There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  His ideas for industrial reform started from the position that the craft tradition, and its reliance on the expertise of veteran workers, had been made obsolete by automation, and that a standardization of methods was needed to redefine the factory worker’s role. Shop foremen were to lose their on-site authority in favor of company-level planning committees. Rule-of-thumb approaches to performing a particular work task were to be discarded in favor of practices based on the scientific analysis of that task. Employees would be assigned a job based on their aptitude and ability, then trained specifically for that position so that it could be performed with maximum efficiency. “The greatest permanent prosperity for the workman, coupled with the greatest prosperity for the employer,” Taylor insisted, “can be brought about only when the work of the establishment is done with the smallest combined expenditure of human effort.”12 By the 1890s he was an expert on shop-efficiency methods, conducting time and motion studies of men performing tasks such as loading pig iron and shoveling coal; he also urged the importance of worker retention and of keeping the factory employee’s mind stimulated.

  The term “scientific management,” although always associated with Taylor, actually originated with a devotee of his ideas, the prominent Boston attorney Louis D. Brandeis. The future Supreme Court justice, in testifying on behalf of shippers before the Interstate Commerce Commission concerning a desired increase in railroad freight charges, suggested that a preferable way for the railroads to save money would be to adopt Taylor’s innovative methods.13 “Roads Could Save $1,000,000 a Day” declared the next day’s New York Times, one of many news articles that sparked curiosity about Taylor’s love of efficiency and his determined efforts at “weeding waste out of business.”14 At a time when corporations were growing larger and industry more automated, there was something reassuring about the idea that such changes might be understood scientifically, that issues like worker contentment, increased production, and the betterment of labor-management relations could be solved through greater scrutiny and analysis. As Taylor had proposed, “What constitutes a fair day’s work will be a question for scientific investigation, instead of a subject to be bargained and haggled over.”15 This sounded very good to capital enterprises weary of expensive, wasteful disputes with employees and labor unions.

  But it sat less well with organized labor, for the AFL and other unions could hardly abide Taylor’s emphasis on taking decision-making away from the worker. Taylor had not hesitated to suggest that workers generally were unqualified to adjudge their own labor from a scientific standpoint, and that such perspective need be left to management. Particularly troubling to laborites was his proposal that differential wages be paid to those workers who showed themselves most efficient, as such a principle reeked of the hated bonus system used in textile mills, emphasized individual workers rather than employees as a group, and threatened to defeat the rationale for collective bargaining. Taylor countered that because employers often lowered the piece rate when individuals demonstrated initiative, which only demoralized the best workers, a sliding scale would put more money in the pockets of the most adept workers and benefit the employer by encouraging rather than discouraging maximum effort. “An establishment running under the principles of scientific management will confer far greater blessings upon the working people than could be brought about through any form of collective bargaining,” he insisted, but by 1911 the AFL had adopted a formal resolution denouncing his policies.16

  Samuel Gompers feared that “wage-workers” might come to be viewed as “mere machines,” and mocked the idea that workers’ jobs should be “standardized and [their] motion-power brought up to the highest possible perfection in all respects, including speeds.” The result would be that “science would thus get the most out of [workers] before [they] are sent to the junk pile.” Taylor angrily resisted such caricature as “the worst falsehood,” insisting that his goal was to spare the worker unnecessary effort. Labor twice managed to force Taylor to appear before congressional committees to justify his methods; already infamous for lacing his guest lectures at Harvard with “profane shop language,” he became so outraged in one congressional hearing at the barbed questions from representatives sympathetic to labor’s concerns, much of his testimony had to be stricken from the record.17

  Few workplaces ever implemented Frederick Taylor’s recommendations to the letter, and after an initial public infatuation with scientific management, critics were heard to declare it a pseudoscience, mocking some of its more laughable concepts such as “scientific shoveling.”18 But the concept had obvious and lasting implications for the coming era of mass production, and in the early years of the century business itself eagerly embraced the idea that its methods were scientific. In addition to innovative labor-saving mechanisms like the cash register, new paper-based control systems proliferated, including “departmental cost-tracking, standard paying and receiving systems, data tabulation and performance reporting,” according to historian Charles R. Morris.19 Countless books and articles about management techniques and other aspects of business appeared, as did a new type of educational institution, the business college.

  And while labor initially resented the systematizing of work, even the AFL by the mid-1920s had grown accepting of the need to define the parameters of a job in terms of its role in production, efficiency, and employee well-being. Certainly, Taylor’s belief in the equitable treatment of workers and worker retention complemented unions’ high estimation of labor’s value. What remained to be seen was how the enlightened principles of industrial democracy would work in practice, and if they could abide independent unionism.

  ONE OF THE FIRST TRIALS of the idea that Progressive ideas might enable the resolution of labor disputes came at the turn of the century, when the nation was repeatedly threatened by the prospect of a lengthy coal strike. The United Mine Workers had expanded from the bituminous or soft coal regions of western Pennsylvania and the Midwest into the rugged anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania, a place known for its railroad feudalism and the violent legends of the Molly Maguires. Much change had come to the anthracite lands in the generation since Franklin B. Gowen of the Reading had persecuted John Siney’s mine union and the Mollies. The long Irish dominance of the region had receded before a polyglot wave of Italian and Eastern European immigrants, whose many languages and customs brought cultural variety but whose willingness to work at low wages complicated union organizing. Nonetheless, when in 1900 the UMW began talking strike in anthracite country, tens of thousands of miners, immigrant and native alike, signaled their readiness.

