Flynn on the essential role of industrial unionism in organizing women workers.

‘Women in Industry Should Organize’ by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from Industrial Worker. Vol. 3 No. 10 June 1, 1911.

From the viewpoint of a revolutionary socialist there is certainly much to criticize in the present labor organizations. They have their shortcomings, of so pronounced a character that many thoughtful but pessimistic workers despair of practical benefit from assisting or considering them further. Yet unionism remains a vital and a burning question to the toilers, both men and women.

Unions constructed on a craft plan in the midst of a highly concentrated system of production; their arbitrary divisions into skilled crafts, many of which are now banished from industry; their sacred contracts binding strong-armed labor to the wheel of production, crushing its striking brothers in allied crafts by “union scabbing” and driving them back to work defeated, contracts which rob labor of its right to rebel for long periods or even at the expiration of the interval except formally through arbitration committees and labor leaders; their high dues and prohibitive initiation fees, operating to limit the membership to the number of accessible jobs, or in plain words to form a job trust, and employment agency, all of which has produced the condition that there are but two million and a half workers organized in this country; its shameful and degrading alliances with the Civic Federation and kindred welfare organizations; its siren song of industrial peace and harmony, brotherhood between labor and capital; the soporific effect of its political policy of “rewarding your friends” and of labor lobbyists in Washington, these and many other numerous counts against the organized anions of today which explain their failure–challenge our critical attention.

We feel justified in assuming that the labor leaders are attempting to build up an army of skilled, well-paid exclusive and conservative retainers, as a bulwark of safety between the masters and the vast majority of unskilled and outraged wage slaves. Such a condition has been ably pictured by Jack London in “The Iron Heel.”

Yet, in spite of these hostile criticisms, certain facts must be admitted. Our criticism affect the form, the tactics, the conscious aims of the union movement. But they do not affect its position–one of great strategic value in the workshops. Here where capitalism strikes its roots into human lives the workers are organizing. Here we find dull, monotonous toil; grinding, hard, laborious toil; disease-producing toil; long hours, unsanitary daily environment, starvation wages.

Here it is that the bitter struggle for bread occurs, here the exploitation, the rendering tribute to the masters; and here if at all, must be aroused the workers’ “hate as quenchless as his wrongs.” Action to overthrow industrial tyranny is most effective inside the fortifications of the tyrant–in this case, where capitalism strikes fiercest and deepest, the mills, the mines, factories and workshops. This is probably the reason that unionism even conservative, reactionary unionism finds a response in the minds of workers. It is not an abstraction, a roseate dream of a future day; it is a movement of here and now, its theories touch their daily lives, its acts vaguely attempt to express their daily needs. Our political movements have as yet, mainly an abstract, educational value. But a union movement, properly constructed and armed, can have an immediate, constructive, value and an objective educational value. A strike like that of the shoemakers in Brooklyn or the workers of McKees Rocks, is a valuable lesson in solidarity, in class action, producing a revolutionary consciousness through the very struggle with the employers. Another reason why the union movement must not be valued too slightly is that it is organizing where the workers have tremendous power–through potential, unconscious power, as yet. Economic power, labor power, that which supplies the world with food, raiment and shelter. Police, army, political forces are hurled against workers in strikes, but it is from the shops that the food, the clothing, the Ammunition comes forth to keep the enemy in fighting trim. Public opinion is moulded through the medium of the press to brutal hostility against the I.W.W. in Fresno; or the McNamara brothers on trial for their lives, But the papers are printed, distributed, and purchased by workers. Yet that same power to feed, clothe, house, transport, amuse and preserve the foes of labor could be withheld or Serve withdrawn from service. A union can be constructed, is being constructed with that aim in view, but with the aggressive and progressive object of struggling hourly, daily for better living conditions. A labor trust of all workers, in all industries, regardless of skill, nationality, or sex: to obliterate all craft lines; to cast aside all binding and traitorous contracts; to throw barriers down for the admission of all workers; such a union inspires the workers through its unity of the practical every day needs with the ultimate revolutionary ideal of emancipation. Through it we are able to live our ideals, to carry our revolutionary principles into the shops, everyday of the year; not to the ballot box one day alone. Now as to women’s relationships to the old and new unionisms. In the final analysis, women’s sufferings and inequalities, at least in the working class which is our only concern, are the results of either wage slavery directly or personal dependence upon a wage-worker.

