While these international adjustments were taking place, the American Federation began to anticipate the problems of the inevitable national labor readjustment after the war.Through a committee appointed for that purpose, it prepared an ample programme of reconstruction in which the basic features are the greater participation of labor in shaping its environment, both in the factory and in the community, the development of cooperative enterprise, public ownership or regulation of public utilities, strict supervision of corporations, restriction of immigration, and the development of public education.The programme ends by declaring that "the trade union movement is unalterably and emphatically opposed...to a large standing army."During the entire period of the war, both at home and abroad, Gompers fought the pacifist and the socialist elements in the labor movement.At the same time he was ever vigilant in pushing forward the claims of trade unionism and was always beforehand in constructive suggestions.His life has spanned the period of great industrial expansion in America.He has had the satisfaction of seeing his Federation grow under his leadership at first into a national and then into an international force.
Gompers is an orthodox trade unionist of the British School.
Bolshevism is to him a synonym for social ruin.He believes that capital and labor should cooperate but that capital should cease to be the predominant factor in the equation.In order to secure this balance he believes labor must unite and fight, and to this end he has devoted himself to the federation of American trade unions and to their battle.He has steadfastly refused political preferment and has declined many alluring offers to enter private business.In action he is an opportunist--a shrewd, calculating captain, whose knowledge of human frailties stands him in good stead, and whose personal acquaintance with hundreds of leaders of labor, of finance, and of politics, all over the country, has given him an unusual opportunity to use his influence for the advancement of the cause of labor in the turbulent field of economic warfare.
The American Federation of Labor has been forced by the increasing complexity of modern industrial life to recede somewhat from its early trade union isolation.This broadening point of view is shown first in the recognition of the man of no trade, the unskilled worker.For years the skilled trades monopolized the Federation and would not condescend to interest themselves in their humble brethren.The whole mechanism of the Federation in the earlier period revolved around the organization of the skilled laborers.In England the great dockers' strike of 1889 and in America the lurid flare of the I.W.W.activities forced the labor aristocrat to abandon his pharisaic attitude and to take an interest in the welfare of the unskilled.The future will test the stability of the Federation, for it is among the unskilled that radical and revolutionary movements find their first recruits.
A further change in the internal policy of the Federation is indicated by the present tendency towards amalgamating the various allied trades into one union.For instance, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and the Amalgamated Wood Workers'
Association, composed largely of furniture makers and machine wood workers, combined a few years ago and then proceeded to absorb the Wooden Box Makers, and the Wood Workers in the shipbuilding industry.The general secretary of the new amalgamation said that the organization looked "forward with pleasurable anticipations to the day when it can truly be said that all men of the wood-working craft on this continent hold allegiance to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America." A similar unification has taken place in the lumbering industry.When the shingle weavers formed an international union some fifteen years ago, they limited the membership "to the men employed in skilled departments of the shingle trade." In 1912the American Federation of Labor sanctioned a plan for including in one organization all the workers in the lumber industry, both skilled and unskilled.This is a far cry from the minute trade autocracy taught by the orthodox unionist thirty years ago.
Today the Federation of Labor is one of the most imposing organizations in the social system of America.It reaches the workers in every trade.Every contributor to the physical necessities of our materialistic civilization has felt the far-reaching influence of confederated power.A sense of its strength pervades the Federation.Like a healthy, self-conscious giant, it stalks apace among our national organizations.Through its cautious yet pronounced policy, through its seeking after definite results and excluding all economic vagaries, it bids fair to overcome the disputes that disturb it from within and the onslaughts of Socialism and of Bolshevism that threaten it from without.
