Containment

Bridgeport militancy was not turned back by presidential power alone. Government intervention to settle the 1918 disputes helped isolate radical leaders from rank-and-file machinists and limited the influence of craft interests on factory politics. At work, more systematic procedures for classifying, promoting, and disciplining employees undermined the solidarities among craftsmen and between grades that had developed during the war. Industrial relations reforms and features of the labor process combined to block the mobilization of control struggles in Bridgeport.

The NWLB sought a permanent solution for labor unrest by establishing a system of collective bargaining through shop committees (a common feature of NWLB and Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board awards)^[66] and a local board of mediation. The plan required shop committee elections in every plant—elections not by members of particular unions or crafts but by all department employees. Chairmen from each department body, in turn, formed an Employees' General Committee. The NWLB's electoral procedures tended to dilute craft representation and union influence on shop committees because craft unionists were usually not strong enough to control departmentwide elections. In addition, management-initiated employee representation schemes won NWLB approval in at least five firms, while elsewhere NWLB committees replaced already-established union committees.^[67] The NWLB

committees set up to negotiate with employers were, in any case, powerless. Departmental and General Committees "shall not have Executive or veto powers, such as the right to decide who shall, or shall not, receive an increase in wage; how a certain operation shall, or shall not, be performed, etc."^[68] Willard Aborn, NWLB administrator for Bridgeport, saw shop committees as vehicles for "inplant cooperation" rather than collective bargaining ("which included only the employees' side"). Employee representation would make it possible for manufacturers "to hear employee suggestions for improving operating methods, and to let the employees know something of the company's problems and to receive their assistance in solving them."^[69]

The NWLB scheme operated against local union influence in another respect. Grievances not resolved by plant committees were forwarded to a Local Board of Mediation and Conciliation, with three labor and three employer representatives. Labor representatives were chosen in September 1918 at a citywide convention attended by delegates selected in earlier plant elections. That convention, dominated by the IAM, elected Sam Lavit, David Clydesdale (chairman of the strike committee in September), and Patrick Scollins (a UMC worker and former hatmaker in the ill-fated Danbury union).^[70] Under the NWLB scheme, however, no union was formally involved in adjusting grievances, and government officials did their best to exclude union leaders from administering other aspects of the award. When the NWLB's Bridgeport administrator extended the period during which former employees could apply for retroactive pay, Lavit, Clydesdale, and Scollins requested a list of claimants so they could notify them of the extension. Willard Aborn cautioned NWLB officials against doing so, arguing that Lavit was merely trying to get credit for the extension. NWLB Secretary Jett Lauck agreed and telegrammed Lavit that claimants "will be notified directly by this office."^[71]

The Local Board of Mediation guaranteed the impotence of individual shop committees. Employee representatives could, in principle, address issues of workplace control. Indeed, assurances that classification could be worked out through the collective bargaining scheme were important in getting machinists back to work on September 17. Because shop committees and employers were hardly likely to agree on classification, however, the issue would

be referred to the Local Board, which, conveniently, had no permanent, voting chair. Employer and labor representatives, equally balanced, inevitably stalemated on any question of importance. A former mediator in the Ordnance Department who was involved in Bridgeport affairs found this failure to complete the Board "somewhat more than an accident."^[72] In vain Lavit requested "such machinery that we can immediately press home [demands for classification and minimum rates] through each shop.... We submit that advancing demands through a balanced committee of six, with a powerless head, to the deadlocked War Labor Board will profit us nothing and merely waste our time."^[73] After many fruitless conferences labor delegates to the Board finally resigned in March 1919 to protest its purely decorative role.^[74]

The NWLB shop committee scheme undermined the organizational base for workers' control movements in Bridgeport. It did so, first, by breaking the links between shop committees and citywide union leadership. George Hawley, general manager of Bridgeport's Manufacturers' Association, described the system as an "experiment in employee representation, through which collective bargaining has been combined with the open shop."^[75] In effect the NWLB had reinstituted a modified form of prewar industrial relations, giving shop committees a somewhat more formal status but isolating them from union influences. Second, the NWLB's committees were elected by all workers, regardless of craft or union, and replaced union committees already in operation. Shop committees thus constituted diluted craft interests as well as union influence on the job.

This reorganization of workplace representation put radical local officials in a dilemma: although NWLB committees were nominally democratic and cross-sectional, they were ineffective for pursuing classification and other demands rooted in the craft tradition. Lavit and his colleagues could push these issues and strengthen the union's position in the factories only by demanding exclusive craft committees and abandoning the less skilled and the unorganized. In addition, a wedge had been driven between machinists on one side and specialists and production workers on the other by the NWLB's wage award, giving the greatest increases to those of lesser skill. Lavit was thus forced to request that "the workers who were not signatory to this case's complaint be not included in its

administration, although asking that they share fully in its benefits. This ruling will produce a workers' committee of tried and true men and women who have been tested and found to be capable of truly representing the workers."^[76] The request was denied.

By expanding the constituencies of nonunion shop committees, the government diluted the social base for control struggles and blocked the coordination of such protest by a radical union local. Under the new organizational conditions radicals could pursue control issues only on an exclusive basis; and as the strikes of 1919 would show, they could mount broadly based collective action only on economistic grounds. The NWLB's scheme and subsequent policies began the isolation of radical leaders that postwar unemployment and blacklisting would complete.

Some Bridgeport employers complained that the NWLB plan had been "really shoved down [their] throats," "in many instances against their will and better judgement."^[77] In fact the Manufacturers' Association had considered and endorsed similar schemes for employee representation well before September 1918, partly to meet government collective bargaining requirements and partly in pursuit of "proper working relations between employer and employees, lower labor turnover, and increased efficiency and production."^[78] When NWLB jurisdiction ceased and the Local Board of Mediation and Conciliation dissolved in March 1919, the Manufacturers' Association also had ready a new scheme for employee representation. This "Bridgeport Plan" was virtually identical to that of the NWLB, but it omitted a citywide mediation committee of the sort dominated, on labor's side, by Sam Lavit. Once again elections obscured occupational identities, grievance procedures shut out union influence, and employee committees lacked the authority to challenge management in any meaningful way. More than thirty-five local firms adopted the plan in April 1919, and although attrition was high, a year later twenty companies employing thirty thousand workers (about half the city's total) still maintained shop committees under the employers' plan. This record made Bridgeport "the industrial center in which the formation of Works Councils has progressed furthest"^[79] in what was a national movement extending employee representation to about 500,000 workers in 1919 (a large majority of them in the metal trades) and to 1,400,000 by 1926.^[80]

The NWLB and Bridgeport plans for employee representation dovetailed with workplace reforms intended to secure more harmonious relations between labor and management. During the war leading manufacturers showed increased concern to secure the willing cooperation of employees. With up to three thousand workers shifting jobs every week, thus bidding up wages and disrupting shop organization, employers hoped to lower the turnover rate.^[81] Another aim was to secure labor peace and reduce the influence of "outside agitators." One strategy for meeting these goals involved welfare programs, which often made benefits contingent on loyalty to the firm and in some cases linked participation to schemes of employee representation.^[82] More important, however, were efforts to rationalize wage grades and job ladders and to administer these systematically. Here, too, employers hoped to check turnover (in part by reducing foremen's discretion in hiring and firing); to meet the unprecedented need for recruiting, training, and upgrading inexperienced workers; and to soothe unrest over arbitrary changes and wage differentials.

Employment policies followed the principle of individualized reward for individual merit. Piecework satisfied this principle for less skilled employees engaged in repetitive machine tasks. On the more varied and demanding work machinists and toolmakers performed, it was rarely feasible to establish standardized piece rates or times. Instead, employers varied hourly wage rates according to the worker's skill, effort, and output. "A flexible hourly rate to meet each individual work is what takes the place of the incentive in the piece rate system."^[83]

This approach could be chaotic for management and irritating to workers as wage rates proliferated and craftsmen of similar skills received different pay. Gradually, however, managers brought hourly wage incentives into a more systematic scheme of narrowly defined job categories and, within each category, pay grades. Individuals moved up the scale and from one classification to higher ones in accordance with their efficiency, skill, and discipline. This system retained the notion of offering different hourly rates as incentives but kept the "individuality" of wages within manageable limits laid down in a clear scale. At the same time, wage and job ladders provided an orderly mechanism for training and upgrading new workers on an unprecedented scale. At least two firms—Bul-

lard, and Coulter and McKenzie—explicitly used job ladders as the basis for an internal labor market.^[84]

Bridgeport employers also sought to ensure a more rule-bound and, if possible, tactful application of these employment policies. Job categories and pay scales would hardly systematize wages or encourage employee loyalty if foremen showed favoritism or whimsy in classifying and reclassifying workers. More clearly defining occupational classes and procedures for rating employees reduced the scope of foremen's discretion. In addition the Manufacturers' Association developed a variety of programs, manuals, and conferences to train foremen in managing workers.^[85] Bridgeport firms also installed employment offices and specialized personnel to handle aspects of labor relations previously left to shop-floor supervisors, including hiring, promotion, and discharge.^[86] These initiatives reflected a nationwide enthusiasm for personnel management during the war, inspired by tremendous increases in the size of work forces, a desire to hold on to employees at a time of labor shortage, and an effort to keep labor relations peaceful.^[87] But in Bridgeport at least these developments survived the war and were even extended and elaborated in the early 1920s.^[88]

These management practices seem to have inhibited movements for workers' control by dividing machinists, aggravating conflicts between skilled and less skilled workers, and defusing one widely shared source of hostility toward employers—arbitrary supervision. More specialized and narrowly defined job categories may have eroded the occupational identity of machinists in Bridgeport. Because job titles and conditions of pay and promotion varied from one firm to another, specific grievances and conflicts were confined to individual shops or departments and could no longer provide a common basis for struggles throughout the city. Within each plant competition for promotion further divided machinists, as local labor leaders warned: "So long as they can play the nonunion man against the union by increasing the former's rate of pay, and not the latter, they feel they can prevent the workers from getting together and demanding any change with a chance of receiving it. This, and discrimination, blacklisting, and coercive slave driving methods, bonuses, pensions, and playing traitorous workers against their fellow men, rewarding such by promotion and other devious remuneration, are so well known and recognized by

the true blue workman, that he is not deceived."^[89] Finally, even the "true blue" craftsman could hardly look with favor on deskilling. Job ladders, by formalizing the promotion of less skilled workers at the expense of union apprenticeship and privilege, accentuated conflicts of interest between grades of labor.

The divide-and-conquer strategies attacked by Bridgeport IAM officials did not require "discrimination, blacklisting, and coercive slave driving methods." The best cure for outstanding troublemakers would always be to get rid of them. On a day-to-day basis, however, progressive managers endorsed the "square deal," with supervisors and workers alike adhering to known rules for hiring, job assignment, promotion, piece rates, and discharge. Such constitutional procedures helped defuse conflicts over unjust and inequitable management practices, coordinating the interests of employers and workers around the rule of law. Many members of the Bridgeport Manufacturers' Association recognized (at least in principle) the virtues of industrial government by law rather than by men; some made clear commitments to their employees to act accordingly.^[90]

These changes in workshop authority had important consequences for factory politics. Of all grievances over workshop control, those focused on the unfair or abusive exercise of authority had the widest appeal. Machinists and production workers had rather different interests in questions of dilution and piecework, but both groups strongly resented foremen who bullied or played favorites. When machinists went on strike to protest the NWLB award in 1918, they justified their action to President Wilson on two grounds. First, they were entitled to a better standard of living. Second, they demanded classification "that will protect the worker from the arbitrary action of the employers with regard to the fixation of wage rates."^[91] Replacing arbitrary action with constitutional procedures allowed employers to retain their own job ladders and pay scales while eliminating a major spur to united action over workshop control.

The emergence of employer classification schemes (particularly in their early and irregular forms) had spurred rather than impeded the solidary struggles of 1917–1918. Effective opposition to management control, however, presupposed joint organization bridging divisions among workers within and between the city's

factories, and the NWLB's shop committee scheme broke that organization. As managers rationalized employment policies in the absence of effective counterorganization by workers, the conditions for mobilizing collective action on behalf of workers' control disappeared. The containment of radical factory politics thus involved a two-pronged offensive: by employers within the shops and by the NWLB outside them. This offensive's success—and the importance of its two components—is evident in the strike wave of 1919.

During the war Bridgeport's extraordinary economic boom relied on munitions production. The government began to cancel its military contracts after the armistice, and leading munitions firms and the subcontractors dependent on them laid off most of their workers or closed altogether. Increased demand for electrical goods, consumer products, and machine tools absorbed some of the slack, but during the winter of 1918–1919, unemployment increased, wage increases ceased, and inflation continued.^[92] IAM Lodge 30's primary concern during this period was to lead workers in unemployment demonstrations and demands for relief rather than in strikes.^[93]

On July 18, 1919, Lodge 30 members voted to present employers with demands for a forty-four-hour week, a 20 percent wage hike, and a minimum wage "for all machine shop workers."^[94] The opening shot in the summer's battery of strikes was fired by unskilled workers, however, many of them foreign born.^[95] On July 21, more than eight hundred record pressmen walked out at Columbia (formerly American) Graphophone, demanding a forty-four-hour week, wage hikes, nondiscrimination, and shop committee recognition. Most belonged to the Workers' International Industrial Union (WIIU), an offshoot of the IWW affiliated with the Socialist Labor Party. When toolmakers and machinists struck Bryant Electric Company the following day for the forty-four-hour week and a 25 percent wage increase, a large number of female employees came out with them—immigrant workers generally joining the WIIU, English-speakers coming to Lodge 30 for leadership. A similar split affected female employees who (together with machinists and toolmakers) walked out from Columbia Graphophone on July 24. Additional disputes (some involving less skilled workers alone, some craftsmen alone, and some both) affecting at

least twenty-one other metal trades firms brought the total number of workers on strike between July 21 and mid-August to more than ten thousand, including fifteen hundred at Bryant and twenty-five hundred at Graphophone. Although Lodge 30 officials applied for national sanction on July 18, by the time a negative reply came back, thousands of strikers were already out and requesting local IAM sponsorship.^[96]

These strikes demonstrated impressive unity among craftsmen and less skilled workers. Machinists, polishers and buffers, and molders came out together at several firms, and strike committees representing men and women of different trades and skills handled picketing and negotiations in some of the disputes. On July 29, officials of AFL unions (including federal unions organized for unskilled operatives) formed an executive committee, headed by Sam Lavit and State Federation of Labor Secretary Ira Ornburn, to coordinate strike policy throughout the city. As in 1915, however, demands for shorter hours and better pay unified the movement. Control issues around which solidary struggles had been based in 1918—classification, equal pay, shop committee recognition—once again appear only in isolated disputes, tacked on to an economistic program by individual strike committees. In only one strike did machinists and less skilled workers together raise the key demand of 1918, occupational classification. Even in matters of wages and hours, all-grades solidarities had an important limitation. Craft unionists cooperated with less skilled workers when the latter joined IAM Lodge 30 or AFL federal unions, as most natives did. But many production workers and laborers were foreigners and were affiliated with the WIIU. This overlapping division based on skill, ethnicity, and union politics was never bridged. AFL and IAM leaders refused to cooperate with the WIIU, and eventually their members returned to work at Graphophone under a settlement rejected by the WIIU (which had its strongest base, of about a thousand members, at that firm).

These strikes further demonstrate the significance of the NWLB's collective bargaining system. In a number of strikes IAM and AFL leaders sought to make good the losses inflicted the previous winter by demanding recognition for union shop committees. AFL Secretary Ornburn insisted, "We will not treat with the employers through the War Labor Board committees. The com-

mittees are in no small part elected by the manufacturers and in most cases there are non-union workers on them.... We will discuss questions and demands only through the shop committees of union employees."^[97] Local officials appreciated that "employee representation" divorced from union organization amounted to company unionism.

Employers were equally clear on the issues at stake. Bryant's factory manager agreed to negotiate only with "properly constituted employees' committees, elected under rules laid down by the National War Labor Board. We will deal with no outside organization or influences."^[98] Speaking for the Manufacturers' Association, George Hawley also endorsed NWLB committees—and only such committees—as "reasonable machinery for the adjustment of differences.... This association insists that these methods of adjustment be used rather than the arbitrary calling of strikes,"^[99] and no metal trades firm agreed to recognize union shop committees. Employers had good reason to defend shop committees established under the NWLB and the Bridgeport Plan. Employee representatives at two firms persuaded workers not to strike, and shop committees established under (or approved by) the NWLB at Singer, UMC, Bridgeport Brass, and some others agreed to compromises on wages and hours without union involvement or strikes.^[100]

Less decisive evidence suggests the success of new employment systems and welfare programs in containing militancy. Union officials were unable to get workers out on strike at three of the most progressive firms—Coulter and McKenzie, Crane, and Bullard. Bullard employees in particular had long been relatively immune to union agitation. The previous year employees had volunteered to work on Labor Day to get out war products, and when Lavit came to Bullard to call machinists out in September 1918, he was nearly thrown in a creek by a detachment of employees led by a flag-waving supervisor.^[101]

By mid-August, many Bridgeport workers had won concessions on wages and hours. But Lodge 30 (and other AFL societies) had failed to substitute union shop committees for the Bridgeport Plan of employee representation. Combined with growing unemployment, this new structure of workshop organization enabled employers to effectively exclude unions from their plants. When local officials revived Bridgeport's Metal Trades Council in November,

their support within the factory gates had returned to its sparse prewar levels. One organizer attributed this loss to management-sponsored employee representation: "The shop committees in the factories are suckers.... They are working, not for the laborer, but for the boss."^[102]

Their grass-roots support ebbing, local radicals once more became vulnerable to union censure. At the beginning of August, the IAM Grand Lodge expelled Sam Lavit from the union, citing his leadership of unconstitutional strikes and his admission into the union of men and women unqualified for membership. Lavit's largest constituency—strikers at Bryant and Graphophone—promptly voted their confidence in him. When Lodge 30 members (by this time probably including larger numbers of less skilled Graphophone and Bryant strikers than machinists) followed suit, the Executive Board revoked Lodge 30's charter.^[103]

Although Grand Lodge action could not deprive Lavit of his remaining support at Bryant and Graphophone, local government action could. On August 29, police prevented Lavit from addressing a group of Graphophone employees meeting to consider the company's final offer, escorting him instead to Bridgeport's mayor, who directed Lavit to leave town. WIIU leaders received the same advice several days later.^[104] Lavit's experience mirrored that of other wartime radical leaders. In 1919 and 1920, national IAM officials expelled local officials who had been disrespectful of Executive Board authority and craft unionism in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, and Chicago, as well as in Bridgeport,^[105] and the Palmer raids and police roundups forced sympathizers underground.

Lodge 30 leaders sought a referendum vote in October to restore their charter. That effort failed. As many as eight hundred machinists from the lodge transferred to a new local set up by IAM officials;^[106] others dropped union membership altogether. A much diminished Lodge 30 joined an outlaw Brooklyn IAM lodge in March 1920 to form the Amalgamated Metal Workers of America (AMWA), whose program articulated the ambitions of wartime movements for workers' control in unqualified form. Delegates to the first convention (held in Philadelphia in December 1920) endorsed "working class ownership of industries," "the amalgamation of all existing crafts and organizations in the industry," and "govern-

ment of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers."^[107] Organizers emphasized that although in the IAM "all the power lays [sic ] in the hands of the Grand Lodge officials," in the AMWA "the workers through their shop stewards control at all times their affairs in their local conditions."^[108]

Workers' control, local autonomy, and union democracy exercised through shop organization: these express the radical potential of craft traditions. Combined with industrial unionism, the platform represented a stark alternative to IAM policies, authority, and structure. Local militants could put forward the alternative only when they were "freed" from IAM authority and from the cautions required to retain support from metalworkers of varied skills and interests because, by mid-1920, the conditions that might have favored an alliance behind AMWA leaders had vanished. With manufacturing practices steadily diluting work, the craft constituency for workers' control narrowed. Management practices highlighted divisions of interest between workers of different skills and eroded occupational solidarity even among machinists. Company unionism and a renewed open-shop drive ensured that lingering conflicts over control would be isolated and free from union involvement. In short, issues of control could no longer bring workers together under radical leadership. From the start AMWA activists were forced to resort to the conventional organizing tactic of the industrial pariah: speeches outside the factory gates. Their support on the shop floor remained negligible.^[109]