Labor Leader Campaigns for Workers’ Rights
JOHN L. LEWIS, The Battle for Industrial Democracy (1936)
In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act), which for the first time recognized a worker’s right to collective bargaining. This milestone legal achievement boosted the power (and membership) of unions, though as workers discovered, their victory in Congress did not effortlessly result in workplace gains. In a 1936 national radio address, United Mine Workers union president John Lewis urged workers to join the battle against “economic dictatorship.”
I salute the members of my own union as they listen tonight in every mining community on this continent.… To them, whose servant I am, I express my pride in their courage and loyalty. They are the household troops of the great movement for industrial democracy and from their collective sentiment and crystallized power I derive my strength. In their daily calling the mine workers toil with the spectre, death, ever at their side and the women of the mining camps share their Spartan fortitude. Enduring hardship, inured to danger, contemptuous of death, breathing the air of freedom, is there anyone who believes that the men of the mines will flinch in the face of the battle for industrial democracy which now impends in America?
The American Iron and Steel Institute last week published a full page advertisement in 375 newspapers, at an estimated cost of one-half million of dollars. Its purpose was to justify the outmoded labor policy of the Institute and to announce the determination of the steel corporations to oppose the campaign now in progress for the organization of the workers in the iron and steel industry. That statement is sinister in its implications; it is designed to be terrifying to the minds of those who fail to accept the theory that the financial interests behind the steel corporations shall be regarded as the omnipresent overlord of industrial America. That statement amounts to a declaration of industrial and civil war. It controvenes the law! It pledges the vast resources of the industry against the right of its workers to engage in self-organization or modern collective bargaining.…
The American Iron and Steel Institute boasts that it includes ninety-five per cent of the steel production of the country and represents an associate corporate investment of $5,000,000,000. This gigantic financial and industrial combination announces that its members “are ready to employ their resources to the full” to prevent the independent organization of their employees. It controvenes the law!…
The Institute says that it favors the right of organization among its employees without coercion from any source. What coercion can the representatives of organized labor exert upon the workers in these plants, and what appeal can they make to them except the appeal that they bring themselves within the organized labor movement for their own protection and for the common good of those who toil. The Institute does not propose to meet that argument; it does not propose to trust in the independent action of the steel workers; it does not intend to grant them the free liberty of organization. Interference and coercion of employees trying to organize, come from the economic advantages held by the employer. In the steel industry it is manifested in an elaborate system of spies, and in a studied discharge of those who advocate any form of organization displeasing to the management. It is shown by confining all yearning for organization to make-believe company unions, controlled and dominated by the management itself. This coercion is finally shown in the implied threat of a black-list which attends the announcement of a joint and common policy for all the steel corporations of this country.
Why shouldn’t organized labor throw its influence into this unequal situation? What chance have the steel workers to form a free and independent organization without the aid of organized labor? What opportunity will they have to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing except by the formation of an organization free from management control?
These company unions are pious pretexts for denying the steel workers the right of organization. Their constitutions and by-laws are drawn by lawyers for the company. No changes can be made without the company approval. The officials are selected under company supervision. No method of independent wage negotiation is provided. No wage contracts have in fact been made between the companies and their employees under the company union plan.
The statement of The Institute is an open warning to representatives of recognized and firmly established labor unions that if by any legal and peaceful methods — public meetings, personal solicitations, or otherwise — they are so bold as to attempt to persuade steel workers to become members of recognized, standard labor unions, the brutal and ruthless forces of the steel oligarchy will be unloosed against them. From bitter experience we know what this means. It means that meetings of steel employees will be disrupted by thugs and hoodlums employed by the steel corporations; that the organizers themselves will be brutally beaten; that the police and judicial authorities of steel manufacturing communities, who are designated and dominated by the steel companies, will be used to arrest labor union organizers, to imprison them on false charges, to maltreat them cruelly while imprisoned, and in many cases forcibly to drive them from the community.…
[W]hen the pronouncement of the Steel Institute states it “fears” industrial strife and dislocations may develop, it really means that as the organizing campaign of our Committee is meeting with success, the steel corporations themselves, through their private legions of armed guards, despicable under-cover spies, and agents provocateurs will deliberately provoke strife and bloodshed, and attempt to place the blame for its occurrence upon the representatives of legitimate labor.…
The statement of the steel industry calls attention to the fact that under their company union plans no dues are required from employees. The company pays all of the expenses of these miserable subterfuges. They pay these expenses to secure an advantage over their employees. The cost of maintaining a company union is trifling, compared to the savings it affords in pay-rolls. These companies assert a determination to see that their employees belong to no labor union which maintains itself by dues. Smug in their own control over all the labor within their plants, they profess to see nothing but a racket in any independent autonomous self-supported organization of their workers. The stake involved is not the small contribution that may be made by the employees to the union, but in the pay-rolls where, on any basis of fair bargaining, millions would be added to the wage envelopes of the workers. This is the stake, this and the right of labor to have a voice in the fixation of its hours and working conditions, and to enter into a state of economic and civil freedom befitting men who perform the labor in this great industry.…
The industry has constantly sought to give the impression that it pays exceptionally high wages, and so far reaching and efficient are its means of publicity that this idea is widely accepted.