  This development worried Marcus Alonzo Hanna, U.S. senator from Ohio and the chair of the Republican National Committee, who was busy trying to secure the reelection of President William McKinley. Based in Cleveland, Hanna had made a fortune shipping coal and iron on the Great Lakes; for years he had been the managing force behind McKinley’s career, boosting the two-term Ohio governor to the White House in the election of 1896 with a promise to workingmen of a “Full Dinner Pail.” The slogan was reprised for McKinley’s reelection campaign of 1900 as “Four More Years of the Full Dinner Pail,” assuring labor he would continue to safeguard its interests. The incumbent was expected to withstand the challenge from Democrat William Jennings Bryan, whom he had defeated four years earlier, but Hanna, ever cautious, feared the political ramifications of a protracted coal strike, pitting miners against big business and possibly creating a fuel shortage in the chill autumn weeks before the election.

  Hanna shared the Progressive perspective that by showing labor organizations respect, management fostered greater productivity and minimized potential disruptions from Socialists and other radical elements. “A man who won’t meet his men halfway is a God-damn fool!” he exclaimed. “My plan is to have organized union labor Americanized in the best sense, and thoroughly educated to an understanding of its responsibilities, and in this way to make it the ally of the capitalist, rather than a foe with which to gra
pple.”20 He put his beliefs on the line as a labor conciliator for the National Civic Federation, founded in 1896, a group of businessmen, reformers, and mainstream labor leaders that sought to improve America’s industrial relations. The NCF’s roster was a decidedly mixed bag, including powerful men of means like industrialist John D. Rockefeller Jr. and financier August Belmont, laborites Samuel Gompers of the AFL and John Mitchell of the UMW, as well as former president Grover Cleveland and the president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot. The NCF represented an effort to insert a moderate public or “conference” sensibility into the labor-capital relationship—the faith that no issue was too divisive to defy rational dialogue—but because of its diverse makeup, the organization never fully gained either labor or management’s trust.

  Hanna typified that ambivalence; he stood at the nexus of the country’s politics and business, and while he may have sincerely believed in a “full dinner pail” for labor, his ambitions were large and he knew how to use money to serve them. For McKinley’s 1896 presidential run he had raised unprecedented sums of money, staging what many historians regard as the original “modern” American political campaign, with slick promotional materials, an army of volunteers, and a corps of effective surrogate speakers. Not for nothing was he known as “Dollar Mark.”

  He set out with like determination to protect McKinley in 1900 by seeing to it that a coal strike did not invigorate Bryan’s candidacy. Through negotiation with J. P. Morgan, the leading coal and railroad financier who had tremendous financial influence with the anthracite business, Hanna was able to obtain a settlement for the miners of a 10 percent pay hike. The mine owners refused to formally recognize the UMW, but the union ordered its forces back to work, staving off a coalfield insurrection and helping ensure McKinley’s reelection.21

  Less than a year into his second term, in September 1901, McKinley was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, putting Vice President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. Roosevelt and Hanna shared little of the rapport that had characterized the Hanna-McKinley partnership, and the new relationship was sorely tested in May 1902 when the 1900 coal agreement expired and the UMW made new demands. Wages remained unacceptable, the miner’s ten-hour day was too long, and workers resented the operators’ practice of laying men off and rehiring them based on short-term need. In addition, safety measures in the mines were inadequate, and the company towns in which the miners and their families lived were generally degraded, unsanitary hovels, where already thin salaries were gouged at company stores. Some miners described their lot as a Northern variation of the sharecropping system. On their behalf the UMW demanded a 20 percent pay raise, an eight-hour day, and a more just method of measuring coal production where it was used to adjust pay scales.

  Roosevelt was as contemptuous of industrial tycoons as he was of radical change-seekers; he did, however, accept the ideas that the conciliatory adjudication of labor’s legitimate demands would be of great benefit to the nation. “I strongly favor labor unions,” he had once said. “If I were a wage worker in a big city I should certainly join one.”22 The avoidance of labor disruptions, he insisted, was “really in the interest of property, for it will save it from the danger of revolution.”23 While he believed that government might serve as an honest broker in labor-management crises, he had his own prejudices; he was inclined to form a favorable view of a labor union only if he respected and felt personally at ease with its leading spokesman.

  In confronting the 1902 UMW demands, Roosevelt had reason to distrust Hanna, who had become a force in the Senate and was thought to harbor presidential ambitions for 1904. It would suit Hanna’s aims to once again deliver labor peace to the nation, and there was no doubt heroic measures would be called for in the face of a devastating coal strike. A walkout by the UMW would affect 357 collieries and nearly 150,000 miners in eastern Pennsylvania, with the capacity to cause inconvenience and suffering for millions of citizens for whom coal was an essential commodity.24 The loss of anthracite coal in particular would be a hardship, as it was superior to the softer bituminous variety as a burning fuel.

