The second in Muste’s brilliant series on the mechanics and personalities of labor organizing based on the work of the Brookwood Labor College. The first, ‘Who’s Your Organizer?’, here.

‘Getting the Most Out of Your Organizer’ by A.J. Muste from Labor Age. Vol. 16 No. 11. November, 1927.

IN this chapter of our series we are going to discuss  two matters, the problem of how to choose organizers, and secondly, certain conditions that are influential in determining whether an organizer’s work shall be successful or not.

When you have drawn a beautiful picture of the type of person you want for an organizer and the training you are going to give him, as we tried to do in the preceding installment, you suddenly wake up to the realization that your brilliant ideal may never get a chance to show his wares. For in practically all cases organizers can get their jobs only by being elected to them by some sort of popular vote or else by being appointed by someone who gets his office by election. In an election a lot of factors count that have little direct bearing on a man’s fitness for a given job, factors all the way from graft to the good looks of the candidate or his wife. In other words, “political” influences are apt to count altogether too heavily.

Unsatisfactory as it may be, however, to elect organizers, there are arguments in favor of making union officials pretty directly responsible to the rank and file for their jobs and requiring them at fairly frequent intervals to get a fresh o. k. from the membership. And whatever may be theoretically desirable or undesirable, we have to face the fact that in our day in a vast majority of instances, organizers are going to have to get their jobs by being elected to them or appointed by elected officials. Are there any practical suggestions, then, as tv how we can make more certain that the best man gets the job and that misfits and crooks are kept out. Several ideas are worth some consideration.

1. Unions might make it a practice before every election to issue a statement giving the past record in the union and in other unions, if any, of every candidate for office, and to put such a statement into the hands of all the voters. The statement ought to be confined to facts, not opinions. It would give the length of time a member had belonged to the unions, the offices, paid or unpaid, that he had held, any facts bearing on the quality of the service he had rendered in office, strikes he had taken part in, any schooling he might have had in labor classes or elsewhere that might have a bearing on his fitness, etc. Such a statement would have to be accurate and impartial to be worth anything. In cases where there are more than one candidate for an office, each candidate might appoint a couple of representatives to serve on the committee to draw up the statement, just as in many unions he appoints tellers to represent him at the election.

Platforms Would Help

2. Every candidate might be required to give a statement in writing or from the floor as to his views on the chief problems confronting his organization at the time, and an outline of how he would deal with the job that would confront him as an organizer. In other words, the candidate ought to have a “platform” and the platform ought to deal with the “issues”, but not only with the general question of what the candidate thinks or proposes to do but with the more specific question of how he would go about it. Of course, there is the danger that a man will stand on a platform during an election campaign and then leave it as soon as he gets his job. But despite all the qualifications that need to be noted, requiring union candidates to state their platforms would have a great educational value both for the candidates and the membership, and would certainly have ft direct effect on the quality of persons elected to office.

Fit Candidates

3. When a school wants an instructor, it is free to choose whomever it can get, but it chooses as a rule from’ among people who have had a certain kind and amount of schooling and perhaps hold certain degrees. When you need a doctor you pick your own, but usually from among men and women who have had education, giving them an M.D. degree. In other words, there is freedom of selection from among trained people. Is it too much to expect that unions shall more and more re- quire candidates for office to give some definite and concrete evidence of being fitted for their jobs either by means of an examination or by submission of evidence of having satisfactorily passed certain courses? Unions of skilled workers require such evidence of skill in the craft as a matter of course from applicants for member- ship. Isn’t some knowledge of the laws of the union, effective conduct of meetings, the trade or industry in which the union is functioning, the aims and history of the labor movement, how to deal with people, etc., quite as necessary in candidates for office? If so, unions must develop means for assuring themselves that candidates have these qualifications. Nor does this mean that we are looking for highbrows as organizers or that a lot of information is the only or chief requirement in an organizer.

Let us consider next some of the conditions under which organizers work which have an important influence on their efficiency.

1. On the one hand we often keep men in jobs in the labor movement because of sentimental reasons, because they are old, because they have been in office for a long time and would take it as a personal insult if they were not retained, because they would not know how to look for another job, and so on. The sentiment is often noble but the way it works is bad. If a man has outlived his usefulness, it is in the long run a kindness to him as well as to the organization to lay him off. If he de- serves or needs it, pension him, but don’t hang on to a dead one. The movement, the welfare of hundreds of thousands of workers, is of infinitely more importance than the personal feelings of an individual. Any organization or institution that has a habit of providing security for the inefficient is doomed.

