People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [195]
According to a report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, in 1914, 35,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents and 700,000 injured. That year the income of forty-four families making $1 million or more equaled the total income of 100,000 families earning $500 a year. The record shows an exchange between Commissioner Harris Weinstock of the Commission on Industrial Relations and President John Osgood, head of a Colorado coal company controlled by the Rockefellers:
WEINSTOCK:
If a worker loses his life, are his dependents compensated in any way?
OSGOOD:
Not necessarily. In some cases they are and in some cases not.
WEINSTOCK:
If he is crippled for life is there any compensation?
OSGOOD:
No sir, there is none. . . .
WEINSTOCK:
Then the whole burden is thrown directly upon their shoulders.
OSGOOD:
Yes, sir.
WEINSTOCK:
The industry bears none of it?
OSGOOD:
No, the industry bears none of it.
Unionization was growing. Shortly after the turn of the century there were 2 million members of labor unions (one in fourteen workers), 80 percent of them in the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was an exclusive union—almost all male, almost all white, almost all skilled workers. Although the number of women workers kept growing—it doubled from 4 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1910, and women were one-fifth of the labor force—only one in a hundred belonged to a union.
Black workers in 1910 made one-third of the earnings of white workers. Although Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, would make speeches about its belief in equal opportunity, the Negro was excluded from most AFL unions. Gompers kept saying he did not want to interfere with the “internal affairs” of the South: “I regard the race problem as one with which you people of the Southland will have to deal; without the interference, too, of meddlers from the outside.”
In the reality of struggle, rank-and-file workers overcame these separations from time to time. Foner quotes Mary McDowell’s account of the formation of a women’s union in the Chicago stockyards:
It was a dramatic occasion on that evening, when an Irish girl at the door called out—“A Colored sister asks admission. What shall I do with her?” And the answer came from the Irish young woman in the chair—“Admit her, of course, and let all of you give her a hearty welcome!”
In New Orleans in 1907 a general strike on the levees, involving ten thousand workers (longshoremen, teamsters, freight handlers), black and white, lasted twenty days. The head of the Negro longshoremen, E. S. Swan, said:
The whites and Negroes were never before so strongly cemented in a common bond and in my 39 years of experience of the levee, I never saw such solidarity. In all the previous strikes the Negro was used against the white man but that condition is now past and both races are standing together for their common interests. . . .
These were exceptions. In general, the Negro was kept out of the trade union movement. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1913: “The net result of all this has been to convince the American Negro that his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his fellow white workingman.”
Racism was practical for the AFL. The exclusion of women and foreigners was also practical. These were mostly unskilled workers, and the AFL, confined mostly to skilled workers, was based on the philosophy of “business unionism” (in fact, the chief official of each AFL union was called the “business agent”), trying to match the monopoly of production by the employer with a monopoly of workers by the union. In this way it won better conditions for some workers, and left most workers out.
AFL officials drew large salaries, hobnobbed with employers, even moved in high society. A press dispatch from Atlantic City, New Jersey, the fashionable seaside resort, in the summer of 1910:
Engaged in a game of bathing suit baseball with President Sam Gompers, Secretary Frank Morrison and other leaders of the A.F. of L. on the beach this morning,