the long struggle. In June, 1921, only 4,500 members were reported.

Interest in Education and Cooperation

The Fur Workers have joined with other garment unions in the United Education Committee, which has done good work in developing workers' education, but have taken no important steps along this line by themselves. They are interested in the cooperative movement and have appointed a committee to consider the possibility of establishing a fur dressing and dyeing establishment on a cooperative basis. The chaotic condition of the industry has made such a step impossible up to this time, however. So much capital is necessary for securing skins that the union could not attempt to carry on the whole process of fur manufacture, and it is uncertain whether or not the manufacturers would countenance a contracting establishment sufficiently to allow it to get fur to handle. Local 20 of the Fur Cap and Trimming Workers is planning to join with the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers in starting their new cooperative factory, however, and is to be responsible for the department making fur caps.

Conclusion

In summing up, we may say that four of the unions of the Needle Trades Workers' Alliance are very similar in structure and policies, in their interest in cooperation and education, and in the system of industrial democracy which they have sought to introduce wherever they have gained control, while at least three of them look forward definitely to the overthrow of the present capitalist system and the establishment of the cooperative commonwealth.

CHAPTER VIII

INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM IN THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY

The United Textile Workers

The textile industry furnishes a peculiar opportunity to study the development of industrial unionism. For many years craft organizations have existed in this field, some affiliated with the A. F. of L. and some independent. In 1901 the United Textile Workers was formed by the coming together of some of these bodies, and was granted jurisdiction by the A. F. of L. over all workers in the textile industry with the exception of the mule spinners and the lace operatives. These groups of workers kept their own separate organizations under charters from the A. F. of L. until 1919, when they were ordered to affiliate with the U. T. W. and were suspended for refusing. There are several independent craft organizations in the industry, but the U. T. W. is now the only textile union which is recognized by the A. F. of L. Although theoretically it is an industrial union, as it claims jurisdiction over all workers in the industry, its spirit and, for the most part, its methods are those of the old craft unionism. In the South and in a few places in the North it has organized general textile locals in which workers of all grades are included, but in most northern centers it is little more than a federation of skilled crafts. Although it includes the unskilled to some extent, it has paid more attention to the skilled workers and has organized a much larger proportion of them. There is little democracy in the union and its

spirit is decidedly conservative. The great mass of the workers in the industry have been utterly untouched by it. In spite of the existence of the various textile unions, there were said to be about 900,000 unorganized workers in the industry at the time when the new industrial union known as the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America. was born, early in 1919. Today from 75 to 85 per cent. of the million textile workers of the country are still unorganized, according to estimates of different union officials. It will be interesting to discover if the Amalgamated Textile Workers proves any more successful than the older unions in meeting this challenge.

Reasons for Slow Progress

Organization of the industry has been slow for various reasons. Officials of the Amalgamated Textile Workers attribute it largely to conservatism and lack of real interest in the rank and file on the part of officers of the United Textile Workers, and to the craft spirit which has prevailed in all the textile unions, causing one craft group to "scab" upon another. The character of the labor force, however, has afforded special difficulties. With the introduction of new machinery, processes have become so easy that in most departments only a small degree of skill is required. The trade can be learned in a very short time and as a result workers shift from one kind of work to another continually. A large proportion of the workers are women and children, and their presence helps maintain the low wages which prevail in the industry, while on the other hand the low wages help to force them into the mills to supplement the earnings of the male wage-earners. Immigrants crowd into the industry in large numbers, apparently being encouraged to do so by the manufacturers. Mr. Raymond Swing in an article in the

Nation charges the textile manufacturers with a deliberate policy of gathering up the peasants of Europe to operate the looms of New England and of so distributing them that no more than 15 per cent of any one race were employed in a single mill. Thus men and women racially hostile to each other were put to work side by side, in order that organization might be made impossible. Whether this specific charge is true or not, the presence of many different foreign-born groups, which have in the past contained many transients, has made the task of organization far from easy. In the northern mills foreignborn workers are decidedly in the majority. In Lawrence just before the strike of 1919, Italians, Syrians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans were said to make up nearly 90 per cent of the workers. Besides these there was a large group of French Canadians, and numerous Russians, Ukranians, Greeks, Portugese, Franco-Belgians, and other nationalities. Any union which hopes to control the textile industry must solve the problem of uniting these various elements.

The size of the industry with its hundreds of different processes helps make the work of organization difficult. Certain obstacles which exist in the clothing industry, to be sure, are less apparent here. Home work is rare and sweat-shop competition does not cause the chaotic conditions which have been characteristic of the clothing trade until very recently. Large scale production in factories representing heavy investment in the plant, machinery, and power, is the rule in the cotton and wool branches of the trade. New establishments, therefore, cannot spring up easily and disappear suddenly in those branches, and thus the problem of retaining territory once won should be less difficult than it is in some trades. On the other 1 Nation, April 26, 1919, p. 650.

hand, the task of organizing the workers in the large factories is often harder than in smaller shops where employees are more closely united. In the silk industry where the shops are small and relatively unstable, the A. T. W. has had greater success in organizing the workers than it has in the huge cotton mills, for the disadvantages of instability are offset by the greater ease with which the workers in the small shops can be educated in the principles of industrial unionism.

The Lawrence Strike of 1919

The strike of the Lawrence workers early in 1919 was perhaps the most important event leading to the formation of the Amalgamated Textile Workers in April of that year. Before the strike there were only 200 members of the United Textile Workers, and 600 others organized in an independent union, out of a mill force of from 30,000 to 35,000. The immediate cause of the break was the refusal of the employers to grant the forty-eight hour week, which the U. T. W. demanded, without a decrease in wages. The U. T. W. officials favored acceptance of this decrease, probably because they felt a strike at that time to be inexpedient because of the dullness of the season, but the great mass of the workers had no patience with this policy, and, refusing to allow any shrinkage in wages which were already far from adequate, went out on strike for "48 hours' work with 54 hours' pay." The union officials, backed by the central labor body of the city and the A. F. of L., refused to support the strike in any way and denounced it as a revolutionary movement, thereby causing great bitterness in the minds of unorganized strikers. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers, however, came to their assistance with generous support, and three former clergymen who had decided