Industrial dispute

“ When will you workers see?
The only way you'll gain your economic liberty,
Is One Big Industrial Union.
How the masters holler when they hear the dreadful sound
Of sabotage and direct action spread the world around ”

“ Perhaps a technique may some day arise which will supply the executives of industry not only with the facts about employees in their varied racial and social groups but supply the facts with due emphasis and in three dimensions so that the controller of power may be able to see them as descriptive of men of like mind with himself. The conclusion most burned into my consciousness was the lack of such knowledge or understanding in the steel industry and the imperative need of securing it, in order to escape continual industrial war, and perhaps disaster. ”

“ Then came the wars over trade-routes, and the struggle for the control of seagoing commerce. And now, under the dominion of an industrial system that is founded on the machine, the factory, the railroad, the bank and the retail store comes the international competition for foreign markets. ”

“ The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by close guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. ”

“ The end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries were the culminating days of the industrial revolution, when the old organization of domestic industry had given way before the factory system, and the population of the factory districts was suffering a martyrdom, with ruin of body and degradation of character, from unbridled competition, long hours, women’s and children’s labour, pauper apprenticeship, great fluctuations of trade and employment, dearness and adulteration of provisions, the truck system and insanitary homes. ”

“ Many of their factories are razed to the ground. Much of their machinery is destroyed or has been taken away. Their people are scattered and many of their best workmen are dead. Their markets will be taken by others, if they are not in some special way assisted to rebuild their factories and replace their lost instruments of manufacture. They should not be left to the vicissitudes of the sharp competition for materials and for industrial facilities which is now to set in. ”

“ The forces which had exhibited themselves in increased manufacture and railway development between the Civil War and the panic of 1873 now found expression in a general concentration of industries into fewer plants with vastly greater capital and output, in the combination of partnerships into corporations, and of corporations into agreements, pools and trusts to avoid competition and to secure the needed capital and economies for dealing with the new problems of industrial magnitude. ”

“ But now our customers have set up in their own countries improved copies of our industrial organization, and have discovered places where iron and coal are even handier than they are by this time in England. They produce for themselves, or buy elsewhere, what they formerly bought from us. Our profits are vanishing, our machinery is standing idle, our workmen are locked out. It pays now to stop the mills and fight and crush the unions when the men strike, no longer for an advance, but against a reduction. ”

“ Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system: iron and steel for permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as the cheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle the appetites of the natives and render the alienation of land and the breakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract labor under white drivers to increase and systematize the production of raw materials. ”

“ When the capitalists get tired of running industries, the workers will cheerfully invite them to abdicate, and through and by their industrial organisations will run the industries themselves in the interests of the whole community. ”

“ It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. ”

“ For our ability to exchange our manufactures for food will grow steadily less, as the self-indulgent and 'work-shy' labourer succeeds in gaining his wishes. If the coal begins to give out, the retreat will become a rout.
We are witnessing the decline and fall of the social order which began with the industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. ”

“ The industrial overlord holds control of the job with one hand. With the other he controls the product of industry. From the time the raw material leaves the earth in the form of iron ore, crude petroleum, logs, or coal, through all of the processes of production, it is owned by the industrial master, not by the worker. Workers separate the product from the earth, transport it, refine it, fabricate it. Always, the product, like the machinery, is the possession of the owning class. ”

“ Coincident with the development of industry which has revolutionized the whole life and history of our people and our civilization, have come the local, the district, the national, and finally the international organizations of [Pg 382] labor. These gigantic associations and federations of workmen are the logical and the inevitable consequence of an industrial development which threatened the subjugation of the individual workman and forced him, in self-defense, to merge his interests and his identity with those of his fellow workmen. ”

“ In Great Britain in particular the close industrial organisation required by the war has provided a revelation of hitherto unexplored and even unsuspected possibilities of production, proving “big” business to have been uncommonly bad business. ”

“ No matter how the battle lines yearn for men, the workers in the factories that send goods across the sea are kept at their task. This diagram is the barometer. For exports keep up the rate of exchange and husband gold.
England is creating a whole new line of industrial defence. The manufacture of dyestuffs will illustrate: This process, which originated in England, was permitted to pass to the Germans, who practically got a world monopoly in it. ”

“ The whole labor movement, with its organizations of workingmen, its labor legislation, its strikes and boycotts, its brotherhood of industry, its demand for shorter hours and larger wages, its rude and sometimes barbaric attempts to exercise control over industrial enterprises in which it has no capital invested, its attempts at profit-sharing and cooperation, its proposed nationalization of land and of industries, is all a movement toward industrial democracy ”

“ No matter how large the industrial unit ultimately required to secure all possible economies of production, here the various raw materials can be secured, here all the branches of the business may be carried on without crossing the boundaries of nations and encountering tariffs and racial and national rivalries. ”

“ Even the skilled mechanic saw himself exposed to panics, commercial crises, and violent industrial dislocations, over which neither he nor his Trade Union had any control, and by which he and his children were often reduced to destitution. ”

