The Labor Policy of the American Trusts
THE policies of the trusts, be they labor, financial, or market, are dominated in the end by the central offices in New York or Chicago. There, immune to the influence of the physical, operations of production, sit the directors in their detached, unreal atmosphere. Driven by the demands of an abnormal market on the street outside, they create rules for pay, and establish hours of labor, without knowing or questioning whether the human element in production can bend to the order or not. Absentee capitalism and absentee control have become real words in the economic vocabulary of recent years.
No centre understands a labor problem less, or fears it more, than a financial and banking community. A strike has always been a Wall Street bogey. Business is impatient to see the open shop established. This desire does not seem to be stimulated by an aversion to paying union wages, but rather by a wish to have industrial conditions placid and controllable. This dislike of dividing power with any force, least of all a union, coupled with the mounting profits and surpluses since 1900, has caused capital to be both temperamentally ready for trouble, and prepared financially to meet it.
The technique of production has carried the industrial undertaker off his feet. There seems to be no limit to the displacement of labor or the reduction of costs through the automatic machine. Undreamed-of speed has been attained in cotton and woolen mills. If organizations of labor have left with the employer one memory, it is that of restriction of output. Whether this was an important union policy or not, it remains the preëminent union characteristic in the mind of the master. Nothing excites his irritation so much as the slowing down of technical improvements or the speed of machinery. Scientific management, the industrial sensation of the hour, outrages all union principles. The invention of the so-called high-speed tool steel, heralded as one of the greatest inventions of the past twenty-five years, would find its value greatly reduced if union rules were in force. If one mill were non-union and were left free to exploit the new technique unhindered, the union mills, slowed down in the evolution, would at once fall badly behind in the competition. A union-free labor force was imperative in the minds of the new industrialism. How could this be ensured?
European immigration answered this question so completely that it is commonly charged that the employers are responsible for the coming of the millions. There is little doubt that the manufacturers, having first been taught the value of a subservient, disorganized, and patient immigrant labor force, made efforts to keep the flood coming; but the migration was at the bottom stimulated by forces over which they had no control.
The immigrants offered the prospect of an organization-free labor force, a force in which technique could receive its fullest expansion, and they were welcomed. Industrial simplification made a place for them, and the news went to Europe that agricultural laborers could find immediate industrial work in America. They came. Against them the trade-unions organized the closed shop. From the beginning, the unions knew it was a death-struggle. They could not unionize the newcomers; they must try to keep them out of the industries. The employers were determined to bring the immigrant in, and in industry after industry an antiunion programme was adopted. It will be profitable to follow this contest through some selected industries.
I
As iron and steel is the basic national industry, the trade-union policy of its control has furnished the rule of conduct for the rest of the American industrial world. Since labor policies of the aggressive type are naturally diplomatically secret and based upon both information and aim private and intimate, it is very difficult to find formal record of such policies. It is fortunate that such a record is in existence regarding the trade-union policy of the United States Steel Corporation.
From the time of the disastrous Homestead strike in 1892, until 1900, the only considerable steel-workers’ union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, remained weak and on the defensive. In 1900, the association, alarmed by the consolidation of many independent companies into the smaller steel trusts, which were later to form the United States Steel Corporation, passed this resolution: —
Should one mill in a combine or trust have a difficulty, all mills in said combine or trust shall cease work until such grievance is settled.
This rule the new Steel Trust met by announcing that each constituent company controlled independently its own labor policy. However, the minutes of the corporation show that a trust labor policy had been discussed at practically all meetings. On June 17, 1900, the following declaration of policy was formulated;—
That we are unalterably opposed to any extension of union labor, and advise subsidiary companies to take a firm position when the question conies up, and say that they are not going to recognize it, that is, any extension of unions in the mills where they do not now exist; that great care should be used to prevent trouble, and that they promptly report and confer with this corporation.
A few weeks later the following appeared in the minutes: —
The president reports that the superintendent of the Wellsville sheet mill down on the Ohio River had discharged 12 men who were endeavoring to institute a union lodge.
Another interesting feature of the corporation’s policy was the plan to agree, if it became imperative to make a mill a union mill, and then quietly close it down. In one executive meeting, the chairman signified his willingness ‘ to sign the scale for the McKeesport mill and keep it shut down.’
