Ray Stannard Baker

McClure’s Magazine/December, 1904

FOR years the fortunes of the East Side have risen and fallen with the garment-making industry. It is the typical trade of the tenements. No other industry in New York City, or in New York state, employs so many workers. Thousands of shops there are in the crowded districts below Fourteenth Street, and they produce over half the ready-made clothing used in the United States; a vast industry, supporting hundreds of thousands of souls yet almost unknown to the outside world. No other trade, perhaps, was more sharply affected by the modern revolution in industry than that of tailoring. When the American began to wear ready-made clothing, the world turned suddenly black for a great body of workers. The ready-made garment produced the modern sweat-shop, though its progenitor—the sweat-shop of “Alton Locke”—has long existed in the custom tailoring industry. Machinery was introduced, and, more important still, labor was divided and subdivided, until garment-making passed from the highly skilled industry in which one man, or at most two or three men, working in a comfortable small shop, made an entire garment, to a condition in which a dozen or twenty men or women, little skilled except in a single operation, were required to make a suit of clothes, one basting, others sewing with the machine, some doing handwork, some button-holing, finishing, and pressing. And the manufacturer saved rent by allowing the work to be taken out into the tenements and there finished.

Invasion of Foreign Immigrants

Each year crowds of foreign immigrants poured into the East Side. They were poor, ignorant, and they had been oppressed; they knew nothing of American life, though they expected much; they found at once that living here—rent, food, fuel—was far more expensive than in their old homes. The first necessity, therefore, was work, no matter what, to furnish them with the necessaries of life.

There are not many things that an unskilled foreigner, knowing no English, can do; but almost any man or woman can sew or learn to sew, especially when the operations are so subdivided that each tailor has only one little seam to sew over and over again, endlessly. The small contractor, who had taken a certain amount of work from the big manufacturer, was ready to employ even the most ignorant and unskilled of immigrants in the hope of getting his work done a little cheaper, making a little more profit. So he set up shops in the tenements, where he preyed upon the necessities of the starveling foreigner. And thus flourished the sweat-shop, the home of the “task system,” where men, women and children worked together in unhealthful, often diseased, and sometimes immoral surroundings. Nowhere in the world at any time, probably, were men and women worked as they were in the sweat-shop—the lowest paid, most degrading of American employment. It was far worse than slavery, because a slaveowner would have taken care of his slaves as he would of his horse or his cow, feeding them well, refraining from overworking them today, that they might continue in good health and strength for to-morrow. But the sweatshop employer ground all the work he could from every man, woman, and child under him—and children were used as remorselessly as their parents—knowing that if they starved or dropped down from exhaustion, as some, of a surety, did, there were plenty more to take their places.

Waste of Human Life

It was no uncommon thing in these sweatshops for men to sit bent over a sewing machine continuously from eleven to fifteen hours a day in July weather, operating a sewing-machine by foot-power, and often so driven that they could not stop for lunch. The seasonal character of the work meant demoralizing toil for a few months in the year and a not less demoralizing idleness for the remainder of the time. Consumption, the plague of the tenements and the especial plague of the garment industry, carried off many of these workers, poor nutrition and exhaustion many more.

They dared not stop working, knowing that there were plenty of other men ready instantly to take their places; and the contractor, himself the victim of frightful competition and the tool of the manufacturer, always playing upon their ready fears, always demanding a swifter pace, forced the price constantly downward. If, by chance, a man appeared who was so highly expert or so unusually robust that he could do a few more pieces in a day, the price went down, and the weaker ones were remorselessly spurred forward to keep pace with him, until they dropped out from exhaustion.

In one of these sweat-shops one day, a woman worker, in a case I know of, gave birth to a child—behind a curtain hung at the corner of the hot, noisy room. Another woman had stolen a few moments to be with her. The child was born dead. When the mother saw that the child was dead, she cried out, shrieking, but only for a few minutes. Then she dried her eyes.

“Thank God,” she said. “I could not take care of it.”

And a few days later she was again at her place in the shop.

That sort of work made brutes of men and women.

