CHAPTER VIII

THE NEGRO IN INDUSTRY

A. EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES AND CONDITIONS

I. INTRODUCTION

1. NEGRO WORKING POPULATION IN 1920

Between 1910 and 1920 the Negro population of Chicago increased from 44,103 to 109,594. Of this number it is estimated that about 70,000 were engaged in industries in 1920 as compared with about 27,000 in 1910.[49]

Questions which naturally suggest themselves for answer in connection with this great increase in the Negro working population in Chicago are: How did this large number of Negroes fit into the industrial life of the city? What were and are the opportunities open to them? Have they given satisfaction to employers? Are they discriminated against by employers or fellow-workers? Has racial friction developed because of competition between white and Negro workers? Were the riots of 1919 in any sense the result of labor troubles? What part have the Negroes taken in strikes? What is the relation of the Negro to organized labor? What is the outlook for the Negro in industry? These and other questions guided the inquiries and investigations of the Commission in the industrial field.

2. OPPORTUNITIES CREATED BY THE WAR

The Negro's position in the industrial life of Chicago is so intimately connected with the changes due to the war that a brief reference to certain facts of common knowledge in connection with the war will be helpful. With the beginning of the war in 1914 came an abnormally large demand by the belligerent countries for American munitions, food products, clothing, leather, iron and steel products, and other manufactured goods. Existing establishments were enlarged and new ones were erected in response to the demand for increased production. It was not uncommon for a plant to double or treble its labor force. A typical case was one of the large packing-plants in the Chicago "Yards" which increased its workers during the war from 8,000 to 17,000.

The war stimulated the demand for goods, and therefore for labor, and at the same time decreased the available labor supply. Immigration from the belligerent nations immediately ceased, and there was a marked decrease in immigration from other countries; aliens in large numbers departed to join the fighting forces of their native lands.

The labor shortage became acute soon after the United States entered the war in 1917, and enlistments withdrew hundreds of thousands of men from northern industries. An unprecedented demand for Negro workers was the result. The migration from the South was mainly a response to the call of larger opportunity and higher wages in the North.

3. INDUSTRIAL BACKGROUND OF NEGRO WORKERS

For the United States as a whole in 1910 the industrial condition of the gainfully occupied Negro population is shown in Table XVIII:

TABLE XVIII

GAINFULLY OCCUPIED NEGRO POPULATION TEN YEARS OF AGE AND OVER IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1910

==================================================================== Industry |Both Sexes|Percentage| Male | Female ------------------------+----------+----------+----------+---------- Agriculture | 2,893,674| 55.7 | 1,842,537| 1,051,137 Domestic and personal | | | | service | 1,074,543| 20.7 | 234,063| 840,480 Manufacturing and hand | | | | trades | 657,130| 12.6 | 575,845| 81,285 Transportation | 276,648| 5.3 | 274,565| 2,083 Trade | 132,019| 2.5 | 123,635| 8,384 Professional service | 69,471| 1.3 | 39,400| 30,071 Public service | 26,295| 0.5 | 25,838| 457 Others | 62,755| 1.4 | 62,671| 84 +----------+----------+----------+---------- Total United States[50]| 5,192,535| 100.0 | 3,178,554| 2,013,981 ------------------------+----------+----------+----------+----------

In 1910, more than three-fourths of the gainfully occupied Negroes in the United States were engaged in two forms of industry--agriculture and domestic and personal service. In the South at that time 78.8 per cent of the Negro population lived in rural communities[51] and 62 per cent of those employed were engaged in agriculture.[52] It is evident, therefore, that the northward migration involved a sudden transition of the southern Negro from farms or small towns to the highly specialized industries of northern cities, with marked changes in modes of living.

On many southern plantations the Negroes were required to buy food and clothing on credit at such high prices that their shares of the return were usually spent before the crops were harvested.[53] This system encouraged careless spending and did nothing to induce habits of thrift. Even the hardest-working Negroes frequently found themselves in debt to their landlords at the end of the year.[54] Incentive to sustained effort and regular work was lacking in the hand-to-mouth existence under this prevailing system of share rent and credit. It naturally produced habits such as drawing against wages and working irregularly under the spur of temporary need. Men handicapped by such habits joined the migration in great numbers. Though ill-fitted for the keen competition, business-like precision, and six-day-week routine of northern industry, the southern Negro, in spite of these handicaps, has succeeded in Chicago.