Let us grant at the very outset of this phase of the discussion, therefore, all of the contentions that the most ardent and bitter advocate of women’s rights can possibly adduce against the present status of women; more than that, since of late “women’s right” has come to convey the limited meaning of woman suffrage; let us assume as just and fundamental the multitude of criticisms that Socialism and Socialists have to offer on women’s conditions. Women to the number of seven million have been driven forth from the home, by dire necessity, into the industrial arena, to be even more fiercely exploited than their brother workers; they are constantly seeking relief and release from the labor market on the marriage mart which marks woman the wage worker as a transitory being; and the social or co-operative spirit engendered in the factory is usually neutralized by the struggle for husbands (livings) outside. Multitudes of wives and mothers are virtually sex-slaves through their direct and debasing dependence upon individual men for their existence, and motherhood is all to often unwelcome and enforced, while the struggle for existence even in the homes where love and affectionate understanding cast their illuminating rays is usually so fierce that life degenerates to a mere animal existence, a struggle for creature comforts–no more, and it is impossible for love to transcend the physical. The mental horizon of the average housekeeper is exceedingly limited, because of the primitive form of labor in the household, the cooking, cleaning, sewing, scrubbing, etc., for an individual family. How can one have depth or mental scope when one’s life is spent exclusively within the four walls of one’s individual composite home, and workshop, performing personal service continually for the same small group, laboring alone and on the primitive plan, doing work that could be better done by socialization and machinery, were not women cheaper than machines today?

We are driven to the conclusion, after the admission of all these facts that much more than the abstract right of the ballot is needed to free woman; nothing short of a social revolution can shelter her cramping and stultifying spheres of today. Yet, I have a firm and abiding conviction that much can be done to alleviate the lot of the working class women today. I have never been one of those possessed of the audacity and hard-hearted courage to face à crowd of hungry strikers and console them with the hope that the next November they could vote the Socialist ticket and thereby strike a blow at freedom. Thoreau has said, “Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.” Likewise I feel the futility, and know many other Socialist women must, through our appreciation of these sad conditions and our deep sympathy for, our sister women of extending to them nothing more than the hope of an ultimate social revolution. I am impatient for it, I realize the beauty of our hopes, the truth of its effectiveness, the inevitability of its realization, but I want to see that hope find a point of contact with the daily lives of the working women, and I believe it can through the union movement.

The only appeal that craft unions make to the wives of their membership is on the matter of the label. But the small number of women shoppers who trouble to inquire about the label or the union affiliations of the clerks, testify to the ineffectiveness of this appeal. Men unionists are hot themselves stirred to great enthusiasm over the label on shoes, hats, overalls, cigars, etc. The reason is not far to seek–namely, that men steeped of craft interests and craft selfishness cannot be suddenly lifted to the plane of class interests and solidarity. How much less can we expect the women in the homes, many of whom know nothing of the significance of the label to demand it on the countless purchases they make. No special effort have ever made seriously to interest the wives in what the men consider “man’s affairs.” Many a wife hasn’t the remotest idea of what the union that John goes every Friday night consists of, or at least her knowledge is grumbling expressed about John having to pay 50 cents a week to “that union.” Stubborn insistence on the two hundred odd labels that mark union made goods is difficult, sometimes as sacrificed from the point of view of personal comfort as an actual strike. Usually it means boycotting all the trades people for miles around and it stands to reason that women who are not vitally and intelligently interested are not going to trudge miles searching for the union label.

But if one is willing to make a sacrifice for the sake of the union movement, one’s ardor is dampened by a realization that demanding the union label usually means simply increasing the demand for some manufacturer’s product to the exclusion of another. All too often the union label does not represent improved conditions as witness the wage scale and price lists in the Wickert and Gardiner shoe factory in Brooklyn before the strike, lower than in the non-union shops which struck. And even where higher wages are paid for the production of union made products, they are simply to one craft on to all who handle the goods in the course of production and the union dues of this craft are utilized to advertise the goods of the company. In short, the union label is open to suspicion and is a very weak weapon at best. Certainly not clean enough to appeal to women with as yet.

