and any employee, either by himself or by any individual fellow-worker, shall have the right to present any grievance at any reasonable time, and such grievance shall be promptly considered by the person or persons appointed by said firm, and in case such grievance shall not be adjusted, the person feeling himself so aggrieved shall have the right to apply to some member of said firm for the adjustment of such grievance, and in case the same shall not then be adjusted, such grievance may be presented to Clarence Darrow and Carl Meyer, who shall be constituted as a permanent board of arbitration to settle any questions that may arise between any of the employees of said firm and said firm for the term of two years from April 1, 1911, during which time these findings shall be in full force "; (4) wage increases and adjustments as follows: a general minimum for all workers of $5 a week; a minimum for males over 17 of $6 and over 18 of $8, and a uniform increase of 10 per cent. to all workers; (5) the establishment of the 54-hour week, and the payment for overtime work at the rate of time and a half. In accordance with the clause of the decision providing for the establishment by the company of some means of handling future grievances, the Labor Complaint Department was immediately established by Hart, Schaffner and Marx with Professor Earl Dean Howard as its chief. The duties of the department, as described by Mr. Howard in his testimony before the Industrial Relations Commission of 1914 and in other statements, were to maintain a system for the prompt discovery and investigation of any abuses or complaints that might arise among the employees; to recommend measures for the elimination of the sources of complaint; to represent the company before the Board of Arbitration (or Trade Board later); to negotiate with the business agents of the unions; to take general charge of employment, discipline and discharge, and of welfare work. The firm believed that the main difficulty in the past had been the lack of contact and lack of means of presenting grievances with any expectation of their being satisfactorily handled. The establishment of the Labor Complaint Department was an attempt to meet this need. Previous to the 1910 strike the industry had been noted for the prevalence of small section or shop strikes and so habitual had these become that they were taken as a matter of course and were thought to be inherent in the industry itself. Stoppages were simply necessary evils and there was no use in trying to eliminate them. During the first year of the agreement little progress was made in the elimination of these strikes. Mr. Howard says that for a while they were practically as frequent and as bitter as before the strike, despite all his efforts. "I used to go about in the shops whenever there was a strike and make a speech to them and describe the agreement. Mr. Hillman used to do so, too, and we really had to instruct the people that this meant a new way of adjusting grievances. The old way was the only way they knew." Until September, 1911, when they first came to be regarded as serious offenses, sudden stoppages occurred almost every week. There was as yet no general understanding of the agreement or of the means afforded by the agreement for other methods of settling grievances than striking. Friction and misunderstandings continued during this first year not through lack of effort on the part of the Labor Department, but because the machinery at its disposal was not adequate for its needs. The Labor Complaint Department, during the first years of its existence, handled nearly 800 complaints. No records were kept of the disposition of these cases, but an analysis of the complaints shows the chief sources of irritation to have been inequality of piece prices, varying quality of work demanded, abuse of foreman's power of discharge, lack of a practical and easy method of presenting grievances, recurrence of small strikes resulting in bad feeling, and lack of a method for the division of work in slack seasons. Problems as serious as these would have taxed even the best equipped system at that time, for to neither side had the significance and possibilities of the agreement become as yet clear. But in addition to the complexity of these complaints, the Department as constituted could not possibly handle such a mass of problems speedily and satisfactorily without more time, more experience and a clearer definition of its powers and limitations. The failure of the Labor Department to handle these matters promptly as they arose resulted in the swamping of the arbitrators with a multitude of unnecessary detail, which theoretically should have been disposed of by the Labor Department. The complaints that were thus presented to the Arbitration Board were so numerous and so varied that in point of time alone it would have been impossible for the Arbitration Board to handle them, while the confusion that arose in presenting cases through the Labor Complaint Department occasioned even more delay. But in addition to the delay involved in this procedure these cases required an intimate and technical knowledge of the industry in all its parts. It was obviously impossible to expect a Board of three, organized for the arbitration of fairly general principles of conduct and relations, to have at its command either the time or the technical knowledge that were needed. During the first year the arbitrators met more than fifty times. A great many oral and only twenty written decisions were made. Lack of means to enforce the decisions or to make them known to the parties often caused injustice, and the failure to make decisions promptly enough produced serious friction. It was increasingly evident that the system was not practicable as then constituted and that the Board of Arbitration could not handle promptly and justly both the technical questions and the matters of principle that were brought before it. Many of the difficulties and injustices that arose under this system were involved in the process of price-making. Under a decision of the arbitrators the company issued complete specifications for all operations and a full statement of definitions and processes. They established piece prices for these operations with the approval of the arbitrators, subject to change only by the consent of the arbitrators, as provided in the decision. In practice the effect of these specifications was frequently to lower the earning capacity of the workers. In such cases the proper procedure was for the complainant to formulate a grievance and to present it to the Labor Complaint Department for adjustment. If no satisfactory settlement could be reached (which was usually the case), the complaint went to the arbitrators, who would generally decide in effect to give an increase in prices so as to maintain former earnings. But by the time these decisions came out the workers in question would have been working at the old rates and the additional problem would have been raised as to when the new rates had become effective. In the meantime new specifications might be drawn up by the company which would practically nullify whatever adjustment the Board of Arbitration had made. Discontent grew so bitter that the employees and arbitrators finally informed the company that there was danger of serious trouble unless some fundamental readjustments were made. As a result a preliminary conference was arranged for March, 1912. At this conference the employees were represented by Mrs. Raymond Robins of the Women's Trade Union League, John Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor, W. O. Thompson and Henry M. Ashton, and the firm was represented by Joseph Schaffner, Carl Meyer, E. D. Howard and Milton A. Strauss. This informal conference reached on April 1 an agreement providing for the appointment of a committee of five, two representing each side and the fifth chosen by the four other members, for the following purposes: (1) To create a board for the adjusting and fixing of prices when necessary, and the adjusting of any other matters that might arise in dispute between Hart, Schaffner and Marx and their employees, the neutral member of the board to be appointed by the committee. (2) To formulate rules for the guidance of this board, such rules to be binding during the continuance of the 1911 agreement, until April 1, 1913. |