II. THE NEGRO IN CHICAGO INDUSTRIES IN 1910 AND 1920

Of the Negro population of 44,103 in Chicago in 1910 the gainfully occupied numbered 27,317. The distribution of this number, according to industrial classification, is given in Table XIX, which shows that 60 per cent of all such Negroes were engaged in domestic and personal service, as compared with 15 per cent in manufacturing and 3 per cent in clerical occupations.

TABLE XIX

NEGROES GAINFULLY OCCUPIED IN CHICAGO IN 1910[55]

======================================================================= | Both | | | Industries | Sexes | Percentage | Male | Female ------------------------------+---------+------------+--------+-------- Manufacturing and mechanical | 4,071 | 15 | 3,073 | 998 Transportation | 1,852 | 7 | 1,849 | 3 Trade | 1,241 | 5 | 1,148 | 93 Public service | 224} | | {224 | 0 Professional | 963} | 4 | {640 | 323 Clerical occupations | 934 | 3 | 771 | 163 Domestic and personal service | 16,389 | 60 | 9,426 | 6,963 Agriculture, mining, and | | | | unclassified | 1,643 | 6 | 1,306 | 337 +---------+------------+--------+-------- Totals | 27,317 | 100 | 18,437 | 8,880 ------------------------------+---------+------------+--------+--------

1. METHOD AND SCOPE OF INVESTIGATION

To discover the industries in Chicago which were employing Negroes in appreciable numbers in 1920, preliminary questionnaires were sent to 850 employers compiled from lists furnished by: (1) the Chicago Association of Commerce (covering 591 establishments, with a total of 350,000 employees); (2) the Employment Department of the Chicago Urban League; (3) the Illinois Free Employment Bureau; (4) the Federal Employment Bureau; and (5) the classified telephone directory.

Questionnaires were returned by 460 establishments of 850 to which they were mailed. We are satisfied that the replies received cover the field of Negro labor, and that no establishments of importance in this field have been overlooked. Table XX shows the results:

TABLE XX

==================================================================== | Number of |Total Negroes Negroes Employed |Establishments| Employed ---------------------------------------+--------------+------------- No Negroes | 264 | 0 Less than five Negroes | 59 | 111 Five Negroes or more (manufacturing) | 69 | 12,854 Five Negroes or more | | (non-manufacturing) | 68 | 9,483 +--------------+------------- Totals | 460 | 22,448 ---------------------------------------+--------------+-------------

Answers came from 156 manufacturing establishments employing fifty-one or more wage-earners. The representative character of this group is indicated by the fact that over three-fourths of the total wage-earners in Chicago engaged in manufacturing in 1914 were employed in factories of this class. The United States Census of Manufactures for 1914 reported the total number of wage-earners employed in manufacturing in Chicago in that year as 313,710; of this number, 244,827, or 78 per cent, were employed in 1,032 establishments employing fifty-one or more wage-earners. The 156 questionnaires therefore represented 15 per cent of the 1,032 establishments in this class (in 1914) and included 107,403 wage-earners, or almost 44 per cent of the total wage-earners in this class and 30 per cent of the total wage-earners engaged in manufacturing in 1914.

Questionnaires reporting Negro employees were returned by 104 manufacturing establishments of all classes. Of these, sixteen employed one to fifty wage-earners, representing a total of 435 wage-earners; and eighty-eight employed fifty-one or more wage-earners, representing a total of 78,919 wage-earners.

Since thirty-five of the manufacturing establishments reporting Negro labor (or 33 per cent of the 104 so reporting) employed less than five Negroes each, or a total of seventy Negroes in all, while sixty-nine employed 12,854 Negroes, or 99.4 per cent of the total Negroes reported by manufacturing establishments, it seemed advisable in this report to consider only those employing five Negroes or more, in order not to give undue weight to conditions where only a relatively few Negroes were concerned. A similar situation was disclosed by the returns furnished by non-manufacturing establishments, and the returns from twenty-four employing a total of forty-one Negroes have been disregarded in this report in order to give proper weight to conditions in the sixty-eight employing five or more Negroes which reported a total of 9,483 Negroes.[56] The combined number of establishments, both manufacturing (69) and non-manufacturing (68), employing five or more Negroes each was 137.

