The labor veteran says that the government is not neutral in the class war, therefore its ‘arbitration’ in a dispute between labor and management is the government putting their big thumb on the scale for the bosses.

‘Compulsory Arbitration’ by Jay Fox from Labor Herald. Vol. 2 No. 10. December, 1923.

THE politicians have found a new and most plausible excuse for the continuance, and intensification of their persecution of Organized Labor. The worker’s principal weapon so far employed in their struggle with organized capital in this country is the strike. The capitalists realize this fact to a greater extent than do even the workers, and have schemed for many years to have the public outlaw strikes by the passage of a federal law. But they have not been able to put it over. They have lacked a catchword with which to build up a sufficient body of public sentiment favorable to their plot. Now they have it: “The public must not be discommoded by the stoppage of industry.”

You hear the politicians mouthing that phrase now, like a cage full of parrots, and the newspapers echoing the voice of the masters from Maine to California. The innocent public must be protected from the wicked strikers by making it a crime to strike. Congress must pass a law abolishing strikes. And why not? Strikes are ugly things. They cause much suffering at times, and they always stop the ready flow of dividends into the money bags. The bosses have labored for many years and spent millions of their hard-earned money in an effort to protect the dear public from the ravages of strikes; still the rabid strikers continue to practice their barbarous sport of demanding a decent living for themselves and their families, never giving the least thought to the convenience of the poor suffering “public” of which they are themselves the most vital part.

As a matter of fact, the workers are the public. Take away the capitalists, storekeepers and professionals, and the “public” would still be there in its hordes, composed entirely of workers. The worker is both striker and public, but he is not recognized as the public in any of the deliberations in which the public is involved. It is always the professional man or small capitalist who is selected to represent the public. The professional is a potential capitalist. His decisions, where he has a voice, go for the capitalists. On the Railroad Labor Board the representatives of the “public” voted solidly with the capitalists. As a matter of fact, there is no third party in the economic and social world. One is either worker or capitalist. Now and then a professional man comes out openly on the side of the workers. But not often. Economically and socially the professionals have more to gain by voting with the capitalists than with the workers. And once that is known the matter of where the professionals stand is a settled question. The professionals don’t represent the public by a damsite.

The cry that the public must be protected from the ravages of strikes is a false cry. It is a trick invented by the capitalists to get support in their war upon Organized Labor. If the capitalists can only get the strike outlawed they have the unions licked. Arbitration sounds good to the ears of a pacifist, but it does not hand out justice to the workers. The capitalists know this only too well, and since they have been unable to destroy the organizations of Labor by the use of gunmen they are now anxious to have the “public” take the matter in hand and use the standing army.

Stay On the Job or Go to Jail

The next congress may pass a law for the “protection” of the “public” and for the “benefit” of the workers, forcing the employers to submit to arbitration, and, incidentally the workers also. Then a board of arbitration will be appointed by the president, an “impartial” bunch, like the Railroad Labor Board, and we will have economic peace for ever after. The board will decide what we shall eat, where we shall live, and the kind of clothes we will wear, for our wages regulate all these details of our lives. From the board’s decisions we will have no appeal. We must not strike, for it will be a crime to repudiate the actions of the board. It will be clearly up to us to stay on the job or go to jail.

Of course, they won’t debar us from quitting, individually; not right away. That will be left for a later date. It will be the next step in the progress of the movement for universal peace and freedom of industry. That there is a principle in law which decrees that what it is legal for a person to do individually cannot become a crime when done in the company of others, is not here nor there in these progressive times. It is old stuff and our forward-looking supreme court would so declare it. If the unions call a strike, the act will be denounced as a conspiracy against the public welfare and fines, imprisonment, and dissolution will follow.

Words Won’t Win Labor’s Fight

Without being a prophet or a seer one can see this condition approaching. The public is being prepared for it by a subtle propaganda that only Wall Street knows how to put over. And there is only one thing that can prevent this approaching doom of the Labor movement a vigorous drive for amalgamation and organization on the part of the unions. Action is needed now as never before. Amalgamation must be speeded up and drives for membership must be inaugurated. Words won’t win Labor’s fight for life and liberty. Action is the demand of the hour. If our officials won’t change their tactics and get busy along these lines, men and women from the ranks must take the lead.

President Gompers assures us that he has checked Wall Street’s union smashing campaign. We wish it were so, but it is not. Wall Street is not worried by grandiloquent words. Neither must we permit ourselves to be lulled into a false security by the sound of the old man’s voice. The very best excuse for doing nothing is the belief that there is nothing to do. If the executive council thinks there is nothing to do, that the danger is passed, while all around the enemies of Labor are busy framing for its downfall, then that council is blind and incompetent. If it sees the dangers surrounding the Labor movement and will not act, it is false.

Whatever the cause, it is plain the official machine does not move. Thus it is up to the wide-awake workers to get together and prepare the Labor movement for the impending struggle.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborherald/v2n10-dec-1923.pdf