Nowhere was there, apparently, any relief for this ferocious waste of human life. These people were cast into the turmoil of the let-alone civilization of America; no one paid any attention to them, or cared what happened to them—with the result that many of them were literally worked to death.

How America Looks to the Russian Jew

In the “Yiddish of the East Side,” written by a Russian Jewish cap-maker, there is a strange, pathetic story of a tailor who comes home one evening to celebrate a quiet jubilee because, at the end of ten years in the garment-making industry, he is still alive!

Ten years was then a long life in an East Side tailor-shop. A bronzed, wiry young peasant, coming here to the land of freedom and hope from the oppressions of Russia, sat down at a sewing-machine in a hot, dusty, fetid tenement-shop in East Broadway or Clinton Street; and sometimes he lasted five years, sometimes seven, rarely ten. In Russia he might have lived in comparative comfort to a green old age; in America, caught in the wheels of a “cold, universal, laissez-faire,” he was wrung dry, worn out in half a dozen years, and flung upon the human scrap heap. He had merely changed oppressions—from the political tyranny of Russia to the industrial tyranny of America; and while the former had robbed him of some of his rights, the latter took his life.

This was the introduction given to hundreds of thousands of immigrants, coming here with large ideas of American freedom; this was the training accorded hundreds of thousands of future citizens, upon whose shoulders was to fall the supreme responsibility of a self-governing commonwealth.

In grappling with these conditions, the Church was never an effective influence; the social settlement was able to be of assistance only in limited localities, though its work, especially in Chicago, has been notable, and the school, the greatest influence of all, elevated the second generation, but left the original immigrant in the slough of misery. And the state, until spurred to the passage of modern factory legislation, concerned itself not at all with these workers until, crushed or made desperate by the conditions of their life, they became invalid paupers or criminals.

Beginning of the Uplift

But the uplifting came, nevertheless; and to-day the sweat-shop and the task-system, as they were known a few years ago, have utterly disappeared. It came, as all really great reforms must come, from within, from the men themselves. Trade-union organization first appeared among these downtrodden workers nearly twenty years ago, and it has been the chief influence—and I am not forgetting the noble work of outside reformers—not only in abolishing the sweatshop system, but in raising wages, shortening hours from the eleven to fifteen of a few years ago to a maximum of eight hours for the cutters and nine and a half for the tailors. It has encouraged large factories where conditions can be regulated and where mechanical power is substituted for the exhausting strain of the foot-power machine.

These results have not been easily or lightly accomplished. No one who has not looked into the history of the garment workers organizations of America can have any idea of the struggles that they have had to pass through—the bitter, hopeless strikes, the equally disheartening internal contentions over unessential social theories, the want and misery—to reach anything like an effective organization.

What the Union Means to the Workers

It is difficult also for the outsider to realize though by temperament restless and distrustful, cautious, and personally rather than socially ambitious, and therefore extremely difficult to organize industrially, and more difficult to lead, the union has given the Russian Jew the first glimpse of liberty, of independent action, that he ever had. The employer for whom he first worked in America, as I have shown, was the small clothing contractor—himself a Jew—a taskmaster by necessity more exacting and merciless than the Russian master or official whom he had just left. He would hardly know that he was in free America were it not for the union. The union upholds ideals, splendid abstractions, the liberty of men, and the Jew is always an idealist. And yet, given a strike, he is one of the hardest of workmen to hold in line; he has been oppressed so long, he is so timid, so ginorant, so fearful of falling to the charity of the Gentile, and withal he is so personally grasping. Having opened a bank account he will go to the verge of starvation, and will sometimes become a “scab,” before he will disturb a cent of it. During the tailors’ strike of 1894, a rumor spread suddenly that a Bowery bank had failed; instantly scores of striking tailors, supposedly near starvation and, indeed, receiving aid from the Jewish charitable societies, were found in line waiting to draw out their savings accounts.