2. On the other hand, men are turned out frequently on equally sentimental considerations, considerations that have little to do with their fitness, because, for example, they are not handshakers; because they are hard on grafters; because their wives are too uppish; because people just like a change once in a while; and so on. If it is true that an organization which gives security to the inefficient is doomed, it is equally true that an organization that does not guarantee some measure of security to good men is doomed. If a good man can lose his job because of a whim of the membership, then good men will not be attracted, and if they should by some chance get in and care to keep their positions, they will, of course, concentrate all their energies on making sure they are reelected, on developing a machine rather than attending to their business for the workers.

Decent Treatment

3. In the matter of wages for organizers and officials generally, we also tend to err in opposite directions. On the one hand there are the notorious cases of union officials drawing fat, capitalistic salaries. Even though it be true that some of these officials could draw even larger salaries in business or professional life, the practice demoralizes the officials, demoralizes the rank and file, and produces a gulf between the two. On the other hand, there are those who seem to think that the best way to get results out of an official is to starve and drive him, and to begrudge the organizer even as much pay as the man in the shop. Such people shout for higher wages, shorter hours, better conditions for the workers in the shops but have no idea of applying such notions to their own employees, that is the union officials. Other things being equal, decent treatment produces decent results, unfair, tyrannical, brutal treatment produces unsatisfactory results—in union business as well as in other kinds.

To some this point might not seem worth laboring. My own opinion is that it will bear emphasis. The life of a loafer is the life of a loafer, in the union as elsewhere. But any union organizer who tries to measure up to his job, especially an organizer among the mass of unskilled workers in whom we are chiefly interested, is a hard and for the most part, thankless job. His hours of work are irregular, his home and social life are largely broken up, he is apt to have little time for recreation or study, he gets mostly hard knocks (literally or figuratively) from employers, police, unorganized workers, company spies and his fellow unionists, his work is like woman’s work in the old adage, “never done”—a campaign, a strike, often resulting in defeat, then the smash up of what he has so carefully built, and on to the next place to go through the same round. It is a dog’s life in very truth. Whatever can be done to make it more liveable the union should in all conscience do.

4. This leads directly to our next observation. We have been urging that so far as possible we give the organizer who is on the job good material conditions, a fair material reward. When all is said and done, however, a man who works for the movement must be one who is interested chiefly in spiritual and not material rewards. If he does not get a “kick” out of the work he does, out of the risks he encounters, the battles he must fight, out of the fellowship with other men and women who have given and are giving their lives to the movement, out of a consciousness that he is serving the ultimate interest of his fellows, no amount of salary paid, no improvement of the conditions under which he works, will make him useful or keep him in the movement, if he can get out of it.

5. Brief reference must here be made to the unpleasant subject of graft and crookedness. It is all the more necessary that we give some thought to the subject, be- cause recently there have been a number of instances where officials and active workers regarded as very progressive have been caught doing crooked work. We have come to a pretty pass when the very men to whom we look for a lead in labor’s battles seem to lack even common honesty.

Members of certain unions whose officers were grafting have sometimes been known to reply to criticisms: “Well, they are bringing home the bacon, aren’t they? As long as they get results, what’s the good of kicking?” Such results doubtless usually prove dearly bought. However, dainty, soft, inefficient souls whose virtue consists solely in being respectable and “never doing nobody any harm” have no warrant for criticizing people who get results. The movement is not a tea party.

Removing Temptation

A few suggestions for getting rid of this problem of crookedness must suffice. For one thing, there are cases where crookedness is simply an individual affair. In all walks of life, there are individuals whose character is for some reason weak on this side and who cannot avoid temptation to take money that does not belong to them. Of course, some of them show up in the labor movement. Such individuals must simply be dealt with in the union as they would have to be in a bank, business firm, or fraternal society. It is the responsibility of the movement to remove temptation from individuals as far as possible and so protect both itself and them. This means that all officers who handle or have access to money must be bonded, that good accounting systems must be installed and that careful and frequent audits must be made of all accounts. The labor and radical movement is still much too careless in this matter. Where international unions do not provide adequate accounting system and auditing services, labor bodies can now obtain advice and service in these matters from such organizations as the Labor Bureau, Inc.

