Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 19, 11 May 1940, p. 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Each issue of the daily press brings new evidence of the increasing boldness of the drive against the organized workers. The Chamber of Commerce of the United States at its recent annual convention in Washington, D.C. spoke quite plainly on the subject.
The Chamber demanded government action “to prevent transportation stoppages resulting from violations of maritime labor agreements.” Not a word about preventing the ship owners from violating the agreements, just a demand that the workers be prevented from doing anything effective about it.
Branding the National Labor Relations Act as a “serious deterrent to recovery,” this august body demanded “fundamental and much needed amendments” to the Act. Passing on to the question of the Wage-Hour Act, the Chamber declares that “its humanitarian aspects in dealing with oppressively low wages belongs to the states, each of which can give consideration to the actual conditions that are to be met.”
In other words, the bosses want the National Labor Relations Act emasculated so that it will contain none of the features which are in any way helpful to labor and, in addition, they want the regulation of minimum wages and maximum hours reverted back to the sole jurisdiction of the individual states where even the present minimum wage provisions, although they are now at starvation levels, can be further reduced.
Former Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, testifying before the committee investigating the NLRB, inadvertently gave the workers a clear picture of the sham and hypocrisy which surrounds the myth of democratic representation of the workers in the present apparatus of state. Reed for many years past presumed to speak as a “friend of labor” in the United States Congress. His real motivations in voting on various legislative acts are quite sharply clarified in his testimony before the Smith Committee.
His wife owns the Nelly-Donnelly Garment Company of Kansas City Missouri. There has been a long controversy between this Company and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Reed called forth all the venom at his command when he began to describe his feelings towards the ILGWU.
He referred to the NLRB as a body “sitting to decide the greatest questions that come before a court, except questions of life and liberty.” In other words, so far as Reed is concerned, the most important consideration in his mind, short of “questions of life and liberty,” is that the Nelly-Donnelly Garment Company in which he has a personal interest be permitted to operate on a non-union basis and at sweat-shop wages.
The case of James A. Reed is only typical of the run of the mill so-called “friends of labor” who are elected to the apparatus of government.
Fearful lest the young people might be kept in school too long for their own good, Henry I. Harriman, a past president of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, in a recent address to the annual meeting of the American Council on Education, urged the importance of herding the young workers into the industrial plants at a tender age. Said Mr. Harriman: “If youth are left to feel that they have a right to support without work, there is a strong probability that they will become permanent charges upon society.”
This declaration is the preamble to the universal employers’ policy of depriving the workers’ children of anything more than a sketchy education. Whether or not there are jobs available for them it is “un-American” for them to become “charges upon society.” The children of the Harrimans, the Morgans and the Fords receive a full education, but that is different, they say.
A preview of what to expect when Roosevelt, acting for Wall Street, has succeeded in herding the American workers into the Second World War is now taking place in Australia. Striking coal miners in New South Wales have carried out an effective tie-up. The government is preparing to “compel” coal mine owners to open their mines immediately. In other words, the government is preparing to utilize the military to smash the strike.
Under the heading Keeping up with the AFL the May 6 issue of the CIO News seeks to utilize in a most reactionary manner the court actions against George Scalise of the Building Service Employees, Joe Ozanic of the AFL Progressive Miners Union, and Willie Bioff of the Hollywood Stage Hands Union.
There is nothing misrepresented; the reactionary character of the item lies in that which is not said. Scalise is reported to be indicted for “graft, extortion and corruption.” Not a word about the methods followed by Prosecutor Dewey in this case and the real implications of this drive to the labor movement. Ozanic is reported facing government action for collection of $550 in fines levied for “crimes in Illinois several years ago.” Bioff is reported serving a 6 months term in the Cook County jail in Illinois, for an “old sentence of pandering.”
Not a word appears about the meaning of the actions of the bourgeois state in going way back into the record to dig up these issues for criminal prosecution against labor officials. This should be called sharply to the attention of the leaders by the rank and file of the CIO unions. The attacks on the AFL today is nothing more or less than a forerunner to similar attacks on the CIO tomorrow.
The CIO Council at Quakertown, Pennsylvania, has voted to establish a committee to look after its unemployed members. The Committee is to provide ways and means for the CIO unions to continue to represent the interests of their members even when they are unemployed. It will attempt to find a basis for general cooperation by the CIO with all of the unemployed workers in Quakertown. This progressive action should and must eventually be emulated by all trade unions.
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Last updated: 22 May 2020