Workplace organizing is a central tenant of the workers’ struggle for a variety reasons. Along with addressing immediate conditions and wages and because it is the point of production and source of our economic power, it is the essential terrain on which the working class ‘of itself’ becomes the working class ‘for itself’, transforming from a subject class to a ruling class. With new industries, isolated unions, and a vast amount of unorganized workers, the 1920s faced issues similar to today. How to organize when your workplace is unorganized? Something like a ‘shop steward’ movement among unionists, the ‘shop committee’ advocated below sought to bring organization to disparate militants, the vanguard, and elementary class consciousness and struggle to the unorganized rank-and-file.

‘Shop Committees—A Revolutionary Weapon’ by William F. Dunne from Workers Monthly. Vol. 1 No. 1. November, 1924.

The shop committee is the natural center around which all organized and unorganized workers should be grouped. Thesis of Red International of Labor Unions.

The existence in the United States of a working class, eighty per cent unorganized, constitutes the major problem of the labor movement here.

The range of the organized labor movement is limited, very definitely, by the presence of this army of millions, outside of its ranks and often hostile to it. In the olden, golden days of competitive capitalism—back to which the LaFollettes would lead us but which were golden only when seen through middle-class spectacles—organization of the masses of unskilled and semi-skilled workers was not so vitally important. Skilled trades held the key positions in the decentralized industry of the period and could play one competing capitalist against another.

The American trade union movement, with its sharply drawn divisions of craft and occupation which survives today, is about the only evidence of the previous existence of this primitive period in American industry.

The American trade union movement has been losing power steadily. Before the outbreak of the world war, in 1913-14, it was helpless in the face of a nationwide industrial depression. The war industry boom brought increase in membership, the betrayal of the whole movement by the official leadership into the hands of the war lords, brought official recognition of the bureaucracy, and the two events combined gave the whole movement a false sense of security.

How ill-founded was this feeling of security was shown in the “open shop” drive of 1921-22 that practically wiped out the most militant section of the labor movement—the railway shop crafts.

Even the building trades unions, although there has been unprecedented activity in their industry for two-and-one-half years, have never recovered their powers. They are rent and torn by jurisdictional disputes and have just about surrendered their rights to the sympathetic strike—the tactic which built their power.

The coal miners, although organized industrially, and possessing a fighting membership, have been forced to watch the growth of non-union fields while unemployment riddled the ranks of the union miners. Their officialdom has abandoned the fight for nationalization, has surrendered to the coal capitalists and joined with them in a scheme to drive cut of the industry 200,000 union coal diggers.

The steel, marine transport, textile, metal mining and food industries are either totally unorganized, as in the case of steel, or have a few small unions powerless against the capitalists but which wage bitter struggles among themselves. In the boom period which has been replaced by distinct and increasing depression the labor officialdom abandoned entirely the struggle on the industrial field.

They have tacitly acknowledged their inability and unwillingness to fight in this sector by their endorsement and support of the LaFollette movement. They now lean on the broken reed of middle-class parliamentary reformism and they will be submerged in the foul muck of the swamp that nourishes its roots.

All over the world the trade union bureaucracy is collapsing. It has ceased to fight for the most elementary needs of the working masses and millions of them are now disillusioned, bitter and discouraged.

For the first time in the history of the labor movement there appears in industry a group of workers, totaling millions in Europe and hundreds of thousands in America, who were once members of unions but who now swell the ranks of the unorganized.

These workers compose an opposition outside of the unions to the treachery and cowardice of the officialdom, but because this opposition is outside and unorganized, it is powerless. Its protest is the negative one of refusal to pay dues and support the bureaucratic machine. It leaves the control of the union machinery in the hands of the bureaucrats.

That we are now in the beginning of a period of industrial stagnation that is becoming, in spite of temporary revivals here and there, more acute every day, is obvious. Industrial expansion in America has reached a limit while the breakdown of European capitalism has made it possible for the American capital ist class to increase immensely its power in every phase of international politics. It has entered upon a career of imperialistic enterprise with the Dawes plan as its expression in Europe and its forays into Oriental politics as its expression in Asia.