We come upon certain cases, however, that cannot be explained as instances of individual weakness. We find, for example, that there seems to be very little grafting in the textile or railroad unions but a good deal in the garment and building trades organizations. It can hardly be that year after year there happen to be more weak individuals holding office in the latter than in the former, or that sewing and bricklaying somehow tend to encourage crookedness more than weaving or driving locomotives. One suspects that there must be special conditions that give rise to such a situation, and such is indeed the case. There are, for example, the notorious instances in the building trades of union officials entering into agreements with dealers in building trades supplies, the former seeing to it that their men would not work for contractors not using materials furnished by the “ring”.

In such cases nothing is to be gained by scolding individuals; installing good accounting systems in the unions is not likely to suffice; and certainly no great good will come from sending one or two union officials, who have made their thousands, to jail and letting the dealers in supplies, who have made their millions, off with a lecture, as was done in New York not so long ago. The situation as a whole must be attacked and radically changed, or after every so-called reform the evil will spring up.

In general, we observe that this evil of graft is fairly prevalent in the movement in the United States while we encounter it hardly at all in Germany, for example, or Great Britain. The same contrast may be observed between political life in the United States and in other countries. Must we conclude that we in the United States are of weaker moral fiber than Germans or Englishmen? Perhaps we should look again for underlying conditions. quite a good many people have made money and made it fast. Often the money has been made, not by hard work, certainly not by steady work, so much as by speculation, luck, more or less respectable forms of gambling. A man buys up worthless land and it becomes valuable because a town grows up, not because the man works hard. Or he has coal under his land. Or oil is discovered on it. Or he takes a flier in stock. Such conditions tend to produce in the entire population a sort of speculative spirit, a get-rich-quick-by-any-method psychology. Anything more or less goes if “you get away with it” and make money. Of course, trade unionists have that psychology to about the same degree as other people and the effect is felt in the unions.

Members Not Blameless

It may be worth while to observe that here is another point where the rank and file are probably as much to blame as the leaders. When in a discussion at Brook: wood this summer the question was raised as to why do the members stand for dishonest officials getting rich out of the union, an intelligent chap, an active rank and filer, member of a union for years, broke in on some highbrow remarks with the blunt statement, “It is because the members would do exactly the same thing as the officers if they knew how and had a chance. They admire the officer who is smart enough to get away with it just as people in general worship the man who has made his pile.” We may as well face the fact that this is a condition we shall have to reckon with. To remedy it, the American labor movement needs a different morale than it has at the moment. But this question of labor morale. Conditions have been such in America that and also the problem of union men who “go over to the other side,” is one that we shall leave to another chapter.

6. After touching on this sore point of dishonesty in the movement, it may seem ridiculous to say next that the rank and file must have a certain amount of confidence in the leadership if the movement is to live and accomplish anything, yet this is precisely what I do assert. A good many union men will believe what the boss and the newspapers tell them rather than what their own leaders say. One has sometimes to travel a considerable distance in order to find a union where there is genuine confidence in the leadership. Of course, there can be no success with such utter lack of morale. We might dismiss the subject by saying, Let labor leaders deserve confidence and they will get it—and there would be worse places than that to stop. But this thing works both ways. One may also say, Let people trust their leaders and leaders will repay that trust. If a man has the name of being a crook anyway, he may as well be one. Certainly the policy of “distrusting the leadership” that has often been deliberately advocated by radicals has been all wrong psychologically. Watch your leaders, yes; call them to account regularly; kick out the grafters; keep certain types of leadership out, watch them when they are in. But once you have picked the best man you have for the job, don’t tie a log around his leg at the outset by telling him, We don’t trust you; we expect you to turn out a fool or a crook. Only people who are themselves fools or crooks do that.

7. Finally, if our organizing work is to go on and our organizers, paid and unpaid, are to be efficient, we must utilize the energies of the young people in the movement, promising individuals must be encouraged and given the opportunity to infuse new blood into official families, and what is more important, the reserves of energy in our young people as a whole must be organized and used. We have dealt with this subject in a recent number of Labor Age and shall not dwell on it at length now. It is, however, sufficiently important to deserve being repeatedly called to our attention. A movement or institution can use its young people and so be constantly remade by them. Or it can neglect them, in which case they either leave the movement to die a slow death, or will rend it in pieces and send it to a swift death.

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/v16n11-nov-1927-LA/v16n11-nov-1927-LA_text.pdf