At this moment the Steel Corporation wanted peace. Its shares were to be worked off on the New York market, which is supersensitive to labor trouble. At the same time the corporation wished to hold the union back from its threatened expansion, for this would make the eventual struggle more costly and the outcome more questionable. But one of the subsidiary companies overturned the plans for peace.
The American Sheet Steel Company had signed an agreement with the Amalgamated Association covering two thirds of its mills, but had largely nullified this unionization by a policy of shutting up the union mills. The Journal of the Amalgamated Association shows the following condition, in 1901.
| Number of Plants | Stand of Rolls | |
| Union mills at work | 11 | 67 |
| Union mills idle | 9 | 33 |
| Non-union mills at work | 7 | 68 |
| Non-union mills idle | None |
Thus, by enlarging and improving the non-union mills, the company had insensibly jockeyed the union out of its position.
The union met this situation by demanding that the Sheet Steel Company sign an agreement covering all its mills. This the company refused to do, and on July 1, 1901, a strike was called by the union against both the American Sheet Steel and the American Steel Hoop Company.
The United States Steel Corporation desired peace even at this time, and an offer of a conference, ostensibly put forward by the subsidiary companies, was made. This conference was held, and the union was offered a settlement which included not only the retaining by the union of all steel mills previously controlled, but the unionizing of six additional mills. This offer was refused by the men, and the steelworkers were called out of all the mills of the trust on August 10, and a general strike instituted.
The workers in the Middle West refused to go out, and popular support of the strike did not materialize. It dragged along until mid-September, when the union was forced to surrender and sign a disastrous compromise. Fourteen mills were lost, and the twenty allowed to unionize were chiefly small ones and were doomed to an early dismantling. Three were at that time condemned, and twelve were soon after abandoned. All the strong mills, which normally could handle the entire output, were left non-union. The union had spent over $200,000 on the strike, the members were bitter, and the lodges now scattered.
From 1902 to 1907, the union played an ineffective part, and lost, one mill after the other. On June 30, 1909, the agreements of the union with the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company, covering fourteen mills, were to expire, and on June 1 the company posted the following notice: —
After a careful consideration of the interests of both the company and its employees, the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company has decided that all its plants, after June 30. 1909, will be operated as ‘open’ plants.
The Amalgamated Association officials tried to obtain a conference with the trust officers, but the latter declined to open the matter. To call a strike was the only move left to the union, and on July 1 the union men in all the fourteen mills, with a single exception, were called out.
The Trust both secured strikebreakers and switched orders to the non-union mills, which were not affected by the strike. When the union attempted to hold town meetings and organize, it was prevented by the Trust’s non-union mill officials in these localities, and the organizers were forced to leave town. On May 1, 1910, the Trust, raised the wage-scale to a point above that obtained by the union. On August 27, after an ineffectual fourteen-months’ struggle, the strike was declared off.
This practically ended the activity of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers until the war-period. The decline of its mem bership is illuminating.
| 1891 | 24,068 |
| 1892 | 20,975 |
| 1893 | 13,613 |
| 1900 | 14,635 |
| 1905 | 10,904 |
| 1906 | 11,410 |
| 1907 | 10,216 |
| 1908 | 7,492 |
| 1909 | 6,295 |
| 1910 | 8,257 |
| 1911 | 4,355 |
| [1912 | 4,318 |
| 1917 | 12,568 |
| 1919 | 32,500] |
The union was eliminated completely from the plants of the United Slates Steel Corporation, and of the 275,000 employees in the steel industry in 1912, the two steel-workers’ unions, the Amalgamated Association and the rival Sons of Vulcan, had a combined total of 5730 members. This small strength was found in the puddling mills and in the small steel mills of the West.
The large so-called ‘independent’ steel companies have carried on the same policy hostile to unionism. One big company forced the workmen to sign the following: —
This is to certify, that I am not now connected with any labor organization; and I further agree that, while in the employ of the - Steel Company, I will not in any way, directly or indirectly, join or have anything to do with any labor organization of any kind whatever.
The unions are gone from the steel industry.2 Their restriction of output, of hours of labor, and of speed of machines, was a constant irritation to the new captains of industry, hot with ideas of developing a scientific technique, displacing men with machinery, and increasing output. There is now a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week. The works are union-free, and one of the best critics of labor conditions in steel has said that a secret service in the United States Steel Corporation ferrets out the organizing or criticizing spirits among the men, and they go. The men are convinced of this espionage and suspect even their partners working beside them. The Jones and Laughlin Company are always warned ahead when disloyalty and sedition threaten, and the men implicated are dismissed. Not only does the steel industry need a pliable labor force, but it intends to keep it from being educated and spoiled by any form of labor organization.
