Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
A Different WWI
Anniversary
Robert
Ovetz
November
4, 2018
Portside
More than a decade
before the New Deal, a wildcat strike wave during WWI brought about extensive
concessions including right to organize, mandatory arbitration for employers,
higher wages, and shorter work weeks. As we approach the anniversary of the end
of WWI the history of this little-known period of class conflict has many
critical lessons for us today. Above all, the lesson is that class conflict
drives reform not the other way around as is commonly argued.
Women Workers
Launch the Strike Wave
At the start of
World War I self-organized women textile workers, most of whom did not have a
formal union struck across New England. Over the next few years, their wildcat
strikes spread to workers in iron, weapons, clothing, timber, shipping, coal,
and other critical war industries picking up steam once the US entered the
war in 1917. Those strikes emboldened workers across the country to launch a
strike wave that reached into the 1920s.
The Wilson
administration responded to the strike wave by embarking on a new experimental
policy of using rapid mandatory arbitration carried out by government labor
specialists. An array of newly improvised federal boards were set up to oversee
war production and set wages in iron, weapons, textiles, timber, shipping,
coal, and other critical war industries. President Wilson soon settled on the
National War Labor Board (NWLB), co-chaired by radical labor lawyer Frank Walsh
and former President William Howard Taft, as the central coordinating body for
labor relations. The NWLB became a short-lived embryonic prototype for what
would later become Roosevelt’s famed Section 7(a) of the 1933 National
Industrial Recovery Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, also known
as the Wagner Act.
While most
historians argue that the Depression era strike wave pushed the Roosevelt
Administration to pass the so-called Wagner Act, the historical records shows
this to be years too late—workers had already done so nearly two decades
earlier. The WWI wildcat strikers demonstrated that workers in strategically
critical industries could use the strike to disrupt critical war industries.
The strikes provided the critical leverage that led to government intervention
to avoid disruption of the war effort. As a result, the Wilson administration
used the NWLB to extract concessions and reforms from arms companies that had
otherwise been blocked, defeated, or repressed.
When snap wildcat
strikes threatened war production the NWLB sent in umpires who investigated and
proposed a mandatory settlement between workers and business to quickly restart
production, sometimes within days or weeks. Workers also directly petitioned
the NWLB to intervene in a labor dispute, umpires were sent in to investigate,
and the board issued ad hoc rulings. Workers began achieving gains that had
long eluded AFL craft unions for years and provided a strategy that other
workers emulated. A growing number of self-organized workers bypassed their AFL
unions, which were collaborating in the war effort by committing to an
unenforceable “no strike” pledge, seized upon the wildcat strike to
extract concessions and a strike wave was on. Workers were recomposing their power
and tipping the balance of forces back in their favor.
What came out of
the rulings were not necessarily victories for the workers and they were hardly
radical. The NWLB explicitly sought to maintain the existing relations between
workers and capital, often splitting the difference by shortening work hours
and raising wages in exchange for getting the workers back to work under the
same working conditions. The board mostly ignored workers demands to reign in
Taylorism, which usurped control over their work and tied pay to
productivity.
The NWLB also
adamantly refused to recognize newly self-organized shopfloor committees as
unions or sanction collective bargaining to negotiate legally binding labor
contracts. This refusal immediately backfired on the NWLB as workers repeatedly
struck soon again after successfully achieving a concession that lacked a
legally binding contractual period. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
while being repressed at the same time, had taught workers that the lack of a
contract gave them a strategic advantage of continually asserting their power on
the shopfloor to extract gains.
From 1915 to 1917
the number of strikes tripled to a stunning 4,359, and the number on strike
rose by 250 percent. Many workers under AFL contracts also wildcatted. While
the number of strikes declined a bit in 1918 the number on strike remained
steady and both rose again in 1919 as wartime layoffs escalated and general
strikes erupted in several cities including Seattle. In the mere 16 months of
its existence, a little less than half the time during the war, the NWLB held
investigations, conducted hearings, and issued awards, findings,
recommendations, and orders concerning 490 cases.
Many of the awards raised
pay, particularly for lower paid unskilled workers and women, simplified and
condensed complicated wage scales, and reduced hours.
By compressing the
wage hierarchy among the workers, the NWLB put them all—men and women, skilled
and unskilled—under one wage scale and work rules in single work sites, company-wide
and even entire industries. In doing so, the NWLB inadvertently created the
conditions facilitating working class cooperation unseen since the American
Railway Union and the Knights of Labor organized all workers into a single
union decades earlier.
Not surprisingly,
the corporations were hardly on board with mandatory arbitration. Nearly all of
them initially refused to recognize the NWLB until President Wilson threatened
to nationalize any company that refused to play along which he did with Western
Union Telegraph Co. and a couple others. That did the trick. The companies
begrudgingly accepted mandatory arbitration for just as long as the country was
at war and not a day longer.
AFL patriarch
Samuel Gompers also reversed course 180 degrees. He not only embraced mandatory
arbitration which he had once denounced as a form of slavery. Gompers became
such a true believer that he even called for firing workers who refused to
arbitrate or abide by NWLB rulings and backed company unions set up to take
over NWLB mandated elected shop committees. In exchange for joining the
Democratic Party’s big tent Gompers became the chair of
the Council of National Defense (CND) Committee on Labor under whose authority
he issued a ban on wartime strikes despite the AFL leadership voting against
it. The AFL, now the AFL-CIO, has never relinquished its faith in arbitration,
the Democrats, and what we now call collective bargaining. The harnessing of
labor to the Democrats didn’t begin with Roosevelt, as most labor historians
wrongly claim, but during WWI and Wilson.
Let there be no
illusion about the cause of these concessions—Wilson’s proto-labor relations
scheme kept production humming so that the guns on the European front could
keep firing, killing workers of other countries on the battlefield. In the
West, where the IWW entirely rejected collective bargaining and contracts,
strikes in the timber industry were met with local terrorism and official
repression. Mandatory arbitration for east coast war industry workers and
repression of the IWW in the west were two sides of the same policy.
The NWLB
temporarily slowed but failed to stop strikes. Workers used mandatory
arbitration to raise their atrociously low wages, shorten their horrifically
long hours, and improve working conditions.
Many wildcat strikes led to quick
NWLB intervention and concessions which strengthened and emboldened workers.
Ultimately, the NWLB was a prototype of collective bargaining that temporarily
harnessed labor to state capitalism by exchanging higher wages for higher
productivity just long enough to fight the war. This classic Fordist
wage-productivity deal was born during WWI—not the New Deal.
When the war ended
business retaliated by abrogating the concessions and issuing massive layoffs which
sparked general strikes in steel and coal and led to workers taking over the
city of Seattle. The 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain was the final battle of the
miners army in West Virginia marking the final defeat of the WWI wildcat strike
wave.
During WWI, the
wildcat strike wave escalated tactics and strategy to open the way for long
overdue concessions and reforms that shifted the balance of power to workers
for years to come. This strategy of escalation appears to be emerging again
today. The 2018 teacher strikes in five states and Puerto Rico demonstrated how
disrupting production provides the necessary leverage to obtain much needed
concessions when all other acceptable efforts have been blocked, defeated, and
repressed.
Robert Ovetz is
the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to
1921 (Brill 2018) which examines the WWI wildcat strike wave, the Seattle
General Strike and the West Virginia miners war among other struggles of the
time period.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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