The Appeal of a Scab

I cannot here forbear from setting down, for the light it throws upon the character of the Jewish garment-worker, the expressive letter of one Sam Schaeffer, a “pants-maker” of Boston, who went back to work while his friends were striking. It was written during the coal strike in the winter of 1902—a strike not kind in its results in the Ghetto—and I give it here translated literally from the Yiddish by Mr. Philip Davis, a leader of one of the garment workers’ unions:

To the Pants Makers’ Union:— I appeal to you, President, and the members of the Pants Makers’ Union. I would feign call you brothers, but I know you will not take it in good faith. I know that you will say, “What think you of the boldness of this scab; he even calls us brothers?” I know that the brothers will be angry and make a motion to fine me with twenty-five dollars. An amendment will be made for fifty. Perhaps you will table my appeal altogether for several weeks.

Dear Brothers, I beg you to have mercy on my children. If you would come in my house you would see how frozen my stove is, and how my children shiver terribly with cold—on empty little stomachs—just as I do. But I can only answer my dear little children with a sigh: “I was a scab, therefore must we starve from hunger and cold. I cannot justify myself against the union. I can do nothing.”

Dear Brothers, I hope that among you there will be found men with feeling. I know that among you there are fathers who know that children ask for bread; how does it feel when you have nothing to give them?

Dear Brothers, I will ask you something, but answer me feelingly. Are my children responsible for my being a scab? Are they to be blamed because their father is a tomfool? Answer me, are they to be blamed? I beg of you in the name of my little ones let me in the union; we are cold, we are hungry, you are men, have sympathy, have mercy, brothers. I am no scab, I am to be blamed, I committed a crime, I did take money from the union, all is true, I can no longer give it back, I will do it no more.

Brothers, men, men, brothers, we are hungry, we are cold, take me in the union, let me go to work. Brothers, if you do not take me in the union the blame will be upon you. I am doing my duty. I beg and keep begging you to take me in the union. Yours, SAM SCHAEFFER.

The leaders of the union, with stoves hardly less cold than Sam Schaeffer’s, thanks to the power of human speech, took back the contrite one and gave him a card.

As the climax of an arraignment of a certain union, a New York newspaper said:

“They have placed the laws of their union above the laws of the land; they are more unionists than Americans.”

Consider what the union has done for what it means to them personally, directly, intimately—then consider what the laws of the land have done and have not done, what America has meant: is it any wonder that they sometimes place their union above their country?

How the Union Succeeded

Well, after nearly twenty years of struggle in New York and other cities, of successive defeats, of new periods of agitation and education, the United Garment-Workers in 1903 and 1904 had reached a position of great strength. The union had been nourished latterly by a period of high prosperity in the clothing trade, when the demand for labor was strong and the supply insufficient, when employers were good-humored, when organization was easy. It had been ably and intelligently led. Henry White, its national secretary, had built up a large strike fund and had employed the union label with noteworthy effect. Last year alone the union expended over seventy thousand dollars in advertising union-label goods in magazines, in street cars, in railroad stations, and by other methods.

The present-day condition of the garment industry, indeed, compared with the sweatshop period of only a few years ago, is not short of amazing. Let no one go down into the East Side to-day expecting to find these tailors suffering for the ordinary necessaries of life; the whole face of the industry has changed.

“I’ve got garment-workers in my shop,” says the employer, “who make a thousand dollars a year.”

Wonderful Change in Conditions

Go down into the East Side and you will find them—a few at the top—intelligent, English-speaking workers, as well dressed as the average man on Broadway, many of them able to discuss the strike on the broadest economic lines. Some of them, indeed, make more than a thousand dollars a year working only eight hours a day—more than many doctors, lawyers, college instructors; more than whole classes of clerks and other salaried workers.

But these are the cutters: the high-skilled men, composing perhaps one-tenth of the whole number of garment-workers. What of the others, the tailors, sewing-machine operators, finishers, basters, vest-makers, pants-makers, and the like? Here surely is poverty and discontent.