II
The story of the strike in 1904 in the slaughter-house district in Chicago becomes an analysis of the labor policy of the big packing-houses and a description of the driving factors in its creation.
The number of women in the meat industry was 2.9 per cent of the whole in 1890, 4.3 per cent in 1900, and in the Chicago industry in 1904, 9 per cent. When the native-born women, suffering from alternative speeding up and piece-work price reductions, struck in 1900, they were not only beaten, but ‘black-listed,’ and their fragile union disappeared. Their places were taken by immigrant, women. Later, these women organized; and although the Trust at once discharged the fourteen charter members, the union grew to a membership of 1200. But the union failed in its effort to draw in the newly arrived foreign women, and to-day the Bohemians and Poles and Lithuanians are very rapidly increasing in the industry, even flowing over into other lines, where they displace men in the heavy and disagreeable work, such as stuffing cans and trimming meat.
In the meat industry as a whole, in 1914, about a fourth — according to union statistics — of the workers received less than twenty cents an hour. It was for this fourth that the amalgamated union struck. The motive which prompted the strike was, in fact, entirely one of self-preservation. The union saw that, through the minute division of labor, promotion from the ranks of this 25 per cent unskilled labor to the upper semi-skilled ranks could be made with hardly any previously acquired training. They saw that they must unionize and raise the rate of pay of the 25 per cent, if they were to protect their unionized skilled trades which stood above. The six big packers argued that the rate of pay of these low-paid unskilled laborers was regulated by ‘supply and demand.’ ‘The 5000 immigrants who hung each morning about the company gates put the price at sixteen cents an hour, not we.’ That the Trust was able to pay never came into the contention. ‘Independent.’ companies, which did not enjoy the manifold advantages of the Trust, were able to pay these wages and make money. The union, therefore, in reality, either had to organize the casuals at the gates, or give up.
The census of 1900 showed that the industry in America hired, at one time in the year, 81,416 workmen, and a few months later in the same year 57,119. In other words, nearly a third of the employees were discharged in one year. This gives a wide-open door for the new non-union men to be hired, and for the union men to fail to be taken on again. Since all the 25 per cent unskilled low-paid laborers are non-union, these could easily be advanced to take the place of union men in semi-skilled places. The strike in 1904 was broken by the bringing in by the Trust of skilled men to Chicago from their branch houses, — a potent example of one weapon always in the hands of a trust, — and negroes and Greeks for the unskilled work. It was a strike of the Americanized Irish, Germans, and Bohemians in behalf of the unskilled, ununionized Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, and negroes. The strike was broken by the introduction of the very class for whose benefit the strike had been organized. Since it has been the self-evident policy of the Beef Trust to use immigrants to keep their factories union-free, and the workmen an unorganized mass, it becomes enlightening to follow the substitution of races in the industry.
This substitution of races in the stockyards has gone on without halt or interruption for more than twenty years. In the strike of 1886 t he workmen were American, Irish, and German. Bohemians were introduced after 1886, and when they had driven the Americans entirely out of the stockyards as unskilled wage-earners, they mounted into the skilled work. In the two ‘killing gangs’ in 1904, twelve of the twenty-four men getting $4.50 a day were Bohemians. The Bohemian has largely driven out the Irish and Germans, and now the Bohemian is being threatened, in his turn, — in the skilled end of the industry, — by the Poles, who in turn, in the last few years, are being driven out of the lowerpaid and disagreeable work by Slovaks and Lithuanians. The latter and the negroes seem content to remain down at this low level. They do not; press up, like the Pole or the Bohemian. The Italians and the Greeks shun the stockyards.
The Immigration Commission’s report of 1911 gives the percentage of employees in the meat industry who are foreign-born as 60.7. One of the largest packing houses in Chicago estimates that, whereas the English-speaking races formerly made up slightly over three fifths of the workers in the plant, to-day they are about one third. The Germans have decreased by over one third, the Bohemians by almost one half. On the other hand, the Poles and Slovaks have increased in numbers by almost 50 per cent, and the Lithuanians, Russians, and Hungarians by 388 per cent.
