Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Eight-hour theory in the american federation of labor / Henry Raymond Mussey

Collection:: Economics Books

EIGHT-HOUR THEORY IN THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR 231 to the last hour of the El Paso convention of the American Fed- eration in 1924, the animating spirit and the directing mind of the movement were those of Samuel Gompers. The intellectual his- tory of the American Federation is for the most part the intel- lectual history of Samuel Gompers. A man of action rather than an original and speculative thinker, though a man by no means unacquainted with speculative writings, Mr. Gompers had a profound distrust of the thinker as such, a distrust that later ripened into a bitter contempt for the “intellectuals”—except the particular ones who served his particular ends. Yet he utilized ideas wherever they came to his hand, and the Federation for a generation practically lived on three important ideas: first, that labor must help itself; second, that the way for labor to help itself is through its economic power (a fair question may per- haps be raised whether Mr. Gompers’ idea of the economic power of labor ever extended much beyond the use and the threat of the strike); and third, that the standard of living determines wages and the whole position of labor in the social order. It is this third idea that underlay the early eight-hour movement and gave it driving power. Nobody can understand the Ameri- can Federation who does not understand this as well as the other two ideas. It was his confident faith in labor as its own only possible savior, and in the organization of its economic power as the only agency for effecting that salvation, that gave to Mr. Gompers at once his distrust of all interfering “outsiders” and his fanatical zeal for the unions and for the Federation, binding those unions together. Over and over again he claims for the unions the whole credit for better labor conditions. Thus he writes in the Ameri- can Federationist of January, 1903 (pp. 20, 21): “It may be assumed that by comparison with conditions of a century or more ago, the scale of wages has risen, the hours of labor have lessened, and the general conditions of toil have improved. This can be ascribed to no other cause than to the constant, concrete, intelligent effort of trade unionism”—though the economists flatter themselves that they have succeeded in ascribing it to several other causes also. If Mr. Gompers had appreciated in more balanced fashion the multitude of causes which to the economist seem to determine the well-being of labor, he would probably not have been so great a labor leader as he was + for

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