The Labor Lieutenants of American Imperialism

V

\

THE LABOR LIEUTENANTS
OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

By

JAY LOVESTONE

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3— PRICIPLES OF COMMUNISM

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5 — POEMS FOR WORKERS

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6— THE DAMNED AGITATOR— And Other Stories
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7— MARX AND ENGELS ON REVOLUTION IN AMERICA
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8— ,1871— THE PARIS COMMUNE
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9 — CLASS COLLABORATION, HOW IT WORKS
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The Labor Lieutenants
of American Imperialism

By Jay Lovestone

Author, The Government—Strikebreaker, American Im-
perialism, What's What About Coolidge, Why
America Wants to Conquer Europe, Etc., Etc.

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'290

The Labor Lieutenants of American
Imperialism.

Politically the American labor movement is today more
backward than that of any other of the big capitalist coun-
tries. Efven the Yellow Amsterdam and Second Interna-
tionals are still too red, too militant for the American Fed-
eration of Labor.

In the main, the officialdom of the American trade union
movement functions brazenly and aggressively as an agency
of American imperialism at its worst. Our labor leaders
are, with, too few exceptions, primarily serving as labor
lieutenants of American imperialism in the ranks of the
organized and unorganized workers. On the whole, these
trade union officials react swiftly and decisively to the
needs and demands of the Yankee imperialists.

On the Job for Wall Street.

Let us cite two of the most recent and glaring instances
illustrating our contentions and characterization. Everyone
knows that the whole policy of the American Federation of
Labor officialdom in inspiring and making possible the or-
ganization of the so-called Pan-American Federation of La-
Ibor was largely a game calculated to help hoodwink and mis-
lead the working masses of the Latin-American countries
so' as to paralyze and stifle their possibilities and capacities
to resist the plans of Wall Street for imperialist domina-
tion and exploitation of these territories. Yet, in the re-
cent attempts of the Calles government of Mexico and the
Mexican Regional Federation of Labor (CROM), an integ-
ral part of the Pan-American Federation of Labor, to beat
back the efforts of the Catholic Church to maintain and ex-
tend its privileges, the American Federation of Labor hedg-
ed and did not support the CEOM. In fact, it did worse.
The last Convention of the American Federation of Labor
appointed a committee of hardboiled union executives to in-
vestigate the whole question of relations between the Catho-
lic Church and the Mexican government (and the CROM).

3

Thia was a slap in the face of the Mexican Federation
<>l L^bor. It is true the decision was, in a measure due to
the pressure of Catholic influence in the American Federa*
don Of Labor. But this is a secondary cause. There is a
more basic reason for this policy. The primary reason
for this hostile action towaxds the Mexican Federation of
Labor, for this staggering blow at the Pan-American Fed-
eration of Labor, is to be found in the fact that the inter-
ests of the American big bourgeoisie and the government
which represents them demanded that under no circum-
stances should such an important section of American pub-
Ik opinion as that represented by the A. F. of L. be definite-
ly mobilized on the side of the Mexican government in its
struggle against Catholic reaction.

Such support of the Mexican government and such solid-
arity with Mexican labor might tend to tie the hands of, to
weaken, the American government in any future strained
relations, in any future conflict with Mexico over the oil
or land questions. It is this attitude of the American gov-
ernment which basically determined the policy of the last
convention of the American Federation of Labor towards
the conflict between the Mexican government and the Mexi-
can Federation of Labor on one side and the Catholic
Church on the other side.

An equally gross instance of the dominant trade union
officialdom being a pliant tool in the hands of the blackest
capitalist interests is to be seen in the official A. F. o/f L.
attitude towards the sending of an American Trade Union
Delegation to the Soviet Union. A number of highly con-
servative prominent heads of some of the biggest unions
in the country organized a delegation to visit the Soviet
Union next summer and to report its findings to the Ameri-
can workers.

The Coolidge Administration and the biggest bourgeois
interests on whose support it rests are hot and heavy
^gainst recognition of the Soviet Union by the United
States. These capitalist reactionaries feel that such a dele-
gation is dangerous to their campaign of slander and villi-
fication of the Soviet Union. Consequently, the blackest

4

and most corrupt forces of the trade union officialdom were
mobilized by them to crush the plan to send this American
delegation, composed of men opposed to Communism, to
the Soviet Union. The State Department of the Coolidge
Administration vetoed the idea of a labor delegation. In
this instance, as in the case of Mexico and countless other
instances of lesser import, the dominant trade union official-
dom continued to be the tail to the kite of American im-
perialism.

Indeed, compared with many of the bureaucrats now in-
festing the American trade union movement, those labor
leaders of whom Engels spoke as labor lieutenants of capi-
tal in the ranks of the English workers, were indomitable
militants! This is going some! Yes. Altogether too often
is it true that our American labor leaders pursue a policy
far more reactionary than that pursued by some groups of
powerful capitalists.

Setting the Pace for Reaction.

It is under such a leadership that our unions are tragic-
ally powerless. It is under such a leadership that at most
three and a half out of more than twenty million industrial
workers are organized. It is this leadership which is sa-
botaging all efforts to organize the unorganized, to build
a Labor Party, and is working overtime to destroy all ad-
vocates of progressive measures, to expel the Communists
and other militant workers from the trade unions. It is this
trade union officialdom, conspicuously exemplified by such
notorious corruptionists as John L. Lewis, President of the
United Mine Workers of America; Matthew Woll, President
of the Photo Engravers' Union and Major Berry, President
of the International Pressmen's Union that is today most
bitterly attacking the Communists and progressives in the
American trade union movement.

What type of men is to be found in the official Ameri-
can trade union movement? How close are they to the
rank and file of their unions? What is the attitude of these
officers to the workers? To the employers? To the gov-
ernment? What are their salaries? What are their in-
terests in life? What are they after?

5

In the answer to these and similar questions we will
lind ail accurate, though uninspiring picture of an impor-
tant phase of the American labor movement. Here we will
lind a cancer on the very body politic of the American work-
ing class.

The Officials and the Workers.

The great majority of the American trade union officials,
from the petty business agent up to the "Grand Interna-
tional President", feels contempt for the workers whom
they consider below them. These labor lieutenants of Wall
Street feel themselves closer to the employers than to
the workers. Especially is this true when they hold high
positions in the trade union movement.

These trade union officers are now American Labor's
window on Wall Street. They model the bourgeois politi-
cians. They ape the gang leader in their treatment of the
workers in their organizations making complaints or seek-
ing redress of grievances. These bureaucrats are develop-
ing a most destructive cynicism in their attitude towards
their members and in their attitude towards their own
work in the labor movement.

They live comfortably, get very high wages and conse-
quently develop a barrier, oftentimes insurmountable be-
tween themselves and the rank and file of the workers. The
average lower trade union officer has an income ranging
from two to three hundred percent greater than the work-
ers of the craft in which the union he leads is found. In
the stronger unions the local business agents, handling
mainly immediate shop grievances and regulating on the
whole the every day relations between employer and work-
er, average a minimum of sixty to seventy dollars weekly.
Here we are speaking of the business agent of the unions of
skilled workers. Yet, the average skilled worker, counting
the loss of wages through irregularity of employment, does
not, through the year, make more than about thirty-five
dollars weekly.

6

Our High-Priced Trade Union Leadership,

The salaries of the presidents — international presidents
as they are called — of the American trade unions, range
from three to twenty-five thousand dollars plus all kinds of
emoluments annually. In the well-organized crafts the sal-
aries of the international presidents of the unions run from
seventy-five hundred to ten thousand dollars and over per
year.

The high priced bureaucrats give two main arguments
for their exorbitant wage demands upon the unions they
run and ruin. These are :

1. The trade union officer sells his labor power just
as well and as much as any worker does. Labor power is a
commodity. The trade union leaders are highly skilled in-
dividuals. They place their commodity for sale in the labor
market. The union must bid against the employers for
the purchase of this commodity, for the hiring of these
"able" men. Naturally, when bid meets bid — when a labor
union must compete against an employer or groups of em-
ployers for the "services" of this highly skilled gentry, the
price of this commodity goes up. Ergo : the salaries of the
trade union officers of the powerful unions go sky-rocket-
ing.

Here is to be found a basic cause for the frequency
with which trade union leaders are often simultaneously
subsidized by the capitalists and paid by the unions for
supposed services rendered. Only a few months ago it was
shown that Frank Farrington, President of District 12,
Illinois, of the United Mine Workers of America, was on
the pay roll of the Peabody Coal Company, one of the big-
gest and most vicious coal operators in the country, at the
salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year while he was
drawing pay from the miners' union.

Labor officials defeated in union elections often get on
the payroll of a corporation in the industry of the union
which repudiated them. But the labor movement is on the
whole so backward, so deficient in class consciousness, that
it seldom attaches odium to such going over to the capitalist

7

Claaa under these circumstances. A trade union official of
thlK type will often openly admit tliat lie is "in it for what
he can get out of it."

2. The second reason for the big salaries exacted by
the labor lieutenants from the trade unions is that the la-
bor union representative must live and feel on a parity with
the inen, with the wealthy employers, "across the table"
in negotiations. These leaders maintain that in order to get
the best contracts for their unions with the bosses they
must live on a swell scale, live in the same hotels with the
employers and dress and act like them in every other way
possible. These union officials consistently exhibit a strong
desire to be on the best of personal terms with the ex-
ploiters. They consider it an achievement and a significant
mark of their skill as labor leaders if they can be on such
intimate terms with the bosses as to call them by their first
names.

Of course, the international presidents usually consider
the "across the table" method as the most effective and
only way of conducting a struggle against the capitalists.
They detest action by the workers themselves, such as ef-
fective mass picketing, demonstrations and huge protests
against government strike breaking and intolerable work-
ing and living conditions. It must be said however, that
the high priced labor leaders of some of the unions some-
times resort to hiring professional gangsters to beat up
scabs. The use of professional gangsters has been resorted
to with too great frequency to exterminate militants in the
trade unions, to conduct a savage warfare of violence
against Communists. This practice is especially character-
istic of certain so-called Socialist trade union officials in
some of the needle trades unions.

Labor Leadership on the Auction Block.

Let me present an illuminating case which will illus-
trate the characteristics and attitude of the aristocrats
among the high-priced leaders of the American trade union
movement. At the last convention of the Brotherhood of

8

Locomotive Engineers, one of the oldest and most power-
ful trade unions in the United States, William B. Prenter,
now Grand International President of this organization, in
discussing the report of the Committee on Salaries, protest-
ed against the recommendation that his salary be limited
to twenty-five thousand dollars a year and said:

"Yon 'have elected me for a term of three years. The
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Co-operative
National Bank in Cleveland has elected me their first
Vice-President and Cashier. I am holding various po-
sitions in your financial interests. I am the Secretary-
Treasurer of your Holding Company, a Brotherhood
Corporation. I am the Secretary-Treasurer of your
Investment Company, a corporation controlled by the
Brotherhoods and owned by the stockholders of the
general public and others. I am the President of your
Nottingham Savings Bank, owned and controlled by the
Holding Company. I am a Director and Vice-President
of your Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Trust
Company of New York. I am the Vice-President of the
Locomotive Engineers National Bank of Boston,
Massachusetts, owned by the Brotherhood. I am a
Director and sit on the Executive Board of the Empire
Trust Company. I am a Trustee for the interests of
the Investment Company, the Holding Company, and
the Brotherhood, in all your other activities, in the
Transportation Brotherhood Bank of Minneapolis,
Minnesota, and the bank in Birmingham, Alabama.

"And I would much pref er that you would designate
what you want to pay me as treasurer for your Broth-
erhood, your Insurance and Pension Department, and
let me make whatever arrangements I want for the
duties that I am required to perform in connection with
your other interests.

"The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Co-op-
erative National Bank has several Vice-Presidents with
salaries ranging from six to ten thousand dollars and
you expect me to go into that bank and resume the re-
sponsibility of its Cashier and on a salary of five thou-
sand dollars a year.

"I will not do it. If I am not worth more than
that to these institutions, they haven't got the right
man and I am not wedded to the job."

Mr. Prenter objected to being paid a flat salary of
twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He wanted to be paid
handsomely for all the above enumerated titles, indivi-
dually and separately. When he was asked how he found
the time to do all this work he answered: "Mostly by
working twenty-four hours a day." Prenter continued :

"You fellows expect me to sit across the table from
fellows making twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
It can't be done unless I get enough money to command
their respect and keep my own self-respect ....
If I'm good enough to represent your interests with
twenty-five thousand dollars a year men, then I am
good enough to make as near that sum as the union
can afford."

A delegate, Ferguson by name, with a sense of humor
and with some sense of duty to his organization then said;

"Brother Prenter no doubt is worth maybe to this
organisation a hundred thousand dollars a year, but
when he gets up there and tells us his duties and re-
sponsibilities and the different offices he holds, it seems
to me that Brother Prenter is overtaxed with respon-
sibilities. He has been elected or has been appointed to
more positions than it is humanly possible for one man
to fill .... When you stop to think about, what
are you paying these brothers (grand officers) today?
If you look at it in that light — I haven't figured it up,
but it is in the neighborhood of thirty dollars a day.
That is a pretty good salary, when you stop to consider
what the men are receiving who are paying for it . . .

But then a delegate, by the name of Burke, rose to the
defense of Prenter by saying:

"You certainly are not going to make your chief ex-
ecutive sit across the table from men in the railroad or-

10

ganizations who are getting a higher salary? You cer-
certainly are not going to take the pep right out of your
Assistant Grand chief by making him sit across the
table from a man who is getting three or four thou-
sand dollars more a year? Certainly you don't mean
that?" ....

Then Mr. Stone, (now deceased) who was formerly
Grand Chief, spoke up and addressed the delegates:

"You want the highest pay in the world for your-
selves and you are the cheapest lot of men in the world
to work for when it comes down to salaries. You put
these men across the table against fifty thousand dol-
lar, seventy-five thousand dollar and a hundred thou-
sand dollar a year men to represent what? To repre-
sent you. You expect them to get results and you ex-
pect them to win out. You put them up against the
keenest, shrewdest and brainiest lot of men in, the
world who draw the best salaries in the world."

This talk got under the skin of a rank and f ile delegate,
Miehlke, who leaped to his feet and declared :

"I would like to see every Grand Officer we have
paid a decent salary, but I can't see anything in the ar-
gument produced by you; Brothers, when you talk about
being paid $15,000 or $25,000 and talking across the
table to men getting $100,000 or f 125,000. I have been
paid $150 (monthly) and in some cases less, the last
twenty-five years, and I have been talking across the
table to superintendents who were getting three times
■as much as I was. If you are going to raise the salaries
of the Grand Officers so they can talk across the table
with some Vice-Presidents, let's do that for the rank
and file back home too."

Of course to comply with the last wish of this rank
and file delegate would mean that the Grand Officers would
have to fight. This is not in their line.

We have quoted at length from the confidential minutes
of the last convention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive

11

Engineers Ltx order to give an accurate picture of the type
Of leadership now dominating some of the strongest trade
unions in America.

Let us proceed to tabulate the salaries of the officers
of some of leading trade unions of the United States:

Name of Trade Union Officers and Salaries

Brotherhood of Locomotive

Engineers President . $25,000

First Vice-Pres 15,000

Grand Chief Engineer 13,000

American Federation of

Musicians President 12,000

Secretary 7,500

Painters, Paper-hangers and

Interior Decorators President 6,000

Secretary .. 6,000

Carpenters and Joiners President 7,500

Bricklayers and Masons President 10,000

Secretary 10,000

Structural Iron Workers ..President 7,500

Secretary 6,000

Order of Railway Conductors..President 12,000

Secretary 8,000

Vice-Presidents (7) 6,000
Sr. Vice-President 8,000

Stage Employees President 6,000

Maintenance of Way Men

(Railroads) President 14,000

Secretary 9,000

Locomotive Firemen President 12,000

Secretary 10,000

Street Car Railway Men President . s . 6,000

Railroad Trainmen President 14,000

.12 V ■' :

Railway Clerks President $10,000

Machinists President 7,500

Secretary 6,500

Railway Carmen President 7,400

Teamsters and Truckdrivem... President 15,000

Secretary 15,000

Auditor 15,000

Vice-Presidents (7) 10,000

Trustees (3) 10,000

Organizers 10,000

Barbers President 7,000

United Mine Workers President 12,000

Vice-President 0,000

Electrical Workers President 7,000

Secretary 6,500

We must also reckon with the fact that some of these
trade union officials get as high as $19 a day for living ex-
penses when they are travelling. Some of them are allowed
15.00 a day in addition to their salary for incidental ex-
penses throughout the year. Many of them are corrupt and
make plenty of money through betraying the workers in
their struggles. Many of them draw additional salaries as
officers of labor banks and trade union financial institu-
tions. A large number of them own substantial blocs of
•stock in big corporations.

What Price Labor Leaders?

The American trade unionists are paying annually a
hundred million dollars to their organizations. Most of
this huge sum goes towards the payment of wages and sal-
aries of officers. At best the organized workers receive in
return, nowadays, is the maintenance of the status-quo
despite favorable economic conditions for the millions of
skilled workers. For some unions even this cannot be said
about the leadership.

A number of the unions have their executive committees
divided into various departments. The Brotherhood of

* ■ ' 13 . ' '

Locomotive Engineers, for instance, has an Insurance and
Pension Department, an Investment Department, and the
lowest of the department is the Labor, or Trade Union,
Department. This in one of the most powerful American
labor unions.

The -workers in the aristocracy of labor, the highly
skilled workers, are getting a few crumbs from the wealth-
laden tables of the American imperialists now enjoying
world hegemony. The greatest beneficiaries of American
imperialism in the ranks of the labor organizations are
the International officers of the unions of highly skilled
workers, of the organizations of the aristocracy of the
American working class. There is a great gap between the
imperialist prowess of the United States and the Imperial-
ist strength of the other leading capitalist national groups.
There is likewise a gap between the extent to which the
trade union bureaucracy of some of the less powerful capi-
talist countries has been corrupted and the debauching of
the reactionary high-trade union officialdom of the Ameri-
can trade union movement. There is a positive relationship
between these gaps.

But let no one make the mistake of viewing as one
homogeneous mass the entire American labor aristocracy.
Let no one even make the mistake of viewing as a homo-
geneous group the entire American trade union officialdom.
There are bases for serious differentiations and divisions,
even in the ranks of the trade union officialdom. The bases
for these differences, of course, are deeply rooted in the
economic conditions of the country— specifically in the
economic status of the particular industry in which the
union happens to be found, of the extent of skill of the
workers unionized, etc.

The American Communists correctly view this corrup-
tion of trade union officialdom and the slight benefits to
the several million of skilled workers, both as a result of the
strength of Yankee imperialism today, only as a temporary
condition. The American. Communists are also beginning
to react in a realistic manner to the differences existing
and potential not only in the American working class as a
whole but also in the various sections of the working class.

14

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