Incidentally this policy of aggression abroad has its counterpart in a new offensive against the American working class. A powerfully organized and militant working class is the one thing that imperialism cannot tolerate. That leaves its rear too weak.

Even though American capitalism was not imperialistic it would not resist the temptation to war on the living standards of the workers when unemployment gives it a reserve army of six or seven million idle workers who must live even though forced to exist but a point just above actual starvation.

We know then that the American workers are facing a long stretch in which they must choose between struggle and complete surrender.

Surrender is unthinkable, but this is what the trade union bureaucracy presents as a solution by its failure to organize the unorganized, its failure to prevent desertion of the unions, its failure to give the workers a program and leadership.

How is this life and death struggle to be organized? It must be by some method that unites four groups:

1. The unorganized workers who have never belonged to a union.

2. The unorganized who have left the unions.

3. The organized workers, and

4. The unemployed who are composed of workers from the first three groups.

Only shop committees can carry out such a task as this. Just as the work shop is the unit of industry so are shop committees the basic instruments of working class power—they are flexible weapons whose use is easily understood by all workers. Because they can be used in the daily struggles that take place wherever there are workers and bosses and because they are formed and controlled by workers, because they are not far removed from the workers and their functions can be allotted, their activities known and their faults easily seen and remedied, they arouse a loyalty and militancy chat is perhaps the most remarkable result that follows their organization. Shop committees are nothing new in America, but they have always been a result of trade union organization rather than a cause. They have never included the unorganized, have had no political character, and usually they have been part of the union machinery, confining their efforts to the registration of grievances and some attempt at adjustment of them.

Where shop committees have departed from this narrow policy in America they have registered some remarkable successes, but as the American trade union movement has but little historical literature these successes of a local character have escaped general notice.

Two instances of successful operation of shop committees will give an idea of the manner in which they can and will function. In Great Falls, Montana, during the war, in spite of the betrayal perpetrated by union officialdom there as elsewhere, there grew up, through the activity of a few militants, a shop committee system in the huge shops of the Great Northern Railway which actually took charge of and controlled the enterprise. It extended its power until it was able to force the discharge of an obnoxious superintendent and choose his successor. It forced the attorney general of Montana to quash an indictment for sedition against a militant in the shops, brought as a result of his revolutionary activity.

This shop committee system forced the discharge of three stool pigeons who had preferred the charges and the entire shop force of over a thousand men shut down the shop one afternoon to chase the spies three or four miles down the railway right of way. Many times the shop committees closed the works and mobilized all the workers to protest meetings for radical speakers which the American Legion had planned to break up.

This movement was fought just as hard by the union officials as by the railway executives and because of this it failed to extend its organization to the entire railway system. Had it been able to do so the shop craft strike of 1922 would not have been lost.

In the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railway shops in Minneapolis and in the Northern Pacific shops in St. Paul, shop committee organization reached a comparatively high point. It was more or less an adjunct of the union machinery, but the activity of militant workers, who were handicapped by lack of a national program and the prevailing confusion of the period, nevertheless made the shop committees a power.

During the agitation for a general strike in behalf of Tom Mooney, these shop committees invited speakers and forced the right to hold meetings in the shops.

During election campaigns they held meetings in the shops for working class candidates and distributed literature. Grievances were adjusted on the job or a strike was called.

As in Great Falls, the lack of national organization, lack of a clear-cut program, the failure to include unorganized workers and the hostility of the officialdom, broke up the movement in the 1922 defeat. That such examples are to be found in American labor history before even the revolutionary minority was organized in the Trade Union Educational League is proof of the statement:

“The shop committee is the natural center pound which all the organized and unorganized workers should be grouped.”

Wherever the shop committee movement has been systematically organized as in Germany and Czecho-Slovakia (both countries have centralized industry that almost parallels the situation in America) with a high percentage of unemployed, opposition from the trade union officialdom and the capitalist state, following the mass desertion of the unions by the disheartened workers, it has been able to check the offensive of the capitalists, give the workers new courage, rejuvenate the labor movement, overcome the defeatist tendency expressed in growing disorganization and make great strides in setting up a united front from below composed of organized and unorganized workers and the unemployed.