  When the strike began on June 2 the mine operators reverted to the labor-busting methods of the 1870s, sending replacements and industry cops into the mine region, although one factor in the union’s favor was that Pennsylvania now required that miners be licensed, thus limiting the number of scabs who could step easily into the job. Another advantage was the character of UMW president John Mitchell. A mine worker since age thirteen, he had, like Eugene Debs, advanced precociously through organized labor’s ranks, becoming master workman of his Knights of Labor local before he turned seventeen. An attractive man known for his assured personal style, Mitchell had ingratiated himself with the ethnically diverse groups that each day descended into the nation’s mines, and was widely respected by his union’s rank and file, as Debs had been by the ARU. Mitchell also got on well with President Roosevelt, who considered him “a gentleman.”25

  Mitchell used all his skills to sustain public support for the striking miners, the first time “a labor organization tied up for months a strategic industry,” historian Selig Perlman explains, “without being condemned as a revolutionary menace.”26 He didn’t inflate the crisis by insisting UMW workers from the soft-coal regions strike in sympathy, and he agreed to submit the entire dispute for arbitration to the NCF or another impartial entity. Probably the biggest help to Mitchell and the UMW was the presence on management’s side of a “tailor-made villain,”27 the unyielding George F. Baer, a sixty-four-year-old attorney and president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, who was adamant that no labor union would dictate terms to mine owners. Baer was “the master-spirit of the anthracite industry,” according to a contemporary account, “foremost among the commanding generals, on active service, fighting the battle of vested interests against the advancing forces of radicalism.” The military analogy was not offhand; he was a Civil War veteran, and his manner when in full antiunion mode was said to resemble that of a Prussian officer planning a siege, complete with the habit of pacing deliberately up and back in a room as he spoke. The sole humanizing quality of this “cold-tempered” man appeared to be horticultural—an enthusiasm for engineering chrysanthemum hybrids. But he wanted no part of any “sentimental” fix to the coal strike, such as the help of the NCF, nor would he deal directly with or even condescend to acknowledge the UMW.28 That Baer and the mine operators turned aside the UMW’s call for fair arbitration played poorly with the public, suggesting indifference to the real suffering that would result from a “coal famine” and raising suspicion that the anthracite profiteers wouldn’t mind a prolonged strike that drove up prices.

  At the heart of the coal operators’ refusal to recognize the UMW was the issue of the closed shop, a union’s exclusive representation of all labor working in any particular job site. To unionists the closed shop was seen as essential to collective bargaining, as it alone granted a union the ability to speak for all workers, unifying them with regard to their demands, strike votes, and ultimate acceptance or rejection of management’s offers. As dear as the concept was to labor, however, capital experienced it as potentially ruinous. Indeed, employer groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), founded in 1895, worked assiduously to ensure that the very term “closed shop” came to carry negative, un-American associations in the public mind, at odds with sacred notions of individual liberty.

  The NAM boosted instead “the open shop,” a workplace in which unions would not be allowed to collectively “dictate” workers’ desires and goals. This controversy, so easily linked to emotionally powerful terms like “freedom” and “choice,” cut to the very core of labor’s struggle, as there was perhaps no issue more critical in unionization than the question of the ability of workers to amass their strength in such a way as to present a solid bargaining position to an employer. Management, historically, seeks to disrupt that process. The “closed shop, open shop” debate took place in this
context, with both sides realizing early on the significance of the relevant terminology. Samuel Gompers, keenly aware of the unfortunate connotation of “closed shop,” always made a point of substituting the phrase “union shop,” which he believed rang more pleasantly in the ear. “It is absurd to consent to, or give assent to the organization of labor, and deny the logical result—the union shop,” he affirmed.29

  Of course, George Baer was not simply parsing words. He sincerely believed that mine owners deserved to retain authority over their workers, and went so far as to suggest this might be a matter of divine appointment. “The rights and interests of the laboring men will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators,” he proclaimed, “but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.”30 Baer was only paraphrasing the common adage that “the best men should rule,” but at a moment when it appeared likely Baer’s obstinacy might cause a coal shortage, his assurance that God was on his side stunned and offended many Americans.31

  Baer’s imperious remark would be recalled as the cold nights of fall came on in the big cities, and the strike-induced shortage of coal sent per-ton prices climbing from $5 to $20. While punishing to large institutions such as schools, factories, hospitals, and hotels (coal was not only a source of heat but also powered gas illumination), the crisis fell most heavily on the poor, as they were accustomed to buying coal in small amounts, sometimes a pailful at a time. Newspapers warned of “no more coal in sight” and printed ominous headlines such as “Darkness Threatens Chicago.”32 With the UMW and Baer’s operators checkmated it was the public that finally pressed for resolution, clergymen gathering their congregants and other citizens in parlors and church basements to call for government action. “A conflict between employers and employed which involves the interests of every home and business establishment,” a statement drafted at one such meeting declared, “can no longer be regarded as a private quarrel.”33