I laughed when I read this paragraph from the History of the Communist Party [View all]

[jtuck004]

Foster's comments below showed what he thought of "business unionists". I would have agreed with him, I think.

To this end, the conservative union leaders were ready to go far in the direction of company unionism, and they did. William Green, who succeeded Gompers as the head of the A.F. of L. in 1924, made this willingness very clear in a number of the most servile speeches ever delivered by a labor leader in the United States. He placed the unions of the workers at the disposal of the bosses in the latter's speed-up plans. The Executive Council's report to the A.F. of L. convention of 1927 showed how far the labor bureaucrats were going toward company-unionizing the trade unions. It declared that "there is nothing that the company union can do within the single company that the trade union cannot develop the machinery for doing and accomplish more effectively. Union-management co-operation ... is much more fundamental and effective than employee representation plans for co-operation with management."

From: History of the Communist Party of the United States by William Z. Foster
Chapter Seventeen: A.F. of L. Class Collaboration During the Coolidge "Prosperity" (1923-1929)
Here.


I have been on a course of reading all these dusty old labor books, stacks of them in the college library, about organizing and dying from 1870 to 1932 or so. Thinking about efforts today and what is happening, comparing. It's personally interesting because none of this was in that 60's white bread public school curriculum, so I kinda eat this stuff up.

The industrial unionists seemed to have the most sustainable plan for worker ownership, but their enemies mostly got rid of them, so here we are. The more I read of this the more I think our train went off the track by the 20's. Not that others did so much better, obviously, but much of what was done cemented the capitalists into their seats and brought us to today. But some of the ideas of the industrial unionists were and still are very good.

Amazing the spirit they brought to that fight.