Actually, there is no basis for this belief. When comparisons are made between the earnings of workers in the steel industry and the earnings of workers in other industries of a comparable character, the standing of the steel industry is at best no more than mediocre and at worst no less than disgraceful.
Thus, in contrast with hourly earnings of 65.6 cents in the steel industry in March, 1936, bituminous coal mining, in the same month was paying 79.3 cents; anthracite mining, 83.2 cents; petroleum producing, 77.5 cents; and building construction, 79.8 cents. These are all industries which, as regards severity of labor and working conditions, might be compared with the steel industry.…
Greater payments have not been made to wage and salary workers because the large monopoly earnings realized have been used to pay dividends on fictitious capital stock, to add physical values in the way of plant extensions, and to multiply the machines that displace human labor.
Under the wildest flight of imagination, what greater injury could be done to steel workers by labor unions or any other legitimate agency than is evidenced by this financial exploitation by private bankers and promoters!…
Our Committee would bring to the steel workers economic and political freedom; a living wage to those lowest in the scale of occupations, sufficient for the support of the worker and his family in health and modest comfort, and sufficient to enable him to send his children to school; to own a home and accessories; to provide against sickness, death, and the ordinary contingencies of life. In other words, a wage sufficient for him to live as an independent American citizen with hope and assurance in the future for himself and his family. Above this basic wage, our Committee believes that differentials should be paid to other workers according to skill, training hazard and responsibility.…
No greater truth, of present day significance, was ever stated by a President of the United States, than the declaration made by President Roosevelt in his speech at Franklin Field to the effect that America was really ruled by an economic dictatorship which must be eliminated before the democratic and economic welfare of all classes of our people can be fully realized.…
In its earlier manifestations — from the beginning of the century to the World War — this financial dictatorship was named by those who vainly but gallantly fought against it — Congressman Lindbergh, the elder LaFollette, President Theodore Roosevelt, Justice Brandeis, President Wilson, Senator Norris, and a score of other crusaders for democracy and humanity — as the “Money Trust,” or “The Invisible Government.”
Profiteering during the World War greatly augmented the sources and power of this group. Its corporate and political control was also greatly extended by the speculative excesses of the so-called “New Era” of 1923–1929.
In his inaugural address of March 4, 1933 President Roosevelt, in reviewing essential reforms, referred to the fundamental significance of this group by the declaration that “The Money-Changers must be driven from the Temple.” The Banking and Currency Committee of the United States Senate after several years of careful investigation later reported, during the summer of 1934, that during the post-war decade this financial oligarchy had usurped “the wealth stream of the nation to its very capillaries.”
An economic dictatorship has thus become firmly established in America which at the present time is focusing its efforts upon retaining the old system of finance-capitalism which was in operation before the depression and thus preventing the attainment of political and industrial democracy by the people.
Organized labor in America accepts the challenge of the omnipresent overlords of steel to fight for the prize of economic freedom and industrial democracy. The issue involves the security of every man or woman who works for a living by hand or by brain. The issue cuts across every major economic, social and political problem now pressing with incalculable weight upon the 130 millions of people of this nation. It is an issue of whether the working population of this country shall have a voice in determining their destiny or whether they shall serve as indentured servants for a financial and economic dictatorship which would shamelessly exploit our natural resources and debase the soul and destroy the pride of a free people. On such an issue there can be no compromise for labor or for a thoughtful citizenship. I call upon the workers in the iron and steel industry who are listening to me tonight to throw off their shackles of servitude and join the union of their industry. I call upon the workers in the textile, lumber, rubber, automotive and other unorganized industries to join with their comrades in the steel industry and forge for themselves the modern instruments of labor wherewith to demand and secure participation in the increased wealth and increased productive efficiency of modern industrial America. The more than a million members of the twelve great National and International Unions associated with the Committee for Industrial Organization will counsel you and aid you in your individual and collective efforts to establish yourselves as free men and women in every economic, social and political sense. I unhesitatingly place the values represented by thirty million human beings engaged in industry and their sixty million dependents as being above and superior in every moral consideration to the five billions of inanimate dollars represented by the resources of the American Iron and Steel Institute or to the additional billions of inanimate dollars that perforce may be allied with the empire of steel in the impending struggle which the Institute, in the brutality of its arrogance, seeks to make inevitable.
John L. Lewis, “The Battle for Industrial Democracy,” in Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 2 (August 1, 1936): 675–678.
READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS