Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 30, 27 July 1940, p. 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Among those to answer roll call as a delegate to the Democratic Convention was Phillip Murray, CIO vice-president and Chairman of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. His presence at the Chicago gathering is of more than passing interest to the CIO workers. Why was ne there? What benefits did he hope to bring to the workers by his participation? Did he hope to find a broader solution to the problems of the steel workers whose plight he so eloquently described in his recent testimony before the Monopoly Committee of Congress?
To answer these questions one must first summarize his telling indictment of the steel trust.
Last November and December industrial production in the nation as a whole surpassed the all-time peak in 1929, but with fewer workers. In the Pittsburgh industrial area production rose 6% from August 1929 to November 1939. But during this period man hours of work declined 19%. 24% of the working population of Pennsylvania was unemployed last December, the point when industrial production was higher than in 1929.
The cry of industry and of government for almost eight years has been:
“Give us greater productivity. Increase our efficiency. Lower the production costs of our commodities, and thereby breath greater buying power and this will afford the cure for all the unemployment evils confronting the nation.”
Productivity has been increased; and labor’s reward is a lower annual income, a shorter work year and more men thrown out in the Streets. Corporation profits, on the other hand, Surpassed the 1929 profits in the last quarter of 1939.
Factual investigations reveal that the trend in American industry today is toward greater monopolistic control. Technology is building a new monopoly in the steel industry. Eighteen Steel companies went out of business in the 1930’s through mergers and consolidations. Eight others merged but kept separate identities. Only two new companies were formed as the result of mergers. Fourteen plants or departments are now on the steel industry’s death list. 22,950 workers employed in them will lose their jobs. Control of steel production is being concentrated into the hands of fewer and larger companies. Eighteen Small independent companies operating hand mills will soon go. They employ 23,350 men.
Modern automatic hot strip mills can handle most of the demand for flat rolled products. 126 men in the automatic mills produce the same tonnage as 4,512 men in the hand mills, a 97% reduction in man hours. The strip mills are displacing 84,770 men. 38,470 of them have already been disconnected from the industry. They are thrown out, not one by one, but a thousand to fifteen hundred at a time. In one case 3,000 workers were told to go home and not come back.
The continuous butt-weld type mill displaces 100 workers. Where 136 men are required for ah operation in the hand mills only 36 are required in the continuous mills, a reduction of 75%.
Since 1923 the number of man hours per ton of steel output has declined 36%. A little more than 6 workers can turn out as much steel now as 10 could in 1923. Almost half of the decline has occurred since 1936 when labor displacement by strip mills began. From August 1936 to September 1939 technology reduced the number of man hours per ton of ingots produced from 18.7 to 14.7 man hours per ton. This is a reduction of more than 21%.
Strip mills have reduced entire communities to ruin. Events during the last three years in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, a steel town of 50,000 people, are typical. 4,500 hand mill workers have been permanently displaced in this town. A few years earlier 1,200 Bessemer workers were displaced. There have been a total of 5,700 victims of technology in Newcastle during the 1930’s. 64% of the town’s population is either on relief or trying to get it. As the plight of Newcastle grew worse, WPA wages were reduced $5.00 a month and the number of WPA jobs cut more than 50%.
Between August 1936 and September 1939 hourly wage rates in steel rose more than 27%, or from 66.8 to 85.1 cents per hour. The amount of wages per ton of ingots produced in August 1936 and September 1939 was the same, $12.50 a ton. Despite a 27% increase in average hourly wages the total wages per ton of ingot produced did not increase. This is the result of a reduction of 21% in man hours per ton of ingots produced.
The claim that increased wage rates are responsible for technological improvement is not valid. All automatic strip mills were completed, under construction or authorized to be constructed before the steel wage raise in 1936 and 1937.
An insignificant number of steel workers are employed a full five-day week for 50 weeks a year. The average employed worker is idle ⅕ to ⅖ of the year. The bosses avoid hiring former hand mill workers in the strip mills. Those employed are given work as laborers or semi-skilled workers. They receive only one-half to one-third of their former daily earnings. The new steel technology is not creating new jobs elsewhere to compensate for jobs directly eliminated in the steel industry.
