and its vise-like grip on the mind of labor had to be replaced with something else before there could be a stable labor movement...

...II By the twenties, the original drive of the Gompersian offensive had been spent, and the AFL had become an assortment of "legalists" and "you must not shake the boat" preachers...

...Gompers had indeed demonstrated his own flexibility by granting the miners the right to become an industrial union in the Scranton Declaration of 1901 and, shortly before his death, by endorsing LaFollette for President...

...The result was the split in American labor, to my eye a tragedy of the first order no matter what may be the judgment of those who welcome "competition" in social movements...

...In Congress labor suffered its biggest defeat in the passage of the Taft-Hartley bill...

...Liberals have found fault with the Gompers' conception of unionism on two counts: its apparent indifference to the unskilled workers and its aversion to protective labor legislation...

...Commons' industrial government was another name for the objective of Samuel Gompers and John Mitchell, as it is the objective of the CIO today...

...Simultaneously, laws like the Sherman Anti-Trust Law were being twisted out of their original intent to serve, as sticks with which to beat labor...

...The implementation of it all had to await Roosevelt's fight on the Court in the early part of 1937...

...This institution, which is still new in the awareness of the average American, was christened "Industrial Government" by John R. Commons, America's foremost labor economist of all times, half a century ago...

...The trouble with this ideology as a program of action has always been that the "producing classes" were a most unstable conglomerate, operating only under the prod of economic depression, and that the third parties when actually tried caused dissensions and a serious weakening of the trade union organizations which sponsored them...

...As regards the view on Gompers' opposition to a labor party, no change has occurred nor is likely to occur, as the American way of political actions remains unchanged...

...The writer spoke of this event as soon as it occurred as the Roosevelt Revolution, analogous to the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800...

...Sumner Slichter therefore justified in speaking of a "laborized" America...

...Is Prof...

...Roosevelt's spectacular victory in the election of 1936 generated a labor upheaval, the like of which has not been experienced since the Knights of Labor upheaval in 1886-7...

...While failing in form, he actually won in substance, when the old Court reversed itself and released government from most of the constitutional limitations as regards labor-employer relations, with the Federal Government now permitted to enforce national standards...

...And, of late, the American liberal of this description has been overtaken by the Nemesis of the underrated labor movement of his own country suddenly blossoming out as the leader of the free trade unions of the world as well as the enduring hope of American liberalism as such...

...Stability was purchased by sacrificing considerable of the sentiment of all-inclusive solidarity...

...American liberals have drunk too freely from the wells of Marxism and Fabianism to admit that there is any flavor of respectable theory in the product of Samuel Gompers, John Mitchell, Andrew Furuseth, Frank J. Weber and Henry J. Ohl of Wisconsin, and the hundreds of other "practicing theorists" on unionism's battle lines...

...And not to run counter to the pro-capitalist ideology of the American trade unionists, socialism as labor's goal was left out of the statement of principles of a labor International for the first time in history...

...It is also my conviction that had Gompers been alive and active, that calamity would not have happened...

...On the whole, though, unionism's acceptance into the high-born family of capitalism remains more of the head than of the heart...

...Perhaps only a wider understanding, long overdue in managerial circles, that our capitalist democracy has no more dependable support than the typically American job-conscious unionism, would spell the beginning of Sumner Slichter's "laborization...

...It was the skilled groups, whose jobs came out of a common "job reservoir" or "job-territory" that could be induced to unite firmly in defense of this common job territory...

...A year and a half after the great blunder of expelling the unions of the original Committee for Industrial Organization for committing the sin of "dualism," the AFL tried to make it good by offering generous terms for a return of the prodigals, but it reckoned without John L. Lewis, then the CIO's master...

...Instead, there were three rounds of wage increases and a fourth one, although of lesser magnitude and scope, in process at the moment...

...In their language, it was the "jurisdiction" of their union for which they were willing to shed their blood (at times literally...

...To our liberals, what stands out in this job-consciousness is the limitation of the scope of interest of organized labor to the job, with the acceptance of the capitalistic system instead of the objective of the nationalization of the major industries by a government in the hands of a labor party...

...Labor in 1950 has traveled far from Gompers' heartbreak house when, World War I over, he was no longer a "statesman" but faced instead Judge Gary's unshakeable anti-unionism, the Railroad Labor Board's "corrections" of the national agreements, and the U. S. Supreme Court's decision in the Coro-nado case...

...but a departed man's "spirit" can neither test out new situations nor pour new wine into old bottles, the characteristics of statesmanlike leadership...

...Now compulsory unemployment insurance, comprehensive social security, minimum wage and maximum hours laws have been either expressly approved or were on the threshold of winning approbation...

...The opposition to labor legislation stemmed from the fear of the loss of the unions' freedom of action for improving conditions for a mere mess of pottage—minimal legislative standards...

...Granted that with the recent agreement with General Motors, Reuther and his auto workers' unions have stabilized their "industrial government," and that the UAW has already found imitators in other high places...

...This, too, was not deductive reasoning but was engraved in the memories of the cigar-makers' leaders who had learned about the American constitutional system the hard way, when an anti-tenement house manufacture law for which they had toiled for years was declared unconstitutional by the highest court of New York...

...Since 1949 the CIO has become implacably anti-Communist and has been expelling its affiliates considered under Communist influence...

...It called not for a class-conscious struggle by the "proletariat" but for a union of all producing classes (note the plural) against the "monopolists," such as the money and credit monopolists, the transportation monopolists, the "trusts," and the land monopolists...

...This sealed the fate of the World Federation of Trade Unions, for which the preparations had been made when the war was drawing to a close and since had obviously fallen under Communist control, and called for its replacement by a new International of free trade unions...

...It was the product of an experiment, which has lasted for decades, in which organized labor has kept testing the mentality of the American workingman, the attitude of the "public," the political structure of the land, as well as the habitual political behavior-patterns of Americans and, lastly, the degree of the employers' willingness to make concessions...

...Yet it at least had the merit of a stable existence...

...Historically, however, this job-consciousness had to make its way in the mind of labor against another reform ideology, the anti-monopoly ideology, a species of individualistic anti-capitalism...

...He pointed out then, in examples in the bituminous coal industry, how the familiar organs of our political democracy—the legislative, executive, and judicial— have found their counterparts in that new type of government, in addition to an understanding as to basic rights analogous to civil liberties but translated into the terms of job and wage security...

...He is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, with whose faculty he has been associated for four decades...

...The writer remains among the serious doubters...

...There was also the accumulating distrust of intellectuals who had passed from mere advocacy of socialism, labor partyism, and industrial unionism to berating Gompers and his associates as the misleaders of labor, whereas the latter felt that the intellectuals had simply neglected to study the facts...

...With him gone, his spirit presumably remained—so both friend and enemy were saying...

...American labor leaders have aided this tendency to under-rate their own movement intellectually by their frantic fear of being taken for "theorists," than which, of course, there can be no greater calamity in this America of ours...

...Neither took place...

...The latter declared self-employment as labor's aim, individually (as a homesteader'on the public domain or a master-craftsman in the industrial pursuits) or group-wise in producers' cooperatives...

...With it the Gompersian "right wing syndicalism" or anti-legislation lost its justification, and Gompers would have acknowledged it, although he would still have cautioned against the labor movement becoming too dependent on government...

...The indifference to the unskilled was justified by their assumed unorganizability, for which chapter and verse were quoted from the book of experience...