Discontent truly—what class of men is contented?—and potential poverty. They are not paid so well as the cutters, certainly; but there are sewing-machine operators who make from two to three dollars a day—Russian Jews whose wages in the old country might be twenty cents a day. There are finishers who earn $14 a week, basters who make $17 a week, pressers who make $18 a week. Not all of them by any means earn such wages, and the work is not steady: you will find Italian women doing piece-work at home, earning as low as forty cents a day.

And as a class these Jewish garment workers are saving, frugal, progressive, eager to educate their children; tomorrow not a few of them will become employers and live in up-town houses, themselves troubled and probably bitter over the attitude of the union men whom they employ.

But in the very strength and success of the Garment-Makers’ Union lurked also its greatest inherent weakness. It is human nature, whether represented by the trust-capitalist or the labor union, given great power, to use that power arbitrarily. Great abuses encourage organization of workmen, and these organizations, accomplishing great good, grow finally powerful, and may become as tyrannical as the employer himself. Greatly as we may sympathize with the struggles of the garment workers, greatly as we may appreciate the need of such an organization, we also see in this union, as in all others, the tendency to monopolize labor, to raise wages inordinately, and to practise many sorts of restrictions.

Workmen Become Grasping Monopolists

So we find the Cutters’ Union, which forms the backbone of the Garment Workers, being composed of skilled men capable of maintaining a highly efficient organization limiting their work, limiting apprentices, becoming arrogant in some localities in the matter of admitting men to the union. In New York only one apprentice was allowed to every ten workers, and in most shops efficient cutters were held back, not allowed to do all the work they could, limited to cutting a certain number of suits a day. Some of the union leaders deny that these limitations exist; I have found, indeed, that union leaders nearly always dislike to admit that such restrictions of work are practised; but al! the manufacturers I talked with complained of the “go-slow” system most bitterly. Here is a provision of Article 9, Section 2, of the by-laws of Local 139 (Rochester) of the United Garment-Workers —a similar clause exists in the by-laws of all other cutters’ unions—which shows that the limitation of work was a regular and business-like affair:

He [the shop foreman] shall call a shop meeting before the beginning of the summer and the winter seasons. A scale governing the amount of work to be done for a given wage shall be made and adopted at these meetings.

In other ways the union was pressing forward. At the close of 1903 it had already secured a firm grasp upon all the clothing centers in America except Rochester, N. Y. Here the manufacturers refused to grant the cutters an eight-hour day, which had then become universal elsewhere in the United States, and a general strike took place—a bitter, hard-fought conflict.

Power of the Boycott

The manufacturers began to get in nonunion men, and the union turned upon them with all of its efficient machinery of the boycott. No fewer than thirty traveling agents were sent out upon the road, visiting all of the important towns in the country—a great and costly undertaking. In each place they urged the local merchants to buy no Rochester clothing, and to favor only union-label goods. If the answer of the merchants was not satisfactory, meetings of the local trades-unions were called, resolutions were passed, and those merchants who bought Rochester goods were in many instances boycotted, and all union men were warned to keep away from them.

As a direct result of this aggressiveness, the more important clothing manufacturers of the United States came together last spring in Philadelphia and formed a National Labor Bureau, with Mr. Isaiah Josephi, of New York, as its president, for dealing with the unions. It was the same sort of action that the employers in many other industries have been taking—the organization of capital to meet the growing power of organized labor. They then passed an “open-shop” resolution, reiterating the principle that a “closed shop is an un-American institution,” that “the right of every man to sell his labor as he sees fit and the freedom of every employer to hire such labor are given by the laws of the land, and may not be affected by affiliation or non-affiliation with any organization whatever.”

Soon after the New York members of the association returned from Philadelphia each posted an “open-shop” notice in his factory.

The union not unnaturally looked upon this notice as the first gun in a general attack upon them. They would not credit the assertion of the employers that this threatening notice meant no discrimination against union men; else why had they put it up? Why had they organized a National Labor Bureau?

“As soon as the busy season is over you will see what the notice means,” said the workmen one to another. “They will put in non-union working-men and break up the union.”

Secretary White sought a conference with the new employers’ organization, hoping to make some general arrangement which would insure peace in the entire industry throughout the United States. But the employers refused to treat with him, declaring that the open-shop question could not be discussed in conference.