The strike of 1904 was beaten, first, because the employers — that is, the Trust—had unlimited millions to put out in defense of their labor policy, and had their branch-house organization to call on; second, because the technique of the industry allowed the use of the hordes of unskilled, non-Engish-speaking labor offering themselves at the gates.
The industrial statistics for the industry show the increasing part played by the plant and its machinery, as compared with human labor. Between 1899 and 1900, a period of tremendous growth in slaughtering, the number of workers increased but 25.8 per cent, horse-power used increased 129.3 per cent, materials 75 per cent, and capital invested 97 per cent.
The next point of importance is — what labor policy did the Beef Trust follow after the strike, and what happened to the union?
The old rule of seniority in promotion, formerly established and maintained by the union in the industry, now disappeared. Promotion became unorganized: the men competed among themselves for the favor of the foreman or superintendent. The old trade-harmony among the workers, so essential to unionism, has been lost. There is no safety in a job, since one can now be displaced by a favorite who has received a forced week’s schooling as a ‘go-between’ workman. The employers before the 1904 strike had made trade-agreements with the unskilled workmen’s unions. Since that date the Trust has refused to recognize them and their collapse has been complete. In 1907 the membership of the Butchers’ Union was only half what it was in 1904. This union consists of skilled workers only, except in cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Evansville, where half the union members are unskilled. But it is illuminating to note that the unskilled workers in the union in these cities are employed only by the ‘ independents,’ and in no case by the Trust.3
Before the strike of 1904 there existed in Kansas City, South Omaha, St . Joseph, East St. Louis, and San Francisco ‘packing-trade councils.’ These were councils, or central organizations, built up from all the unions in the meat and slaughtering trades except the meat teamsters. These councils were purely war bodies, and strove to unite all the unions in order to make the grievance of one the concern of all. After the disastrous defeat in the 1904 strike, all thase militant bodies disappeared, and the councils continued to exist, only in Chicago and New York. The essential fact in the situation is that the present packing-trade councils are formed in only two cities, New York and Chicago, where there are ‘ independent ’ packinghouses which are neither controlled nor owned by the six Trust packers, that is, the Beef Trust. And moreover, a still more important indication is that in all those cities where the packing-trade councils of the slaughtering industry have gone out of existence, except on the Pacific coast, the stockyards and packing-houses are all owned and controlled by members of the Beef Trust. This becomes a strikingly clear indication of the incompatibility of the industrial trust and the unions.4
But; this ‘incompatibility goes even beyond the refusal of the Trust to allow unionism in their chosen part of the industrial field. The Trust refuses to tolerate the ascendancy of the union even in that part of the industry where it does no business, or at least only an unimportant fraction of it. For example, in 1906 the unions forced the meatpackers in Evansville and most of those in Louisville to acknowledge the ‘closed shop,’ and to abide by the union rules. The union prepared a union stamp, a 1 meat label,’ to be stamped on all carcasses slaughtered in these shops. Some employers, friendly to the union, and even bound by the closed-shop movement, were nevertheless absolutely unwilling to use this stamp, because they had received intimation that, if they attempted to put union-stamped meat in the wholesale market, the Beef Trust would invade their market, undersell them, and break them. This same threat prevented the unions from enforcing the use of the meat label, in 1903, in Buffalo, in Kansas City, and in Wichita, Kansas.
III
One more Chicago strike should be cited, to indicate a related but important new phase in this conflict between federated employers and the union. While the general statement can be made that no effective national union exists in the great, field of the trustified industries, to the unions has usually been ascribed an indefinite period of effectiveness in the industries where skilled handicraft is demanded, where men cannot be replaced by unskilled strike-breakers. Two fields usually entirely granted to these skilled unions are the responsible work connected with railroading and with telegraphy. With this in mind let us study the great strike of the Commercial Telegraphers’ Union of America in 1907.