On the basis of the returns reported in the preliminary questionnaires certain establishments and industries were selected for more intensive study through personal interviews with employers, conferences participated in by employers and members of the Commission, and interviews with employees. The basis on which the selection was made was either the number of Negroes employed or the length of time during which Negroes had been employed, special attention being given to those industries and establishments which had employed Negro labor for the first time since the war. The industries employing large numbers of Negro workers which were selected for further study were: slaughtering, meat packing, and other food products; iron foundries and iron and steel products; laundries; needle trades; hotels; railroads; Pullman and dining-car services; tanneries; taxicab upkeep and repair; mail order.

An investigator for the Commission visited 101 establishments of the 137 reporting five or more Negro employees (ten establishments employing less than five Negroes each were also visited). Four industrial conferences or informal hearings were held by the Commission, large employers of Negro labor being invited to co-operate with the Commission by giving it the benefit of their experience with Negro labor. Among those who reported were general superintendents, assistant superintendents, employment managers, and other representatives of the large employers of Negro labor in Chicago as shown in Table XXI:

TABLE XXI

No. of Negroes Employed in 1920 Pullman Car Shops 450 Armour & Co., Stock Yards 2,084 Morris & Co., Stock Yards 1,400 Swift & Co., Stock Yards 2,278 Wilson & Co., Stock Yards 818 Corn Products Refining Co., food products 500 International Harvester Co., agricultural machinery 1,551 Yellow Cab Co., taxicab 250 American Car and Foundry Co.[57] 20 American Brake Shoe and Foundry Co. 265 Brady Foundry Co. 125 National Malleable Castings Co. 427 Western Foundry Co. 200 Sears, Roebuck & Co., mail order 1,423 Montgomery Ward & Co., mail order 350 Gage Bros. Wholesale Millinery 73 Spring-filled Products Co., automobile cushions 250 ------ Total 12,464

2. NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE OF NEGRO EMPLOYEES

The number and percentage of Negro employees to the total employees in 136 establishments reporting five or more Negroes are shown in Table XXII.

TABLE XXII

NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE OF NEGRO EMPLOYEES IN ESTABLISHMENTS REPORTING FIVE OR MORE NEGROES

=================================+========================================= |Number of | | | Negro Industry |Establish-| Total | Negro |Percentage | ments |Employees|Employees| of Total ---------------------------------+----------+---------+---------+---------- Manufacturing: | | | | Box manufacturing (paper) | 3 | 995 | 143 | 14 Clothing | 9 | 1,405 | 203 | 14 Cooperage | 2 | 327 | 106 | 32 Food products | 8 | 35,278 | 7,597 | 22 Iron and steel products | | | | (iron foundries) | 27 | 37,773 | 3,879 | 10 Tanneries | 7 | 2,230 | 462 | 21 Miscellaneous: | | | | Lamp-shade manufacturing | 1 | 275 | 75 | 27 Auto-cushion manufacturing | 2 | 500 | 250 | 50 Other industries | | | | (manufacturing) | 10 | 2,571 | 139 | 5 +----------+---------+---------+--------- Totals | 69 | 79,354 | 12,854 | 16 ---------------------------------+----------+---------+---------+--------- Non-manufacturing: | | | | Hotels | 9 | 1,714 | 923 | 53 Laundries | 20 | 1,736 | 764 | 44 Mail order[58] | 1 | 17,450 | 1,423 | 8 Railroads, dining- and Pullman-| | | | car service | 16 | 7,816 | 5,408 | 68 Miscellaneous industries[59] | 21 | 10,028 | 615 | 6 +----------+---------+---------+--------- Totals | 67 | 38,744 | 9,133 | 23 ---------------------------------+----------+---------+---------+---------

3. INCREASE IN NEGRO LABOR SINCE 1915

The data obtained from questionnaires, interviews, and conferences with employers disclosed the fact that there has been a remarkable increase since 1915 in the number of Negro workers employed in manufacturing, in clerical occupations, and in laundries. As was to be expected, the number of Negroes in personal service (hotels, dining-cars, and parlor-cars) also increased, but the increase was negligible in comparison with the gain in the other fields mentioned.

Inability to obtain competent white workers was the reason given in practically every instance for the large increase in the number of Negroes employed since 1914. All of the large employers of Negro labor attending the conferences assigned shortage of labor as the principal reason for the increased number of Negroes reported. A few establishments (not represented in the conferences) reported that Negroes had first been employed to take the place of strikers, and increasing numbers had been employed thereafter. The establishments so reporting were hotels, a small clothing factory, and a warehouse company. Because of the labor shortage in the North, large numbers of Negroes left the southern states.