Preparing for the Great Struggle

Mr. White threatened an immediate general strike in the midst of the busy season, hoping thus to prevent the Employers’ Association from acting upon its open-shop declaration. In doing this, through the official journal and elsewhere, he thoroughly alarmed the already uneasy membership of the union. He had never really intended to order a strike, knowing the great danger of such a course, at such a critical time, and when President Josephi of the National Labor Bureau declared (in a letter to Mr. Gompers) that the “open-shop” notice meant no discrimination against union men, Mr. White decided to change his policy. But the rank and file of the union had now become so belligerent, so distrustful of the employers, that a large majority of the various unions voted to strike.

Masses of men follow principles, not policies. Here appeared to be a plain threat of the employers to crush the union—the union that had meant so much to them, had done so much for them—and they proposed, in spite of the unfavorable conditions of the trade, so apparent to their experienced leaders, to defend it to the end.

These Jewish idealists, indeed, were prepared to risk everything—the high wages, the short hours, the excellent shop conditions they had secured after years of struggle—in order to maintain the principle they felt to be at stake. In June they marched out 20,000 strong.

Democracy on Its Way Up

Mr. White, feeling that he could not lead a strike that he did not believe in, resigned—rightly or wrongly—and this vast body of men and women without a general, without a policy, without even an immediately apparent cause which would enlist the necessary sympathy of the public, swept on into battle. There is something tremendous, appalling, about such a conflict—and yet one looks upon it not without a sort of love—a vast, half-blind, inarticulate rising of the mass for an abstract principle; democracy on its way up. Half of these garment workers, perhaps, possessed only the vaguest idea of the real reason for the strike—except that the vital “unie” was somehow threatened. “Ich Veiss? Do I know?” they exclaimed most appropriately—and went into the fight unconscious that every economic condition was against them. Economic principles—what are they, when the mass is aroused? It was little short of amazing what these workers did to support their union. Those cutters, for instance, who were employed during the strike by manufacturers not belonging to the Employers’ Association, assessed themselves in cash one day’s wages a week—about four dollars a week. The tailors paid fifteen per cent of their wages and all the union garment workers in other cities paid assessments to support the New York strikers. What other class of men would “bent over a sewing-machine continuously from eleven to fifteen hours a day in July weather” contribute from fifteen to twenty per cent of their wages to any cause whatsoever—and take the chances at that of being deprived of work entirely—with the dreadful alternative of the East Side staring them in the face? What religion would draw so much from its followers? No one can understand the meaning or the vitality of trades unionism, or appreciate the depth to which its roots have struck into our soil, until he has seen a strike like this.

How Unionism Americanizes Foreigners

Another remarkable feature of the strike was that the union supported not only union men, but a large number of non-union men who came out on strike in sympathy with them, including not a few Lithuanians and Italians. Unionism, indeed, observes no racial distinctions; in this strike we find, besides the Jews, a considerable number of Americans, Germans, Lithuanians, Italians, and even Irish and Scotch—all working together in harmony. We find a large body of Jews—the most insular of races—working on the closest terms with workmen of other nationalities, contributing largely to their support. No other force tends more strongly to secure the needed amalgamation of these diverse nationalities and to inspire them with common American ideals than unionism—a fact already well demonstrated in the babel of the Pennsylvania coal-fields.

And the tragedy of it all! One afternoon I talked with the strikers in the East Side. They were hopeful, buoyant, sure of success. What manufacturer could stand against their great national union? They assured me that they were all unyielding, loyal, firm; that the employers could not get workmen, and they would soon have to give in. I went directly from these leaders to one of the largest manufacturers. I expected to find him downcast. I asked him if the strike was crippling him.

“Would you like to see for yourself?” he asked.

I went with him through his great factory—four floors of it. Empty? Not a bit of it. Every bench was filled, every machine was running.

“We don’t need any more men,” he said; “these non-union workers are not so efficient, of course, as our old men—not so efficient now, but they will soon learn.”

