Lenz looks at the crisis brought by technical and productive changes on mechanics and their main union, the International Association of Machinists.

‘The Passing of the Skilled Mechanic’ by Hugo Lenz from The International Socialist Review. Vol. 13 No. 9. March, 1913.

What Ails the International Association of Machinists?

A WAIL is rising from the ranks of the organized machinists. In the January issue of the Machinists’ Journal an international vice-president in his monthly report voices the dissatisfaction that has been agitating the rank and file of the machinists’ union for a long time.

The machinists are standing still. For the last seven or eight years, according to the admission of this international officer, their organization has not gained ground. But one can safely go further and say that, comparing its progress with that of other craft organizations, it has not only not gained, but actually lost ground.

The machinists have always considered themselves the backbone of the iron trades. The skill which had been required in the past to do the fitting and assembling of machinery gave them a place which could well be called the front rank of the manufacturing industries.

But there have been startling inventions in the iron and steel industry which have at one blow knocked the props out from under the craft superiority of the machinists.

In the early days the skill of the machinist depended largely upon his ability to measure, with the aid of calipers, the size to which the work was to be machined. The sensitiveness of his touch, the “feel” of the caliper, as he put it, determined the quality of the machinist as a close worker.

That stage of infant industry is now past. Today the machinist has the micrometer and it has superseded the calipers for accurate measurement. The instrument is similar in appearance to a horseshoe with a screw put through one side of it. This screw has forty threads to the inch and one revolution of the screw extends it twenty-five thousandths of an inch. By placing the micrometer over the piece of work to be measured and adjusting the screw until it touches the work, the graduations upon it will register the exact measurement in one thousandths of an inch or in ten-thousandths in the finer make of instruments.

A boy or a woman can use the micrometer. In the large manufacturing plants women and boys do the finest quality of workmanship with the aid of mechanical measuring tools. That is why the I.A. of M. has had to admit women to its membership, but for the boys it still reserves an obsolete apprenticeship system which spells the death knell of the craft union.

The machinist’s apprentice no longer “puts in his time” learning to caliper. It takes too much time and the employer demands that he use micrometers or gauges. And so what has been considered the strong point of the machinists’ skill is being relegated to the scrap heap of primitive industry.

But this is not the only thing which heralds the doom of the machinist as an independent craftsman. The automatic machine is here and most of the tools, cutters, gears and duplicate kinds of work are fed into the maw of the automaton.

Jigs, templets, snap gauges, gang cutters, the micrometer attachment on machines, and a multiplicity of other kinds of tools make it possible to do accurate work without any special adaptability on the part of the workman. The machinist in the large manufacturing plants has become an automaton—an adjunct to the machine. He is no different from the machine tender in any other industry where subdivisions of labor and specialization are supreme.

The automobile industry is a good example of intensified industry which has so thoroughly subdivided the work that such a thing as an “all around” machinist is as scarce as the “dodo” bird.

That does not mean that there no longer are all-around mechanics, but that in this particular industry, expediency and the pressure of competition force the automobile manufacturers to standardize and specialize the work. This makes it possible to take “green” country boys (corn-fed, the employers call them) into the shop and make automobile mechanics of them in a few weeks or months. They may be able to do but one particular job or even but one operation, but that is all the company asks of them. This advance in industry has brought into being the specialist—that nightmare of the skilled mechanic.

The specialist is undermining the International Association of Machinists. A reactionary constitution, which accepts only “an intelligent white machinist” with four years’ experience in any branch of the work and an exaggerated idea of craft superiority has made it impossible to organize this class of workers.

The automobile industry as such is unorganized and known everywhere as a notoriously open-shop outfit. The A.F. of L. has repeatedly tried to organize this industry, with no more success than it has had in the steel industry. Only One Big Organization of Automobile Workers along industrial lines can meet the emergency. The I.A. of M. realizes this and has lately been turning its efforts to the organization of specialists, but there will be no appreciable effect visible in the automobile industry until craft lines are obliterated in imagination and practice, as well as in fact.

Thus is the automobile industry being taken away from the machinists. The chauffeurs have already been lopped off and attached to the Teamsters’ Union. The linotype machinists have been detached and hitched on to the Typographical Union. The Elevator Constructors have taken that branch of work away from the machinists. Those in the mining industry have been absorbed by the Mine Workers’ organizations. The Electricians have torn away a big chunk in the electrical shops and made it a tail for their kite. The Carpenters want control of certain work. The American Flint Glass Workers’ Union has been given jurisdiction by the A.F. of L. at the Rochester convention over the Mold Makers (machinists) over a protest from the officials of the I.A. of M.

The machine hands, steam fitters, pipe fitters, coppersmiths, millwrights, gas engineers, boiler makers, marine engineers, steam shovel engineers, and a number of other craft unions can all trace their lineage back to the machine shop.

All the big labor organizations are reaching out for the control of the machinists in their particular industry. Nor can they be blamed. The miners know that when they go out on strike, it is imperative that they pull out the men who build and repair the machinery with which they work. This applies as well to the printers, electricians, teamsters and other organizations which use machinery.

But in the meanwhile what is going to become of the machinists? They have been wavering around the 70,000 mark for a long time and the mercury is falling. The International Association of Machinists as a craft organization is doomed. The dividing-up process will go on until the machinists are distributed among the industries in which they belong. And it is evident that as machinery is introduced into more and more industries the machinist will have to follow the machine and take his card along with him.

There is no need of an international officer asking what is wrong with the machinists’ union. Those near the top should be able to hear the rumbling of the mass. The evolution of modern industry demands that the machinists, boilermakers, molders, patternmakers, blacksmiths, steam fitters and every other man in the iron and steel industry down to the last sweeper and oilerup get into an Industrial Union of Metal and Machinery Workers. All those machinists who are not in a general manufacturing line should be turned over to the industry which they supply with machinery. That will answer the question, “What’s Wrong.”

In San Francisco we have the farce of the Steam Fitters objecting to having machinists work on the installation of refrigerator plants for $3.50 per day while they are getting $6.00 per day and Saturday afternoons off. Has the A.F. of L. any solution to this problem? Of what use is an Iron Trades Council when it cannot keep two of its affiliated unions from scabbing upon each other?

What excuse have the machinists for remaining a craft organization? According to our Vice-President’s figures Philadelphia with 11,000 machinists has 1,100 organized. New York with 20,000 has 3,000 within the fold of the I.A. of M. And this ratio holds good wherever specialization is advanced.

In the west the organization is stronger because industry is still largely in the competitive stage. It is easier to fight a number of small competing establishments than a Trust but wherever the Trust has invaded the field, there you find a weak machinists’ union. Witness how the Steel Trust has weeded out the organization.

The machinists’ union is fighting terrible odds. New inventions, standardization, specialization, efficiency systems, jurisdictional disputes, a reactionary apprenticeship system and waning craft-skill are sapping the strength of the organization. Its craft life is flickering like a wind-blown candle. It has lived its life and neither Father Time nor Economic Expediency know favorites. Unless it gets busy and brings itself into harmony with the development of industry there will soon be no craft organization of machinists.

But there is consolation in the hope that from the ashes of burned-out craftunionism will rise a Phoenix to herald the dawn of an Industrial Republic which will know no divisions in the ranks of the Producers.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v13n09-mar-1913-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf