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Wednesday December 21, 1904
Fall River, Massachusetts - Textile Council Moves to Submit Settlement to Arbitration
A resolution passed by the Textile Council this past Sunday would submit settlement of the strike, now ongoing for 22 weeks, to a board of arbitration chosen by the
. The resolution must be adopted by a two-thirds vote of the affiliated unions before it would take effect. The plan has also been submitted to the Manufacturers' Association, and would, of course, also need to be acceptable to the mill owners.
26,000 textile workers are involved in this strike and are facing much hardship as relief funds are not sufficient to meet the great need. Many textile workers have already left the area to seek work elsewhere rather than submitting to the wage reduction demanded of them by their employers in Fall River.
A Labor Conflict Without Violence.
The Fall River Lockout
By Edward Porritt
Fall River Textile Workers compete with the labor
of poorly paid southern workers, many of them children.
THE American ordinarily gets much more out of the English language than the Englishman. Yet in describing the situation at Fall River, where seventy mills have been stopped for twenty weeks, and twenty-five thousand workpeople are idle or have left the city, the use of an English word seldom seen in print in this country seems necessary. In England, where trade-unionism is much older than in this country, and the phraseology of labor conflicts has become more definite, the word strike is not used to describe every conflict between capital and labor which results in a stoppage of work. In a case where the employers announce a reduction of wages and the workpeople stay away from the mills rather than accept it, the word used is “ lockout."
The workpeople are understood to be locked out until they surrender, or until the employers give way; and in the case of a lockout the attitude of the public towards the conflict is different from what it would be towards a strike due to a demand for an increase of wages, or to some other aggressive movement on the part of the workpeople. In a lockout English sympathy is apt to be with the workpeople, unless the employers can adduce exceptionally good reason for aggression on their part; while in the case of a strike, the employees, being the aggressors, must put forward a strong case before public sympathy and subscriptions to relief funds can be expected.
Since the trouble began at Fall River it has invariably been described in the daily press as a strike. In reality it is a lockout; for what happened was this. In November, I903, when the violent fluctuations in the raw cotton market were keeping manufacturers in the United States and in England on tenterhooks, the manufacturers of Fall River intimated that there must be a reduction of wages to offset the high price of cotton. In Lancashire the disturbed state of the market resulted in many of the mills being put on short time. There was much distress in consequence in mill towns, such as Bury and Darwen; for the short time was of long duration, and many mills were closed altogether for some weeks. Curtailment of production was universally regarded in Lancashire as the best method of meeting the abnormal conditions on the cotton exchanges; but the old rate of wages was continued.
At Fall River the employers met the situation both by short time and a reduction in wages. The five unions in which the Fall River workpeople are organized, and the Textile Council, which is composed of representatives of these unions and acts for the unions in labor matters involving the whole of the industry, realized that the mill treasurers were in an exceedingly tight place. The reduction demanded was ten per cent; and, with scarcely a dissenting vote in any of the unions, and by the unanimous vote of the Textile Council, it was agreed to accept it. There was no stoppage of work in connection with the change in the wages scale; but from November, 1903, until July, 1904, few of the Fall River mills worked continuously full time. Cotton continued at high prices, although not at the abnormal level of the long-drawn-out “bull” movement in the summer and autumn of 1903.
The demand for cotton goods did not increase with the lower price of the staple; and trade in Fall River was poor. Times were unusually trying for the treasurers of most of the cotton-mill companies, and the outlook for dividends on the $25,500,000 invested in Fall River’s three and a half million spindles and eighty-two thousand looms was discouraging. There is no dispute about these general facts. The trade union leaders all admit them; and it was because they realized these adverse conditions that the ten per cent reduction was promptly and unanimously accepted.
In July, 1904, conditions had changed little, if any, for the better, except that the market for raw cotton was more stable. Then the Manufacturers’ Association again took counsel, and decided that there must be another general reduction, and notices were accordingly posted at the mill gates announcing that from July 25 the scale of wages would be twelve and a half per cent below the scale which had come into operation in November, 1903. There was no conference with the union leaders. The notices simply went up, and the workpeople knew that if they did not accept the reduction the mills would be closed. Through their unions and the Textile Council they intimated that they could not accept this second reduction.
The mills were opened on Monday, July 25, as usual; but at seventy-three mills—all those whose treasurers are of the Cotton Manufacturers’ Association—the employees all stayed away, and the doors of the mills were closed until the 14th of November. During these seventeen weeks no overtures were made by the employers. They refused a public conference with the union leaders—a conference to which representatives of the press were to be invited.
In Thanksgiving week I spent three days at Fall River obtaining at first hand the facts concerning the prolonged and distressful struggle. I called on representative men on both sides. I spent an evening with one of the best-known mill treasurers in Fall River, a man who knows the situation there and the situation in the South perhaps better than any other mill treasurer; and I also called on three of the union leaders who are also of the Textile Council. But before summing up each side of the case I ought to explain that the situation is aggravated by disputes between the Weavers’ Union and the mill treasurers, arising out of the recent introduction of labor-saving appliances.
These disputes affect only the weavers. They do not affect the carders, the ring and mule spinners, and only indirectly, if at all, the loom-fixers, who have one of the strongest trade-unions in the Fall River trade. One of these new contrivances is an electric stop motion, by which a loom is instantly stopped when a thread in the warp is broken. Another is an improved bobbin, which carries nearly double the amount of filling that is carried on the old-fashioned bobbin. The bobbin in the shuttle has consequently not to be renewed so often.
My boyhood was spent in a Lancashire cotton town. I have relatives and friends in the business. and in my periodical visits to Lancashire I am often in the weaving plants there. From my knowledge of the older methods, and from what I saw of the newer methods at Fall River, it is clear to me that these new appliances materially reduce the work of attending to looms, especially when, as at Fall River with the new appliances, boys are introduced to watch the dropwires, oil and clean the looms, and do other chores for the weavers.
Weaving is paid by the piece. The price is based on the number of picks to the inch—that is, on the number of times the shuttle passes to and fro in the making of an inch of cloth. Before the new appliances were installed it was usual at Fall River for a weaver to attend eight looms. Under the new plan weavers were called upon to attend twelve looms, and the piece-work schedule was revised so that some of the gain from the improvements should accrue to the mill treasury; for it costs about twenty-five dollars to install the electric stop, and for the new bobbin longer traverses have to be installed in the ring frames on which the filing is spun.
The weavers’ scale was revised on the basis of two-thirds the price per cut, plus a ten per cent bonus to the weaver. This is the employers’ understanding of the revision. The figures were given me by the mill treasurer from whom I obtained my statements as to the position of the employers as to the twelve and a half per cent reduction. The weavers, however, insist that the division of the gain is not a fair one. They allow that the changes save work, but they insist that the strain of attending twelve looms with the improvements is greater than that of attending eight looms without.
The union leaders declare that they have not opposed the introduction of these improvements. They accept them as inevitable; but there was much friction attending the introduction of the new scale of weaving prices. Had times been better, the Weavers’ Union would have pressed for better terms; and if the workpeople succeed in the present contest, and return to work on the wages scale of November, 1903, the weavers will seek for readjustment of the scale which applies to the workers on the improved looms.
The case of the mill treasurers on the question of the general reduction can be stated in a few words. It is the old story of Southern competition of which Fall River and all Massachusetts have heard so much since the middle nineties. The mill treasurer on whom I called turned at once to the statistics of Southern spindles and looms; to the large increase in their number in the last three or four years. In the South in 1901 there were 5,819,000 spindles.
Today there are 7,973,000. During the past twelve months the increase in spindles in the South has been 924,000; in looms, nearly 30,000; and with the increase in spindleage and in the equipment of weaving plants the South has not been content to make only the coarser grades of goods with which its mills began in the early nineties. It has gone and is increasingly going, the Manufacturers’ Association avers, into the varieties of cloth which are produced at Fall River, and the long and short of the case of the manufacturers, as it was presented to me, is that wages in Fall River must come down to somewhere near the Southern level.
In answer to this argument as to the South, the trade-union leaders complain that the employers have changed their ground. When the reduction was made in November, 1903, the high price of cotton was the plea on which it was based, and it was for that reason that it was accepted. In July the second reduction was insisted upon because cotton was still high and the demand for cloth was small. The trade-union leaders then urged that further curtailment of production was the remedy and not another reduction of wages. As to Southern competition, they do not concede that the South is cutting into the trade of Fall River to the extent claimed by the mill treasurers. They freely concede that the demand for cloth is still poor, and that for some reason or other the cotton trade in New England has not fully shared in the good times which have been general in other industries all over the United States since 1898. There have been good times in these last five years, but they have come to Fall River only in spurts and have not been of long continuance.
The Manufacturers’ Association, on November 21, published in the Boston “Herald” what was practically a manifesto. They had opened the mills on November 14 with little or no success. They were again opened on November 21, and in view of this second attempt to bring the workpeople to their terms the mill treasurers’ case was published in detail in the Boston “Herald.” Much insistence was then made on Southern competition, and figures were given showing the wages in the South and in the Fall River mills.
The trade-union leaders would not accept the Fall River figures as correct—as figures that could be accepted without explanation and as applying to Fall River mills generally. As to the Southern figures, their reply is that a Southern wage in Fall River is not, and could not possibly be, a living wage, and that if Fall River wages are to come down to the Southern level, it will behoove the mill workers in Fall River to lose no time in seeking other work if they are to earn a decent living. In a word, according to the claim of the trade-union leaders, the Fall River work people in maintaining this long struggle are making a fight for a living wage and to uphold the present standard of life in the cotton industry in New England.
Fall River lives almost entirely out of the cotton trade and its allied industries. Hat manufacturing is the only other industry there. Yet, excepting the mill treasurers, and those people in Fall River who are pinched by reason of the failure of mill dividends, local sympathy is, I think, on the side of the workpeople, and rightly so. In a trade in which so many young people are engaged, a statement of the average wages throughout the industry does not tell all. But I very much doubt whether in the case of the adults in the mills the average wages are as good as the wages earned by unskilled laborers in the steel plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio, of which I had made a round only two weeks before I went to Fall River. And yet most of the adult labor in the cotton-mills is skilled, and requires some period of apprenticeship before proficiency is acquired.
My feeling is that if a Southern dollar is all that the Fall River industry can afford to pay its help, the industry had better go where a dollar goes as far as it does in the South in rent and the other requisites of family life. I am not in a position to controvert the statements given to me as to Southern encroachment. But the Southern industry must have made phenomenal strides since I was last in the Southern cotton-mills, if Southern manufacturers are really pushing successfully into the higher grades of goods which are made in many of the Fall River mills.
It would need another article, and a long article too, to describe all the phases of the lockout—how it is affecting life in Fall River; how ten thousand of the workpeople have, since July, left for other mill centers in New England, for the Province of Quebec, for the Azores, and for Lancashire; and to tell of the hundreds of empty tenements and stores, and the general depreciation in this class of real estate; of the somber Thanksgiving which was the lot of the mill work people, and of the still poorer Christmas which awaits them.
The distress among the locked-out workpeople is intense. By Thanksgiving week the city appropriation for relief had already been exceeded by $25,000, and although the Textile Union has been receiving outside help at the rate of a thousand dollars a day, and the week I was there received its first draft on the $75,000 voted by the Federation of Labor, much work in the way of relief of suffering has been thrown on the local religious organizations. The lead in this has been taken by the Salvation Army and the Haffards Street Church. At the Salvation Army Hall in Bedford Street the work consists principally in providing dinners for school-children, sending cut dinner-pails for families that are destitute, and also providing shoes and winter clothing.
All this work and the charge on the city would have been even heavier but for the fact that thousands of families have migrated from Fall River. As early as August there was a large outward movement of French-Canadians to Quebec. Every week since then scores of Portuguese have returned to the Azores, to await better times in Fall River. The cut-rate war in the transatlantic steerage business was timely for the Lancashire people; for until Thanksgiving week the rate from Boston to Liverpool was as low as fifteen dollars. News of the uplift in the Lancashire cotton trade soon reached Fall River, and many of the more recent arrivals made their way back to England.
In the mill districts in the neighbor hood of Providence work became more plentiful as the autumn advanced; and hundreds of spinners and weavers were distributed among the mill towns of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut which are not affected by the lockout, but which will be if the lockout brings the employees to terms. In some of these centers mill superintendents are, to use their own language, “letting go ” Italians and Portuguese, and replacing them with the better-trained Lancashire, Irish, and French-Canadian workpeople from Fall River. Incidentally it may be remarked that this is one of the unfortunate features of the lockout; for by no means all the emigrants will find their way back to Fall River; and if all the mills were reopened to-morrow, and there came a rush of work, many looms and ring spinning frames would lack operatives to run them.
Between five and six hundred of the younger women have been drafted into domestic service in Boston and other New England cities; and, generally, it would be an unfortunate time—this month of December, 1904—to take a census at Fall River. Fall River is admittedly a labor camp; but when work is fairly good there is no poverty, and there are no slums. It is off the line for tramps; and ordinarily the administration of poor-law relief is a simple matter. Just now, however, there is not a more harassed group of public officials anywhere in the United States than those who are administering city and State relief at Fall River. They are charged with using pressure to force the workpeople to accept the employers’ terms. This charge has been made only since November 14, when the first attempt was made to reopen the mills; and there are undoubtedly grave difficulties in giving relief to able-bodied applicants when the employers are making the statement that work is offered to them.
The last strike in Fall River was in 1894. It lasted eleven weeks, and the employees were compelled to accept a reduction. Then the population was under eighty thousand, and the problem which confronted the city relief officers was much less grave than it is today, in a conflict which has already extended over nineteen weeks, and which involves a population of 117,000.
Two other points need emphasizing. The Cotton Manufacturers’ Association declares that it is not part of its scheme to break up the unions; and, judging from what Mr. O’Donnell, of‘ the Mule Spinners’ Union, and Mr. Whitehead, of the Weavers’ Union, told me, the unions fully accept the mill treasurers’ statement on this matter. Except for some window-smashing away back in July, there has been no disorder growing out of the lockout. There was none when the non-unionists went to work in the mills which opened their gates on the 14th and the 21st of November; and so far there have been neither riots, injunctions, nor militia.
I do not think that the city police have even been reinforced; and one of the features of the lockout which is surprising is that, while the streets are more thronged than when all the eighty-odd mills in Fall River are at work, there is no begging, no commotion, nor any suggestion of social disorder. The Fall River lockout differs in several respects from the general run of labor disputes. It differs for the better; and, as a Lancashire man, I am inclined to think that much of the patient good humor which is characterizing the lockout is due to the fact that all the union leaders, though long in this country, learned the principles of unionism and of what makes for union success in Lancashire.
[paragraph breaks and photograph added]
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