“ The strike has already demonstrated the fact that in the hands of a well-organized body of laborers, especially in those trades where the number of apprentices may be controlled, industrial power becomes a much more effective weapon than it is in the hands of the present capitalistic owners. ”

“ Our industrialism has been in the grip of business, and our industrial cities, and their institutions, have exhibited a major preoccupation with business. The coercive repression of an impersonal, mechanical technique was compensated by the pervasive will-to-power—or at least will-to-comfort—of commercialism. ”

“ The high stage of world-industrial development in capitalistic production finds expression in the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of the instruments of war, as in their practically uniform degree of perfection in all belligerent countries. ”

“ France had made only the barest beginnings in the modern industries depending on coal and iron, and on the application of machinery, at the time of the Revolution, and though industries developed when commerce was interrupted by war, they were weak in organization and technique, and loudly demanded protection when peace returned, and opportunities for commerce developed. ”

“ It is always easy to recognize, in any labor dispute, the difference between contention for redress of legitimate grievance, as to wages or otherwise, and contention for control and direction and limitation over the management and conduct of manufacturing enterprises. This difference has distinguished and differentiated the engineers' strike from most of the great labor conflicts which have preceded it in England. It was, from start to finish, a contest over a great economic principle—a principle which lies at the foundation of modern industrialism. ”

“ They receive ample confirmation in the history of the English Factory Acts, imposed on greedy and unscrupulous capitalists after a severe struggle prolonged for half a century, and required to prevent the moral and physical ruin of the industrial population. ”

“ With the pernicious system of each trade organzing and looking out for itself, signing contracts and agreements with the employers that bind the workers of a certain craft for a definite and long term of years to work certain hours under certain conditions for certain wages without taking into account and consideration the rest of the workers in the same establishment or industry, workers are divided and defeated. ”

“ The spread of the modern industrial system has brought with it the modern state, with its millions of consumers, its vast area, its innumerable activities, its complicated code of industrial and commercial law. At the same time, the revolution in the means of transport and communication has destroyed, or is tending to destroy, local markets, and closely interwoven all the business of the world. ”

“ This leads us to the third branch of industrial administration the settlement of the conditions under which the human beings are to be employed. The adoption of one material rather than another, the choice between alternative processes or alternative ways of organising the factory, the selection of particular grades of workers, or even of a particular foreman, may affect, for the worse, the Standard of Life of the operatives concerned. ”

“ The Industrial Union
Shall be the human race.
We want no condescending saviors,
To rule us from a judgment hall;
We workers ask not for their favors;
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell,
We must ourselves decide our duty,
We must decide and do it well.
The law oppresses us and tricks us,
Wage systems drain our blood;
The rich are free from obligations,
The laws the poor delude. ”

“ How shall we better distribute the product of industry, and allay the unrest of which we hear so much? There's only one way—by improving our methods of production. To effect this the earnest and active co-operation between those engaged in industry must be employed.
... No longer must a man be supported by his union when he refuses to mind two lathes because the custom of the factory confines him to one. No longer must an employer assign as a reason for cutting prices that the man's wages are too high.... ”

“ With the war came a demand for an enormously increased production in British manufacturing plants. In order to increase the output the government appealed to the labor unions to suspend their protective network of usages and customs. ”

“ But this change has, in some instances, been caused or accelerated by the conduct of the workmen, in refusing a reasonable reduction of wages, or opposing the introduction of some kind of improved machinery or process; so that, during the dispute, another spot has in great measure supplied their place in the market. Any violence used by the workmen against the property of their masters, and any unreasonable combination on their part, is almost sure thus to be injurious to themselves. ”

“ On the one hand the manufacturers hold up to our affrighted vision the picture of our mills stopped, our machine shops standing empty and idle, our hardware trade slipping through our fingers, our ships rotting in our own and in foreign ports, and our greatness as a producing nation for ever passed away. On the other hand, the journalists who take the labor side of the question, the trades-union leaders, and a large number of the workmen themselves, hold that we have little or nothing to fear from our foreign rivals ”

“ Men of trade, industry, engineering, of all manner of business and professional life willingly agreed to the curtailment, even the complete stopping of their own affairs if the Government needed their services, their supply of coal, or their raw materials for its war production, or turned to its uses the ships in which they were accustomed to import or export their goods. ”

“ The hour when our militants generally adopt English methods, and turn their whole-hearted attention to building up and developing the trade-union movement,—that hour will be the dawn of a new day for American Labor. ”

“ Whether there are more or fewer factories than one hundred in the United States, it is excessively wide of truth, and excessively humiliating to all occupations, to apply to them exclusively the phrase "national industry." ”

“ But the woollen manufacture is the life and blood of the whole nation, the soul of our trade, the top of all manufactures, and nothing can be erected that either rivals it or any way lessens it or interferes with it, without wounding us in the more noble and vital part, and, in effect, endangering the whole. ”