The strike began on August 8, 1907, and spread at once to every office in the United States, except the railroad telegraphers. The union leaders claimed, with apparent truth, that ninety per cent of all operatives, union and non-union, left their keys. This condition should have tied up national business hopelessly and forced the public to intervene within ten days. The union had no war fund, and donations which came in from friendly unions were barely sufficient to maintain them two weeks. On the other hand, the companies were backed by the most powerful capitalistic interests in the country. The directors of the Western Union Telegraph Company included J. P. Morgan, J. J. Astor, George Gould, E. H. Harriman, and James Sullivan. Clarence H. Mackay was the power behind the Postal Telegraph Company. Barring public intervention, these two companies, though losing money, could fight the unions indefinitely. The unions returned to work after a twelve weeks’ battle, starved and broken. The companies seemed, to all outward appearances, absolutely untouched. President dowry of the Western Union said that under no conditions would he again enter into negotiations with the union.
But another element had entered, in character vastly more important as a danger to the union than the proved inequality in war-fund strength. That was the appearance, induced by the strike, of the technical element of the automatic machine. When the skilled telegraphers left the keys in the Chicago office of the Postal Company, a Rowland and a Barclay telegraphic machine were introduced, which took care of the New York and St. Louis wires. Messages were sent on these machines by young women who knew practically nothing of telegraphy, and at the receiving end the message came out automatically recorded and printed. Superintendent. Copen of the Chicago office stated that the Postal Company had a staff of experts working on the Rowland machine, to adapt it to economical work in small offices. The Western Union, its competitor, is working, regardless of expense, to perfect the Barclay machine.5 The intent of allied capital to build up an aggressive labor policy, combined with its willingness and power to develop technique for the displacing of the skilled and organizable workmen, seems not only to doom the union in the field of telegraphy, but also to forecast a troubled future for organized labor in other apparently secure fields.
The American Bridge Company controls a large part of the country’s heavy bridge-construction, and is a large constructor of steel buildings. In its early life the company purchased its structural steel mainly from the Carnegie Steel Company; but since that company’s absorption by the United States Steel Corporation, this work is controlled by the central organization.
The American Bridge Company is the chief constituent of the National Erectors’ Association, and this associalion was organized to deal with labor in steel construction work anywhere in the United States or Canada. The important members were the American Bridge Company, Pennsylvania Steel Company, McClintic-Marshall Construction Company, Pittsburg Steel Construction Company, and the Phoenix Bridge Company. But the dominating factor remained the American Bridge Company.
In 1905 the American Bridge Company had a closed-shop agreement with the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. It was complete even to an arbitration clause. In this year the American Bridge Company was furnishing structural steel to the National Tube Company for a plant at McKeesport. In the employ of the Tube Company at this plant were non-union men, and the union demanded of the American Bridge Company that it force the Tube Company to discharge these men or else stop delivering steel to them. This the company refused to do. A few months prior to this contention, the structural workers had been irritated by the subletting by the American Bridge Company of three New England contracts to the Boston Bridge Company, a nonunion, or open-shop, company. The union now demanded that the American Bridge Company force the Boston Bridge Company to use union men. On its refusal, a general strike was called against the American Bridge Company in the United States and Canada. It was claimed by the Erectors’ Association that F. M. Ryan, president of the Structural Iron Workers’ Union, demanded that no subsidiary company of the United States Steel Corporation should furnish steel to any contractor who used non-union men.
The American Bridge Company answered this early in 1906 by announcing a strong open-shop policy; and in May the National Erectors took a similar stand. The Erectors1 Association announced officially that they had adopted the open shop ‘as the fixed and permanent policy of the Association,’ and ‘had many times lent material aid in the open-shop movement of other building trades.’ At a meeting in 1906, President Briggs of the Association stated that the moulders’ union had lost sixty per cent of its membership through the aggressive action of the employers. Secretary Hutchinson in 1911 reported formally that, while the Founders’ Association had spent $327,937 since 1901, fighting strikes, the same strikes had cost the moulders’ union $1,841,000.
Following the aggressive anti-union announcement of this powerful employers’ association began one of the most astounding labor battles in American industrial history. The union resorted to direct action and dynamiting. Eighty-seven explosions in construction jobs were under Federal investigation in 1911. In two months alone, seventy-five serious assaults were made on non-union men in New York City. The National Erectors’ Association published a list of 113 dynamitings which they charged to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers.
On December 1, 1911, J. B. and J. J. McNamara pleaded guilty to a charge of blowing up the Times building and the Llewellyn Iron Works, in Los Angeles. This confession implicated them in the whole orgy of destruction. On December 28, 1912, the United States District Court of Indiana brought in a verdict of guilty against thirty-eight officials and employees of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Workers, charged in fact with conspiring to further the dynamiting and destruction of structural work.
