THE FIELD BEFORE THE COMMISSION ON

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

N the last day of the year 1911 a group of social workers and university men presented to President Taft a petition for the creation of a federal commission of inquiry. They asked for a body "with as great scientific competence, staff, resources and power to compel testimony as the Interstate Commerce Commission" to investigate the field of relations between employer and employee. Among the topics specifically mentioned for investigation were the organization and methods of trade unions and employers' associations, strikes, laws and judicial decisions relative to labor, and constructive "schemes of economic government," such as the "trade legislature" in the New York cloak and suit industry, the Canadian industrial disputes legislation, the Wisconsin industrial commission and the Australian minimum-wage acts.

Six months' agitation resulted in the passage of an act by Congress, approved August 23, 1912,' providing for a commission of nine members, three to represent employers and three to represent organized labor. The duration of the commission was limited to three years, and an appropriation of $100,000 was made for the expenses of the first year. The commission was given broad powers of investigation into general labor conditions, conditions of association of labor and capital, problems of sanitation and safety, agencies of industrial peace, and the subject of Asiatic immigration. It was especially charged to "seek to discover the underlying causes of dissatisfaction in the industrial situation and to report its conclusions thereon." In mid-September, 1913, President Wilson's nominations were confirmed by the senate, and in October the commission met and organized for work.

It is significant that the impulse which resulted in the creation of this commission came from men and women who belong

1U. S. Statutes, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, Public, 351.

to what may be termed the third party to the industrial struggle. They were men and women, to be sure, who know conditions of life and labor at first hand; and many of them had been instrumental in settling industrial disputes. Yet after all, of what deep concern was it to them that employers and employees are recurrently at loggerheads? What concern is it to the average citizen?

Let us look at the situation as they brought it forward, and carried conviction in Congress that the work ready to the hand of such a federal commission reaches to the economic bedrock of American democracy.

I

Throughout the period of westward expansion the homestead laws were the underpinnings by which men adjusted themselves to the land, as the basis for subsistence. On them, and on contractual relations which smacked of the soil, they built up the great commonwealths of the Mississippi Valley and beyond.

With the development of manufacturing, the currents have set in new directions; cities have piled up; the people have massed in great trade groups; employments embedded in corporate industry have become the basis for subsistence for vaster and vaster numbers of Americans. On the contract of hire depends their prosperity.

Now, the laws and customs of adjusting rights and interests among agricultural peoples have been the development of centuries. They have become moulded in forms conformable to democracy. But while organic social changes have come in with modern industry, as radical as the change in tools from wheelbarrows to electric cranes, the terms of the contract of hire have not been reconsidered in relation to the new conditions.

If we apply to the farming life of America the words equity, tenure and security, we obtain a fairly clear idea of the economic base upon which households and granges, counties and states, have been built up. But if we apply the test of the same words to the working life of American industrial districts, we get at once a vivid impression of the insecure footing of our

wage-earners. And if we turn to the message which Abraham Lincoln sent to Congress fifty years ago and read what he then said of the self-sufficient household and the self-employing man as the sure foundations upon which political democracy must depend to withstand the encroachments of new forms of despotism, we appreciate the risks to our institutions which industrial changes have thrust into the national life.

Not merely the sudden massing of industrial workers but the unevenness in the size and strength of the parties to the work contract put strains upon it. Corporate bargainers range from small concerns, which retain much of the old personal contact between master and man, to far-flung enterprises governed by wire, which have injected a system of absentee capitalism into American industrial life as definite in its effects as is absentee landlordism. In strength of position these corporate bargainers range from the isolated contractor, whose work must be prosecuted on an exposed corner and at a rate of speed enforced by real-estate owner and prospective tenant, to the manufacturer whose walled plant enables him to store up finished goods to tide over a strike. They range from associations of such manufacturers, which can put a strike-breaking force into the plant of any member and break the back of a local strike regardless of its merits, to nationalized industries, which can effect the same end by closing down a plant here and operating elsewhere. They range from manufacturers, who view organized labor as nothing more than a disruptor of orderly administration to be fought at every turn, to manufacturers who not only bargain with it, but look to it to aid in the discipline of unsteady workers or to settle disputes between crafts.