The workmen looked up as we went by, quickly, and turned back to their work. It gave one somehow a feeling of the absolute unceasingness, relentlessness, of industry. Somehow the world’s work gets itself done, irresistibly, remorselessly, regardless of unions, or associations; regardless of human aspirations, or of human life.

The Strike Fails: Hunger in the Tenements

Well, the strike failed. After six weeks—the longest and most determined general strike the union ever conducted—the men returned to their work individually, such of them as were wanted, with the notices still posted in the shops. Hundreds of them did not and will not get back at all. And there will be deep bitterness and hopelessness this winter in many East Side tenements, and perhaps hunger and cold—dull tragedies which, though pregnant with meaning, will never come to public notice. And it is significant that the sufferers—if suffering there is—will be the union men who have struck, who have helped to raise the standards of the industry, while those who profit will be the non-union men, who, taking their places, draw for a time the high wages which the union has helped to secure. This fact may serve to explain, if it does not excuse, the intense hatred of the union for the non-union man.

The union itself, though by no means wiped out of existence, has been scattered, its treasury laid waste, and the inundating tide of cheap foreign labor has again flooded the industry, crushing down the protective walls that the union has built so laboriously. Hours may and will probably be lengthened, and wages may be decreased, though at this writing the shops are still crowded with work and no reductions have been made. A New York employer assures me that the cutters should work nine hours instead of eight and that they must come to it sooner or later, as they have in Rochester.

And yet, the industry will never go back to the deepest depths of the sweat-shop period. The union, though defeated, has accomplished many permanent results, some through factory legislation, some through an awakened public sentiment, some through the very fear on the part of the employers that, if conditions grow too bad, the workmen having now learned how, will speedily revolt. And with certainty the broken fragments of the union will be gathered up again, for the ferment of united democratic action—indeed, the very spirit of Americanism—is here, planted deep. Without it we might well be hopeless about the East Side. And gradually the union will grow strong again, and the older men will be wiser for their experience.

But what a gigantic task it is for these dim-minded East Siders—this lifting upward not only of themselves, not only of those new and still more densely ignorant immigrants who are daily pouring into the East Side, but of the entire crushing mass of society above them! As soon as they have trained one set of immigrants to the principles of their union, others crowd in, threatening their existence—so they can never rest from the toil of agitation and organization. And no outsider can help them much; they must do it themselves. If the East Side is lifted, the East Side must do the lifting. It reminds one of the huge, contorted, muscular figure of the Rodin statue, struggling to emerge from its block of marble.

Part the Employers Played in the Struggle

But what of the employers? How were they concerned in this titanic struggle? They, too, sacrificed much. By having their shops closed in the busiest season of the year, by having to train unskilled men, they lost thousands of dollars. They would assuredly have allowed no mere notice to involve them in a costly conflict, unless they really felt that the condition of the industry was becoming serious.

The plain fact is, the organization of the National Labor Bureau and the posting of the open-shop notices really meant an organized attempt to check the union.

Several causes influenced the employers; the union was weak from a long fight in Rochester and Philadelphia, the industry had passed from a period of expansion to one of quiet which presaged a falling market, and there was, finally, a large surplus of labor in the East Side clamoring for work. In other words, the law of supply and demand, which for several years had been working in favor of the union, was now operating against it.

As showing how fully the manufacturers realized the opportunities presented by a swarming, unemployed East Side, I quote an interview with an employer printed in the Daily Trade Record (the organ of the clothing trade manufacturers) for July 1st:

Why, tailors! there is no scarcity of tailors; they are thicker than the hair on a dog. It is impossible to organize them all, inasmuch as they come over so fast that the union cannot keep enough people who understand the language of the newcomers, busy among them, and they get to work before they can make themselves understood in this country. There is more material for tailors coming over here every week than the whole trade can ever find work for. If there is one thing that Russians can do better than the Japanese, it is to make pants. There is not a boat that comes to these shores that does not bring a thousand possible tailors. One boat landed yesterday with some 3,900 of them.