No economic or social causes of the unparalleled war were allowed to be put in evidence in either trial. The avowed anti-union policy of the affiliated employers was not material in the legal controversy. An experienced critic of the Indiana trial voiced one widely held, if unexpressed, opinion: —
There are some bad men here, I think — some of the worst criminals in the United States. But only a few are like that. Most of them are the product of their environment. The danger of their work calls for red-blooded men —men of recklessness and courage. In their fight for union recognition they found themselves up against a bitter struggle with the Steel Corporation, and they actually believed, many of them, that the only way to avoid the loss of an eighthour day and complete subjugation was through the use of dynamite.
The Bridge and Structural Workers Union was the only union left up to 1911 in the steel industry, and to-day it is broken.6
The basic American industries are to-day, in fact, union-free. The immigrant each year dominates the labor force more and more. Each season the industrial technique makes the factories of a few years before obsolete. The crux of the labor policy of the trust is to place the workman on as absolute a par with a machine as possible, and to organize the human element out of important consideration. The mechanization of industrial production has been realized in America beyond any precedent in economic history.
American unionism may survive for a long period in certain industries which require a technical training and into which, therefore, it is difficult to bring the unskilled immigrant as a strike-breaker. Railroading, printing, structural steel work, plumbing, all maintain with varying success a ‘ closed shop’ in certain localities; but each year finds the organizations more and more threatened and apprehensive. Employers’ associations, citizens’ alliances, merchants’ and manufacturers’ associations, are called into life by some irresistible stimulus, and unionism is always facing a prospect of war.
This is not due to the accidental existence of a selfish and cold-blooded generation of employers. Many capitalists are bewildered to find themselves arrayed actively against the organization of their men. They are in many cases able to explain their position only by claiming that unionism in their eyes is simply an organized conspiracy to restrict output and speed. This they see is incompatible with the industrial technique now dominating their whole conception of their industry. Immigrant labor as an isolated influence, combined with the technique, and both lost in the abyss separating the man from his employer, produces an industrial status in which unionism fails of all its old strategic strength. America to-day is well on the way to the realization of industrial life infinitely ruled, mechanicized, and desocialized. Let trade-unionism vanish, and the labor world will be made up of unsteady folk-groups, separated by race and religion, and lacking the bond of a common, hard-earned technique.
If this life continues, in time a classconsciousness will run through these submerged strata. The unifying force will be a commonly felt bitterness, and, as leaders are found, violent strikes will convulse industry. If the workers have come to a condition where their sense of inequality and injury has eaten in deeply, the violence can continue, feed on itself, and create, by its own manifestations, new aspirations, and thus render most of the old world useless. The danger is great, because the forces hurrying up this evolution are deep, economic, and built fundamentally into our present-day industrial life.
- This paper was written in August, 1914. The war, with its consequent restriction — almost stoppage — of immigration, its consequent tremendous impetus to trade-unionism, brought about an industrial situation which could not wholly be foreseen. But as a background of the present labor situation its value is unimpaired. — C. S. P.↩
- True until 1917. — C. S. P.↩
- To bring the situation between tbe unions and the packing industry up to date, the following quotation is given from the President’s Mediation Commission of 1918: ‘As is generally true of a large industrial conflict, the roots of the labor difficulty in the packing industry lie deep. The chief source of trouble comes from lack of solidarity and want of power on the part of the workers to secure redress of grievances because of the ‘systematic opposition on the part of the packers against the organization of its workers. The strike of 1904 destroyed the union, and for thirteen years the organization of the yards has been successfully resisted. In 1917 effective organization again made itself felt, so that by the end of the year a sizable minority, variously estimated at from 25 to 50 per cent, was unionized.’ — C. S. P.↩
- Soon after this paper was written, the Chicago Packing-Trade Council was forced out, leaving only the New York Council, which, it is suspected, seceded from the International and made an agreement of itsown with the packers. At present, however, there are councils in seven cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, East St. Louis, Kansas City, St. Joseph, and Omaha. — C. S. P.↩
- The Barclay machine has been discarded by the Western Union, and in its place the far more efficient Morkrum machine is being perfected. — C. S. P.↩
- This evidently refers to the union organization within the Steel Corporation. Its membership in 1911 was 10,928, in 1919, 31,560 (union figures). — C. S. P.↩