Technological improvements have been very profitable to the bosses and very costly to the workers. The same labor cost of production has been maintained despite an increase of more than one-fourth in hourly wage rates. Fourteen million dollars have been eliminated from the total monthly pay envelopes of the steel workers. Production efficiency has been raised by one-fifth. 30,000 workers have been displaced. Finished steel prices have increased 9%.
In other words, the industry produces the same amount of steel with 30,000 fewer workers. The employed workers are receiving more than 26% higher wages per hour but they are idle one-fifth to two-fifths of the year. 30,000 then have been displaced entirely and are getting no wages at all.
The SWOC Chairman supported this vivid description of conditions in the steel industry with verifiable statistics and instructive illustrations. He next turned to the role of the SWOC. If the steel workers had not organized, the situation would have been more serious. The SWOC has prevented, by increasing the hourly wage rate, a reduction of total monthly pay rolls by more than one-fourth. It has also, by reducing hours, prevented thus far the permanent elimination of 58,000 steel Workers from their jobs. If it were not for the SWOC there would today be 88,000 instead of 30,000 steel workers thrown out in the street.
Murray recognizes that important as the Union has been it has fallen short of a complete solution of the steel workers’ problems. He goes on to say
“Having won an increase of fourteen and one-half million dollars in total monthly payrolls, however, the SWOC has been helpless to prevent the steel industry from taking it away through technological improvements.”
Pointing out that collective bargaining in the steel industry is on a company-wide basis, while the problems of technological improvement are industry wide and national in character, the CIO spokeman concludes: “Consequently, in the absence of universal collective bargaining. Congressional regulation of the introduction of large technological changes is necessary.”
Murray recognizes that the steel workers must supplement trade union action with political action if they are to find a solution to their problems. But why does he turn to the Democratic Party? They will give lip service but they will not act. The Democratic Party, just as the Republican Party, is a political organization of the steel bosses, not of the steel workers.
One of Murray’s fellow delegates at the convention was Mayor Kelly of Chicago whose police carried out the Memorial Day massacre of the strikers in Little Steel. In the Ohio delegation sat the men who called out the National Guard to help the steel bosses in the same strike. Roosevelt, to whose renomination Murray was pledged, has been in the White House during these very years in which the steel bosses were grinding the workers down under the heel of technological change.
The SWOC Chairman told the Monopoly Committee that there should be a national unemployment conference of leaders of government, industry, labor and farm groups. The Democrats put it in their platform. Platform promises, however, are taken lightly by the Democrats and the Republicans. The conference may never be held. If it is held it will wind up in a discussion of how to keep down labor trouble “in the interests of national defense,” and not in any clear-cut program to aid the unemployed and underpaid workers.
The corporations are interested in only one thing: profit. As in the past so it will be in the future; the Democratic and Republican politicians will do the bidding of the corporations. Murray and all other labor leaders who support them are very popular with the Democrats and Republicans just before elections. When the election is over the bosses get the benefit of political representation and the workers get a few crumbs at best, sometimes tear gas and bullets.
“I say to the leaders of industry’, Murray told the Monopoly Committee, “keep your economic theories in text books. So far as the workers of this great nation are concerned, they want to know only one thing. When do they get jobs? When are they going to be protected from losing their jobs everytime a new contraption or a new invention is discovered. When are their children, the youth of this nation, who are roaming the streets today, going to get jobs? This is the question. This is the big problem of today.”
He is one thousand percent correct. but the workers won’t get action on this vital problem from the Democrats or the Republicans. Nor will they get results through a third party of employer-loyal Senator Wheeler as John L. Lewis would have had the CIO membership believe.
The acute problems of the steel workers which Phillip Murray has so. eloquently described can no longer be solved by trade union action alone. Unions the workers must have. They are an indispensable instrument. working class political action is today equally indispensable.
The workers can depend upon no one except those of their own class. The next step toward the solution of their problems must be the election of candidates to political office – local, state and national – from the workers’ own ranks by the workers’ own political party. An independent labor party based on the trade unions must be formed.
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