LABOR: At Vancouver

Cartoonists often represent Labor as a hulking, slightly stupid man with great biceps and an ominous sledgehammer in his hand. Viewing the cartoon, one gets the idea that it would be incautious to tread on the man’s big toes, extremely imprudent to slap him in the face. He might be sluggish and slow to anger, but if aroused his wrath could be violent. Fortnight ago U. S. Labor, the large part of it that works in steel, copper and textile mills, decidedly had its toes stepped on. After sustaining wage levels through two depressed years while dividends fell and officers’ salaries were lopped, employers at last reduced their workers’ pay (TIME, Oct. 5). How would the giant with the sledgehammer take it? Up to last week he had taken it very well. But the nation’s attention was still uneasily centred on the giant as the American Federation of Labor prepared for its annual convention at Vancouver, B. C. this week.

While preliminary meetings of the building and metal trades departments got underway, came more bad news. The U. S. Department of Labor at Washington announced a 12.4% increase in industrial unemployment for August as compared with August last year and two more big companies—Republic Steel and M. A. Hanna Co. (coal) of Cleveland—reduced wages.

The metal trades department incorporated a threatening tone in its annual report by urging Federal relief measures for the winter ”to prevent cold and hungry workmen from being driven to desperation.” The building tradesmen, however, were chiefly concerned with a jurisdictional problem: carpenters in Philadelphia were making employers let them do work which the A. F. of L. Board of Jurisdictional Awards had allotted to the elevator constructors. President Frank Feeney of the elevator constructors’ union interrupted the meeting to call his men off their Philadelphia jobs.

When President William Green of the A. F. of L. appeared on the scene, he again struck the threatening note in an address before the preliminary gathering. His words sounded as though lumbering Labor had got its back up. Evidently trying to scare employers out of making further pay cuts, said he:

”Some of us are wondering whether the present industrial order is to be a success or a failure. No social order is secure where wealth flows at such a rate into the hands of the few away from the many. . . . Labor is the source of created wealth and Labor will protest so long as the inequitable distribution of wealth continues. This inequity can be wiped out in two ways, through a distribution in the form of wages and earnings, and through redistribution through the masses by taxation. . . . No man should have the right to hand down his great fortune intact, any more than he should have a right to accumulate such colossal wealth during his lifetime. After a reasonable amount is left to his heirs … we will be in favor of having the United States Government take it away through taxation and distribute it to the masses.”

On the eve of the convention the Executive Council drew up a program favoring: 1) beer as the ”spark to lift us out of the depression, as the automobile lifted us out of the hard times of 1921″; 2) a national conference, called by President Hoover, of employers and laborers “to divide all available work among all workers”; 3) immediate inauguration of a five-day working week; 4) maintenance of wages; 5) prohibition of child labor. Labor’s Executive Council opposed: 1) compulsory unemployment insurance; 2) a sales tax.