There is equal unevenness in the ranks of labor. The workers range from those in sedentary trades, thick with traditions, to those in new and hazardous callings like that of the structural iron workers, which attract foot-loose men of the same devilmay-care stamp as did our frontier settlements. They range from old employees, indispensable core of an industry, to the machine hands of the loft districts of the cities, whose employers take them on and lay them off with no more sense of responsibility than they feel when they throw the switch that

turns on their electric power. They range from mass organizations which embrace every worker in an industry-from common labor up, to craft organizations hedged in by apprenticeships from competition with the common laborers; from elemental, unorganized bodies of men who strike spontaneously under some common spur, as at McKees Rocks and Lawrence, to highly disciplined orders, like the railroad brotherhoods, whose stages of development have been as distinct in character, ideals and methods as are those of thoroughly organized business concerns. The organizations of workers range from isolated local bodies to international unions with staffs of paid organizers; from irresponsible associations with unitemized accounts and a ring control which matches that of machine politics, to organizations on a business basis with large benefit funds and responsible executives.

Leaving out of consideration what have been called the predatory industrial corporation and the predatory trade union, we have, therefore, a great diversity in the relative strength of position enjoyed by the two parties to the labor contract. In the middle ground, for the purposes of illustration, may be cited the brewery trade, in which strong unions, local and international, have carried on long-headed negotiations with an equally strong organization of employers to devise trade agreements covering not only the customary subject-matters of hours, wages and labor conditions, but the creation and joint management of a fund for old-age pensions, accident and sickness insurance. At one extreme of the scale is the Chicago builder who has to deal with thirty different city trades and who may be bankrupted because his operations are held up by disputes which the unions may have among themselves. At the other extreme, the Steel Corporation, with a half-billion capitalization and with men numbered in the hundreds of thousands, refuses to bargain with even two men acting in unison.

The presence of such inequalities between the two parties to the labor contract is sufficient to require that the commission give fresh scrutiny to that contract to see if it is meeting the stress of demands which it was not devised to bear. Clearly, also, the commission should consider how the sovereign power

of the state, greater than that of any of these parties, may be thrown over the transaction so that sheer disparity in strength between the contracting parties shall not of itself occasion social wrong.

In the absence of such governmental control, the parties to the labor contract have themselves sought to exercise control over it either by mutual agreement or by compulsion from one end of the bargain or the other. Thus we have:

The closed shop-closed from below-in which unions succeed in preventing the employment of any but their own members in a given trade.

The preferential shop, in which the employers agree to give a preference to union labor when engaging new workers.

The open shop, in which union and non-union men are on an equal footing and in which employees are treated with singly or in groups, as they prefer.

The pseudo-open shop, in which the labor organization is dislodged or rendered feckless by a process of discharge or refusal to treat with the men collectively.

The closed shop-closed from above-in which the employer discharges men who attempt to act collectively or even to belong to unions, and in which the workers do not so much bargain as simply take or reject what is offered.

Two recent developments should be added. The tactics of the I. W. W. may be regarded as evolved out of the very weaknesses of the workers in the last named position. The appeal of this organization is to the ranks of common labor, the glutted, the replaceable. It meets the flat refusal of the employers to bargain with such men by denouncing all contracts with employers. And where, against the all but impossible odds of police repression and economic necessity faced by such workers, they fail to win, the I. W. W. counsels reprisal, after return to work, by a sabotage more to be feared than the strike itself. But in its larger strategy the I. W. W. preaches an industry wide open at the bottom, an industry organized as a whole, an industry working out its common salvation.

The protocol plan in the garment trades in New York, apparently at the far extreme of the scale from the tactics of the I.