Goal Behind Steel

Last week organized U. S. Labor had reached the greatest crisis in its history. The resolution of that crisis promised to shape the future, not only of Labor, but of the nation.

The issue was industrial v. craft unionism--clashing philosophies whose champions had at last come to the brink of open war. Though the fateful declaration was postponed by the American Federation of Labor's Executive Council, meeting in Washington last week, and though the contending forces were still formally united in the Federation, the battle lines were already clearly drawn. On one side were ranged William Green and his fellow craft unionists, representing nearly two-thirds of A. F. of L.'s membership. Beneficiaries of an entrenched order, they would fight to preserve it. Against them stood John Llewellyn Lewis and his fellow industrial unionists of the Committee for Industrial Organization, representing A. F. of L.'s remaining strength. Visionaries of a new order, they would fight to create it. A. F. of L.'s Executive Council was debating whether to suspend from the Federation, on a charge of attempting to set up a rival Labor organization, John Lewis' United Mine Workers and the other industrial unions allied in schismatic C. I. O.

In the impending struggle, victory for Green & allies would mean that organized Labor was to remain split in a hundred quarreling groups, patterned on a vanished industrial structure and excluding from its ranks the great mass of workers in the nation's industries. Victory for Lewis & allies would open the way for organized Labor to adapt itself to the times, fulfill its enormous potentialities. Conceivably neither side would win, in which case Labor would probably destroy itself.

Caught squarely between these opposing forces was President Roosevelt. He had counted on the virtually unanimous support of Labor at the polls in November. But, while cautious William Green clung to A. F. of L.'s nonpartisan tradition and refused to pledge it publicly to the New Deal, bold John Lewis had rushed in to place his industrial unionists solidly behind the President, help organize Labor's Non-Partisan League to work for his reelection. When Franklin Roosevelt gratefully accepted this support, craft unionists began to suspect that he would reward it by siding with John Lewis in Labor's internal dispute. A further political complication was the fact that one of the A. F. of L. Executive Council's bitterest enemies of industrial unionism, President William L. Hutcheson of United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, who hates Leader Lewis not only for his ideas but for the fisticuff Lewis dealt him at the last A. F. of L. convention (TIME, Oct. 28), was chairman of the Republican Labor committee in the 1932 campaign, expects to do the same job this year.

On this uncomfortable spot President Roosevelt last week sat tight, ostentatiously refrained from taking sides. William Green and John Lewis each went to the White House for separate heart-to-hearts. New Deal conciliators headed by able Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward F. McGrady worked hard to bring about some compromise which would postpone, at least until after Nov. 3, Labor's apparently inevitable break.

Talk v. Action. Labor's crisis had been precipitated, though not caused by the action of John Lewis and his Committee in going over the heads of A. F. of L.'s Executive Council to begin an organization drive among the nation's historically unorganized steelworkers (TIME. July 13 et ante). Last week in as belligerent a statement as the soft, pious, conciliatory President of A. F. of L. ever permits himself to make, William Green declared: "A very serious, if not fatal mistake was made when [ the Committee for Industrial Organization] flouted the decision of the last convention of the A. F. of L. . . . and prevented the Executive Council from carrying out the convention's instructions 'to inaugurate, manage, promote and conduct an organizing campaign among the iron and steel workers at the earliest possible date. . . .' The sum total achieved by the Committee for Industrial Organization thus far is nothing whatever except division, discord and confusion within the ranks of organized labor.'' Back slugged the strong and scornful leader of the Committee for Industrial Organization, not with plaintive generalities but with crushing facts. Said John Lewis: 'The Executive Council of the A. F. of L. never had a plan to organize the steel industry. They had instructions to inaugurate and conduct an organizing campaign . . . first given . . . in October 1934 and reaffirmed . . . in October 1935, the instructions were never executed. The Executive Council contented itself with heavy thinking on the subject, while in the meantime not a single organizer was sent into the steel industry." If Leader Lewis had chosen to round out his indictment of the Federation leadership's failure to organize U. S. steel workers, he could have harked back across the dismal years since Steelmaster Henry Clay Frick bloodily crushed the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers at Homestead, Pa. in 1892. Not until 1919 did A. F. of L. recover courage to attempt a campaign in the nation's No. 1 basic industry. Its program was to split Steel's craftsmen among no less than 24 of its craft unions--unions in which there was no place for the mass of unskilled steel workers. Sympathetic labor historians believe that the campaign was lost less because of the savage resistance of steel-masters and their police and military allies than because A. F. of L. craft unions backed out in alarm when they saw the steel working masses moving in to threaten their privileged caste system.

Similar was the case in 1934. when NRA sent rank-&-filers trooping into the tight, little Amalgamated Union of Steel's aristocratic craftsmen. The young newcomers jolted Amalgamated's ineffectual old President Michael Francis Tighe out of his well-paid complacency by proposing to improve the steel worker's lot through an industry-wide strike. William Green rushed to Mike Tighe's side, helped him squelch this militant ardor, with the result that most of the newcomers quit the union in despair or disgust.

Hence it was in no way surprising that A. F. of L. craft union leaders in Washington last week should be virtually as angry and alarmed as were U. S. steelmasters at John Lewis' current campaign to organize U. S. steel workers in one big industrial union. For it was no less a threat to the established order and profits of one group than of the other.

Blunt fact is that the American Federation of Labor is not and never has been vitally concerned with the laboring masses of the U. S. It was organized in 1886 by tough shrewd, opportunist Samuel Gompers as a loose federation of unions of skilled workmen, whose realistic aim was to establish monopolies of their skills. Through the 1920's it dwindled and declined for two reasons: 1) a lack of militant, progressive leadership as its officials became absorbed in guarding their vested interests, enjoying their fat salaries, spending their energies in jurisdictional squabbles; 2) development of machines and mass production, outmoding many an old-time craft, changing the structure of industry and turning the vast majority of U. S. industrial workers into unskilled or semiskilled tenders of machines. The conservatives of A. F. of L. have met the change by standing pat, insisting that craftsmen in mass industries be divided up among the old-line unions. Hence the employes of a single big corporation would be split into some 25 factions.

Just as Samuel Gompers adjusted himself to the realities of 1886, so John L. Lewis has adjusted himself to those of 1936. His United Mine Workers' Union admits any man who works in or around a coal mine, no matter what his craft. Under his aggressive leadership U. M. W. has become the biggest, richest, most powerful union in the land. Backed by eleven other industrial unions, leader Lewis is now attempting to organize Steel's 500,000 workers on the same principle. Beyond that-- implicit in his announced plan to organize the automobile, rubber, lumber and textile industries as well as steel--lies a far greater goal.

"My voice tonight," boomed John L. Lewis by radio last week,*"will be the voice of millions of men and women employed in America's industries, heretofore unorganized, economically exploited and inarticulate. . . .

"Let him doubt who will that tonight I portray the ceaseless yearning of their hearts and the ambition of their minds. Let him who will, be he economic tyrant or sordid mercenary, pit his strength against this mighty upsurge of human sentiment now being crystallized in the hearts of 30,000,000 workers who clamor for the establishment of industrial democracy and for participation in its tangible fruits."

After those eloquent words, spoken with the grim determination of a born fighter, no one could doubt that John Lewis' ultimate aim was anything less audacious and revolutionary than to create in the U. S. a united industrial working class.

* Leader Lewis was given free time by National Broadcasting Co., subsidiary of Radio Corp. of America, whose Victor plant at Camden, N. J. was last week fighting a strike of United Electrical & Radio Workers backed and partly financed by Leader Lewis and his Committee.

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