In the terrible crisis through which the German labor movement passed and which is not yet over, when the unions lost almost half of their membership, when millions of workers left the unions because the bureaucrats made them tools of the German and allied capitalists, the shop committees, under Communist leadership, proved to be a rallying point for the German workers and the salvation of the labor movement.

Even in Germany, where shop committees are now the accepted instruments of struggle, and are fairly well organized, the movement is not yet fully developed and all of its possibilities have been by no means realized.

This is due to the fact that, growing out of the struggle and born of sheer necessity, the shop committees are just beginning to have definite militant aims. Where shop committees have not sprung into existence their organization is not pushed with intelligent persistency and great questions at issue between the capitalists and the working class have not been used properly to create shop committees and link up those already formed. If this is true of the German movement, with the revolutionary experience of the German working class, how much more difficult but more necessary is the establishment of shop committees in American industry, with its millions of unorganized and inexperienced workers, ruled by the most powerful capitalist class in the world.

Organization of shop committees with a common program of struggle, with the clear aims of conducting the daily struggles of the working class and the conquest of power for the working class is the first task to be attacked in building a powerful trade union movement. All that has gone before has served simply to show the futility of the present program and basis of the existing movement.

Shop committees cannot take the place of unions, but they will give them new life and vigor and lay the foundation for industrial unionism. Decentralizing tendencies that will develop as the shop committees grow in strength will have to be combatted but this is a minor danger compared to the present helpless status of the American working class.

How will shop committees come into existence?

First, by reason of the failure of the unions to resist the wage-cuts, increase of hours and general worsening of the working and living conditions of the masses, that is already the order of the day.

Second, by the activity of the Communists and revolutionary elements who accept the shop committee program.

It is unlikely that with the present strength of the Workers (Communist) Party we will be able to do much more than give the movement a program and a series of immediate objectives, but this need not worry us.

Shop committees are purely working class bodies, they have to fight, they will naturally be composed of the best and most courageous elements, and the situation of the workers, as the industrial crises become more acute, will be such that only the program of the adherents of the Red International of Labor Unions offers any real hope. If the bureaucrats want to fight with us for the leadership of shop committees we shall be much pleased.

Organization of the unorganized is the first job that the shop committees must undertake. They must also organize the unemployed and see that unemployed workers remain in close contact with their fellow workers in the industry and every new attack of the capitalists must be made the occasion for agitation and propaganda among the workers.

The shop committees must become the centers of discussion for all problems of the workers. They must take the lead in action and rally the workers for their own defense, as well as interpret the political character of all strikes and other actions in this imperialistic epoch. As the movement develops it will be advisable to link up the committees in various industries into a national body that will, because of its purely working class character and known militancy, be able to give direction to all activities of the shop committees and shop councils.

What slogans express the needs of the masses in this period? They must be simple and so pat that they will meet with immediate response.

No wage cuts!

No increase of hours!

Organization of the unorganized!

Down with the blacklist!

Amalgamation of all unions in the same industry!

Workers’ control of industry!

Slogans like these, with others adapted to particular important issues as they arise, have a stimulating effect on the working class and serve to keep its problems always before it.

This article begins with a quotation from the theses on immediate tasks of the Red International of Labor Unions and we cannot do better than close with one.

“It is necessary to become imbued with an understanding of the greatest importance of the committees for the revolution. No opportunity for the creation of this natural representation of labor should be missed There is no better way of creating the united front from below than the organization of shop committees, there is no better schooling for the unorganized than the shop committees. That is why the struggle for shop committees must become the principal aims of the R.I.L.U. adherents in the immediate future.”

Out of the daily battles which the sixo0p committees wage for the everyday demands of the workers, comes the united front in the revolutionary conflict.

By creating shop committees under revolutionary leadership (which means Communist leadership) and thus laying the foundations for revolutionizing the unions, the organized and unorganized masses can be brought into the united front against capitalism and organized in the struggle for its overthrow.

The Workers Monthly began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Party publication. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and the Communist Party began publishing The Communist as its theoretical magazine. Editors included Earl Browder and Max Bedacht as the magazine continued the Liberator’s use of graphics and art.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/1924/v4n01-nov-1924.pdf