Heinlein's Future History: The Strike Of '66.
Anderson's Technic History: Van Rijn must deal with the Federated Brotherhood of Spacefarers, later the United Technicians. See here.
Stirling's Black Chamber Trilogy: Luz reflects that it was dangerous for steelworkers to be union men:
"Because it could mean pitched battles with the Pinkertons that Carnegie and then U.S. Steel had used as strikebreakers and goons, or with the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police. Nowadays everyone in the mills belonged to the Party-aligned United Steelworkers of America, and things were settled by arbitration boards, but memories lingered and attitudes would for longer still."
-Shadows Of Annihilation, Advance Reading Copy, TWELVE, pp. 285-286.
That is the corporate state. Unions need to be independent of government and of all political parties. And I would avoid those initials!
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And, just for once, I agree with you! Unions AND corporations should both be independent of the state, any state. I am not happy with these policies of the alternate Theodore Roosevelt. It boils down to the kind of cartelization seen in Anderson's MIRKHEIM and which Nicholas van Rijn so vehemently opposed. It reminds me as well of what Benito Mussolini advocated in Italy, to be implemented by his Fascist Party.
I can see why the USA, the United Steelworkers of America, reminded you of that other USA! A name probably chosen for exactly that reason.
Ad astra! Sean
TR got his first widely-reported action as President mediating a strike in the anthracite coal mines of the eastern states -- it was threatening urban supplies, and at the time it was the only fuel used for heating most homes and businesses, so millions of people were getting quite desperate. There had been federal intervention in large national strikes before, almost always effectively on the owners' side.
TR wrote extensively about it later, and said that he went into it being fairly impartial, and ended it by being (more than he could publicly state) on the miner's side and concluding that the owners were a bunch of idiots and no sense of the public interest, while the miners' leader was unfailingly quite reasonable.
He eventually threatened to have the Army take over the mines and run them with military engineers on the grounds that public order (riots were starting over coal shortages) demanded it -- and he told the mine-owners privately that the -first- thing he'd do then was grant the miners their whole wage demands -and- officially recognize the United Mineworkers as the workers' bargaining agent.
That more or less bludgeoned them into submission, because they were anxious to avoid recognition at all costs.
The final sticking point was the presence of a labor representative on the arbitration board he set up. The owners were totally opposed to that; so TR asked them if a sociologist would be acceptable...
... whereupon he appointed the -very same man- but -called- him a 'sociologist'-.
As he said, this finally and totally destroyed any respect he'd previously had for the brainpower of the self-described "Captains of Industry".
Astounding.
TR had always been a bit of a radical on economic issues(*) and got more so as he gained experience in government. While he was police commissioner of New York he'd been friends with investigative reporters like Jacob Riis, who produced a famous series of photographs on slum tenements where immigrants worked in sweatshop conditions in one-room warrens. They gave him a first-hand look at how the "other half" lived.
(Incidentally, the NYPD of the time was... let's put it this way: the Chief of Police who Roosevelt sacked had just bought a castle and 5000 acres of land in Ireland, supposedly on savings from a $2000 a year salary, and his assistant claimed that his large fortune had been gained by real estate speculation in his own time... in Tokyo. In point of fact, policemen had to buy their jobs and made it back with "squeeze", and that was just the beginning.)
And his first extensive experience in administration was as an official in charge of reforming the Civil Service and eliminating patronage and corruption -- a true labor of Tantalus at the time. That put him in close contact with the urban political "machines", which were based on corruption and quid-pro-quo manipulation of blocs of working-class immigrants.
Unlike many other reformers of the time, TR was acutely conscious that the cities were dominated by corrupt "machines" like Tammany Hall and the Predergasts because those were the only people who were actually doing anything at all for the masses in the slums, even if it wasn't much and was for their own reasons. They traded city jobs and bags of coal and Christmas turkeys for votes, but at least the voters got -something-.
Also unlike many middle-class reformers, TR wasn't a shrinking violet -- he'd been warned that politics was "low" and "dirty" and "no occupation for a gentleman", but wasn't put off -- he freely mixed with Irish ward-heelers (often saloon-keepers or ex-boxers) and others of that ilk. Like the cowboys in the Dakotas, they often started off by mocking his accent and glasses and clothes, but ended up impressed by his willingness to talk man-to-man -- not to mention his willingness to challenge anyone who felt they could bully him to a round with fists, which was essential to being respected in those circles.
He wasn't interested in eliminating "corruption" of the five-dollars-to-the-policeman sort while ignoring the wholesale robbery of contract kickbacks and so forth.
And as President he was mortally offended when moguls like J.P. Morgan presumed to treat him as an equal they could negotiate with; as far as he was concerned, he was the people's tribune, the only one chosen by the American people as a whole, and the steward of their interests.
(*) and not only economics. His graduate thesis at Harvard in 1880 was a paper arguing for complete legal equality for women, including voting and holding office and reform of marriage to end patrimonial authority by husbands, and one of his first actions as Governor of New York in 1899 was to order the end of racial segregation in the public schools of the state. His first action as a Republican delegate to the 1884 national convention was to nominate a black man as Chairman.
Kaor, Mr. Stiring!
The coal mine owners of the early 1900's were certainly NOTHING like Nicholas van Rijn, who would most certainly not have run the mines so stupidly or treated the miners so unjustly!
While there was much to admire in Theodore Roosevelt's ideas, at least up to the time he left office as President in the 1909 of our timeline, I cannot say the same for his later years. He became more and more radical and, in politics, that started taking forms which would undermine the limited gov't ideal of the US Constitution. Impatience with checks, balances, bargaining, compromise, etc., could too easily lead to a steadily more autocratic gov't.
So, I don't have much sympathy for TR being "offended" when people like J.P. Morgan tried to negotiate with him. ALL gov'ts thru out history have had powerful people not holding formal offices in the countries they governed whose views it was at least tactful and prudent to heed to some extent.
Ad astra! Sean
TR becomes more and more interesting.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, altho I find TR a bit too much like Mussolini for my comfort.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: He didn't mind negotiating with them, it was their presumption that the President was on a level with them -- that they were "princes" who could set policy -- that offended him.
TR disliked Jefferson and venerated Washington, Jackson and Lincoln. He believed in a strong, active executive, not a passive one -- and most of the late-19th century Presidents had been rather passive, with the legislature the dominant branch.
He didn't approve of that, having a lot of experience with Congressmen, who at the time were notoriously corrupt and when they weren't, grossly parochial.
TR once remarked to a friendly Senator that there was nothing wrong with Congress that releasing a dozen hungry lions on the floor during a joint session wouldn't cure.
The Senator laughed nervously and asked whether he wasn't afraid the lions would eat the wrong legislators.
"Not if they stayed hungry long enough," he replied.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I understand what you mean about "presumption," and I agree a certain deference by men like J.P. Morgan to the President would have been right.
By and large, I'm inclined to prefer "passive" presidents or heads of state. Because they are so much less likely to do harm than aggressively active leaders like TR.
And I think a corrupt House representative or Senator better than a fanatical ideologue!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the problem with slothful corruption is that it builds counterpressures that eventually can delegitimize the entire system and provoke terrible consequences.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have to agree. Poul Anderson shows us that kind of slothful corruption very well in ROGUE SWORD, and how calamitous it was for the Eastern Roman Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
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