Why the Employers Fought the Closed Shop

It was not because the “closed shop” or the domination of labor by the union was an “un-American institution” that the clothing manufacturers attacked it. Business is not that way; business cares no more for Americanism than for Christian Science; business is for itself, for the main chance, and if a closed shop will increase its profits more than an open shop, then it espouses the closed shop—as the Building Trade Employers’ Association has done in New York, as the Master Plumbers have done in many cities. Indeed, some of the clothing manufacturers of New York who are now fighting the union so bitterly on the “open-shop” proposition were, a year ago, actually urging the union to press forward in the Rochester struggle and bring the manufacturers there—their competitors—to the eight-hour day. If the union had succeeded in Rochester, there would have been no “open shop” talk in New York this spring. But they did not succeed; Rochester went back to a nine-hour day, and Philadelphia followed, thereby giving them an advantage as competitors over the New York manufacturers.

The manufacturers of New York, then, began an “open-shop” campaign. Now the open shop means the right to employ nonunion or union men indiscriminately—which certainly is a right, perfectly inalienable, indisputable. And Mr. D. M. Parry and his associates have shown their great shrewdness in emphasizing it, in dramatizing the non-union man as an abused figure of independence—which, indeed, he often is— thereby appealing to the sympathy of the American people.

But if the undoubted right of the employer to hire union or non-union men indiscriminately is exercised without resistance, it means that the employers will gradually fill up their shops with non-union men—because non-union men, unprotected by organization, will work cheaper; and that ultimately means the end of unionism and all that unionism stands for. Hence the bitter opposition of labor unionists to the unrestricted operation of the right of the employer to hire non-union men. The garment workers insist that the union is the only barrier that stands in the way of a swift return to conditions approximating those of the old-time sweat-shop. Indeed, the tendency of wages in an unorganized industry is to sink to the wage of the man who will work cheapest and live poorest. A poor wage, like poor money, drives out the good. Allow Chinese labor to compete freely in the American market and immediately only Chinese wages would be paid, and the American workman would be forced to live like a coolie or starve. On the other hand, in industries where no unions exist, there is a tendency for all employers to grade downward to compete with the most merciless task-master in the trade. An employer who wishes to pay good wages, to share his prosperity, to be benevolent, cannot do it because his neighbor grinds his workmen down, and in order to remain in business the honest employer must stoop to the methods of the dishonest employer.

The properly managed union enables the naturally upright employer to be upright, and it forces the dishonest employer to be upright.

What a Complete Breakdown of Unionism Would Mean

In the clothing trades of New York, therefore, the breakdown of the union would not only pull down the better, more ambitious workmen—those that have built up the union—to the level of the new immigrant, who is willing to work for next to nothing and live in crowded, dirty, immoral, un-American conditions, but it would let in also the piratical, dishonest, small employer, who, if he could, would return to the diabolical sweatshop system and force the decent employers to follow, directly or indirectly. These are the inevitable tendencies; and the chief force that has appeared to withstand this industrial “grading down” is the union.

Unions, like governments, like society in general, are organized to deal with the dishonest and to assist the inefficient classes. If all employers were as broad-minded as the best in the clothing industry, and all workmen were efficient, temperate, honest, there would be little need of unions—nor of any law or government. The union is the industrial policeman.

We find, therefore, two classes of employers in the clothing industry opposing the union—first, the high-class, broad-minded, self-respecting employer, whose shop conditions are excellent, union or no union, and who hates to be reminded of his duty when he does his duty of his own volition. I went through a great clothing establishment, one of the largest in the country, where the conditions were really ideal; where the best wages were paid; where there was at present no apparent need of a union, although unquestionably the excellence of these conditions was due in large measure to the agitation for years of the union in other quarters. But the chief owner of this establishment is one of the leaders in the fight on the union. On the other hand, the union always has against it the unscrupulous employer, who sees in this organized force a hindrance to his plans for sweating a little more profit from the abject necessity of the workers. And it is only when the better class of employers perceive, as they have in many industries, the value of a good union as an ally in raising the standard of the whole trade, do we reach the amicable trade-agreement stage in which the frequency of the industrial conflict is reduced to a minimum. I was impressed with the testimony of Mr. Herman Justi, secretary of the Illinois Coal Operators’ Association, on this very point.