But more important than the label is the relation of the women to strikes. Many of the strikes of the Western Federation of Miners have been famous for the exceptional courage and fortitude displayed by their women folk. Strikes of foreigners in the mining and steel districts of Pennsylvania have been the scenes of wonderful bravery among the women. Yet all strikes are not thus fortunately aided. Many a smooth-tongued agent of the employers has discovered on approaching the wives of strikers that he can induce them to influence their husbands. Many a striker has been taunted by his wife, who has been an eager listener to the emissary, that he is lazy, doesn’t care about his family and that “Mr. Smith always treated you all right, will take you back to work,” and so forth, ad infinitum. The meeting of the union may be enthusiastic, the speakers eloquent, convincing and capable of stirring all that is stanch and courageous in man, but if when he trudges home he finds a desolate, poverty-stricken household, sees hardships visited on his family, and worst of all, finds that his wife is alienated through her lack of understanding–there comes a terrible reaction. No influence is more piercing, more subtle through the voices of his dear ones; the speakers, the union, the enthusiasm that was as wine in his blood fades before it. Yet the woman cannot be blamed, even if she helps drive the husband to cowardice and treason to his fellows. All the instincts of maternity are aroused to protect her little ones, and she is in the grasp of a foe that “calls for something more than brawn or muscle to o’ercome—namely–ignorance. Woman’s influence is one of the strongest in the world, though we may scorn the idea of influence. But it must be made an educated influence and used to help on the battle that is for her and hers, if she but realized it. Every gain made by a union man means more of the necessities and some of the luxuries, for the family depending on him. There is the best of reasons from the view of enlightened selfishness why women should indorse and support the unions in their strikes.

Little need be said of the seven million wage-earning women. That unionism is their one great weapon, hardly admits of argument. Even more than their brother toilers do these underpaid and overworked women need cooperative effort on their own behalf. Yet many of their experiences with the old unions have been neither pleasant nor encouraging. Strike after strike of cloak makers, shirt waist makers, dressmakers, etc. on the East Side of New York has been exploited by rich faddists for woman’s suffrage, etc., until the points at issue were lost sight of in the blare of automobile horns attendant on their coming and going. A band of earnest, struggling workers made the tail of a suffrage kite in the hands of women of the very class driving the girls to lives of misery or shame, women who could have financed the strike to a truly successful conclusion were they seriously disposed, is indeed a deplorable sight. But the final settlement of the many widely advertised strikers left much to be desired. A spontaneous revolt, a light with glowing enthusiasm and ardor that kept thousands of underfed and thinly clad girls on the picket line should be productive of more than “a contract.” Contracts binding dressmakers in one union, cloak makers in another, shirt waist makers in another, and so on through the list of clothing workers–contracts arranging separate wage scales, hours, dates of expiration, etc., mean no more spontaneous rebellions on the East Side of New York. Now union leaders arbitrate so that you may go back to your old job “without discrimination,” the new concept of “victory” and if you dare to strike under the contract you will be fired from both shop and union for violation of it.

Such a “victory” as this occurred in Chicago last winter, in reality a shameful betrayal of workers because they refused to accept contracts agreed upon by the “Women Trades Union League.”

The unionism to help working women must be industrial in form, aggressive and progressive in spirit, must organize the women workers, must be willing to fight for their interests they are organized to produce for the employers, must be willing to fight for their interests 365 days in the year.

Women are in industry to stay. They cannot be driven back to the home. Their work left the home and they followed. They are part of the army of labor and must be organized and disciplined as such. Unorganized point of subsistence; organized they are tenacious and true fighters. And the union factory girl of today is the helpful and encouraging wife of the union man of tomorrow. Mutual aid replaces suspicion and distrust in the home and the benefit of mutual effort between women and men workers and husbands and wives should not be underestimated.

Then through intelligent criticisms and systematic efforts to remold the old–a new fighting union will come forth eventually to flower into the co-operative commonwealth. Men and women workers, unite.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.”

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v3n10-w114-jun-01-1911-IW.pdf