Advantage of Unionism to Employers

“Perhaps the greatest single advantage of our trade-agreement system,” he said, “and of a reasonable, business-like unionism, is that it has eliminated the unscrupulous employer, who cheated his men by underweighing his coal, and as a consequence often compelled decent employers to meet his methods or go to the wall. The union, supported by the coal operators, in joint agreement has placed coal-mining on a solid, honest, business basis, where all employers are on the same footing so far as labor is concerned. Of course, the union is far from perfect; but I regard it to-day, where it adopts’ business methods and where it is wisely led, as one of the most useful and uplifting influences in our life.”

Granting that the clothing manufacturers could utterly demolish the United Garment Workers—a design which they all disclaim— what would they gain? With the union beaten, wages would be lower and hours longer, sweat-shop work might even be surreptitiously reestablished, but no one manufacturer would gain anything; they would all go down together in the competitive market. The only party to the struggle really profiting would be the public, which could clothe itself for a time more, a very little more, cheaply—at the expense of the comfort, morality, and Americanism of the East Side.

The public, certainly, pays for unionism. Wage advances come, finally, from the pocket of the consumer. But the Americanizing of the East Side—and that is exactly what it means—through unionism, would be cheap at almost any price, and not merely in a philanthropic or moral sense, but in a broader, social, and even selfish business sense; for a high-paid East Side will live better, buy and consume more food, clothing, coal, furniture—make business better for everybody.

Open Shop and Closed Shop

Broadly speaking, therefore, if an “open shop” policy rigidly pursued by the manufacturers (no matter what their abstract rights may be) disrupts the protective union and reduces the garment-workers to sweatshop conditions, drives them down to a plane below that of decent American livelihood (and there is no question that it has this tendency), then it is a public wrong and a detriment to society. The union is not only a benefit to both workers and employers, but it has become, in our complex democratic civilization, an absolute necessity; and it should be as jealously protected by society as any other great institution. We may even find that a union shop or even a “closed shop” in many unskilled or semi-skilled occupations would be a blessing rather than a curse—at least until the workmen have been lifted to a plane of intelligence, having acquired a capital of skill, where they can in a measure protect themselves or until immigration is stopped or checked.

Unionism, then, is a necessary, vital force in our life; but just as surely as it is a great power for good, it may also, unlimited and unrestrained, become a dangerous influence for evil.

We have seen that the unrestricted exercise of the Clothing Manufacturers’ unquestioned right of “free employment”—in forcing the “open shop”—might lead to the destruction of unionism and the degradation of the workers to sweat-shop conditions. On the other hand, if the union were allowed an unrestricted exercise of its equally undoubted right to stop work (strike) for any cause whatsoever, it might, by a system of discrimination and violence against all nonunion men, be able to force a universal “closed shop”—in other words, a labor monopoly which might be used to mulct the public as it has in Chicago and San Francisco, or to seize control, practically, of the employer’s business. It can, indeed, be conclusively shown that, exactly as an extreme “open shop” condition (the result of which is finally a wholly non-union shop) is a detriment to employers as well as to the workers, so an extreme “closed shop” is a detriment to the workers as well as to the employers.

Limitations of Unionism

Neither extreme is wise. It is essential to recognize the limitations of the principle of trade-unionism. The best condition is one in which there are strong organizations on both sides, each holding the other in check.

Thus it is that in England and in the better organized American industries like coal mining, stove-molding, and others, both employers and employees have learned to avoid any discussion of the abstract rights of the two parties, knowing that they lead instantly to irreconcilable difficulties. In England, where unionism is, in some respects, far better developed than in America, there is no “open shop” question whatever. Each side learns that the labor problem is not abstract, but intensely practical; that each side must refrain from exercising all of its rights (in common with all men in civilized society), and must submit to the eternal law of compromise, that the industry may progress in peace.