TABLE XXIII

NEGROES EMPLOYED FROM 1915 TO 1920 IN SIXTY-TWO MANUFACTURING ESTABLISHMENTS CLASSIFIED ACCORDING TO INDUSTRIES[60]

======================+==========+======+======+======+======+======+======= |Number of | | | | | | Industries |Establish-| 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | ments | | | | | | ----------------------+----------+------+------+------+------+------+------- Box making | 3 | 3 | 3 | 116 | 116 | 145 | 143 Clothing | 9 | 75 | 110 | 140 | 108 | 161 | 203 Other needlework | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 25 | 325 | 325 Cooperage | 2 | 29 | 34 | 95 | 110 | 15 | 106 Food products[61] | 16 |1,103 |2,529 |4,765 |6,518 |5,789 | 5,379 Iron and steel[62] | 22 | 121 | 672 |1,115 |1,580 |3,002 | 3,829 Tanneries | 7 | 0 | 17 | 36 | 87 | 229 | 462 Miscellaneous | | | | | | | manufacturing | 10 | 15 | 15 | 24 | 48 | 75 | 140 +----------+------+------+------+------+------+------- Totals | 62 |1,346 |3,380 |6,291 |8,592 |9,881 |10,587 ----------------------+----------+------+------+------+------+------+-------

TABLE XXIV

NEGROES EMPLOYED FROM 1915 TO 1920 IN FORTY-SEVEN ESTABLISHMENTS (NON-MANUFACTURING) CLASSIFIED ACCORDING TO INDUSTRIES[63]

======================+==========+======+======+======+======+======+====== |Number of | | | | | | Industries |Establish-| 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | ments | | | | | | ----------------------+----------+------+------+------+------+------+------- Hotels | 9 | 544 | 559 | 615 | 684 | 693 | 956 Laundries | 20 | 118 | 180 | 220 | 350 | 520 | 764 Mail order (clerical | | | | | | | occupations) | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 664 |1,650 | 1,400 Railroads (dining- and| | | | | | | parlor-car service) | 16 |3,939 |3,940 |4,274 |4,493 |4,506 | 5,363 +----------+------+------+------+------+------+------- Totals | 47 |4,601 |4,679 |5,109 |6,191 |7,369 | 8,483 ----------------------+----------+------+------+------+------+------+-------

4. CHICAGO EMPLOYERS AND SOUTHERN NEGRO LABOR

During the course of its inquiry the statement was frequently made to members of the Commission or to its investigators that large employers of labor in Chicago, and particularly the packers, had imported many Negroes from the South. Although the Commission made a thorough investigation of such statements, no evidence of any value was discovered to support them.

The general superintendents of the Armour, Morris, Swift, and Wilson plants who attended conferences declared emphatically that their companies had not engaged in any encouragement of migration.

Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, being asked through correspondence from the Commission if he could furnish any evidence tending to prove the importation of Negroes into the Chicago district by employers, replied, "There is a plentitude of such evidence," but when Mr. Gompers was urged to cite the evidence, his reply was: "It cannot be unknown to you that some 30,000 Negroes were imported into the Chicago district during the steel strike. They did not go there of their own volition, but through inducements which were held out to them by the agents of employers who visited southern and western cities."

As, however, the Chicago race riot occurred a year prior to the steel strike, importation of Negroes at the latter time could not have affected the situation out of which the riot came. But the fact remains that labor leaders insist that employers in the Chicago district imported Negroes from the South, notwithstanding their inability to cite facts in support of this belief.

5. CLASSIFICATION OF NEGRO WORKERS

An accurate classification of Negro laborers into skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled would help to an understanding of the position of the Negro in industry. In manufacturing, such a classification was attempted, but the results were unsatisfactory. These classes cannot be strictly defined, and different employers give them different meanings. In a number of important cases employers reported the total number of skilled and unskilled, and that figures for each class could not be compiled without great labor. In all such cases the total is listed as "unskilled." This class is thus unduly enlarged at the expense of the semi-skilled and the skilled. So the number of semi-skilled workers appears to be less than the skilled. These facts show that accuracy cannot be claimed for the classification in Table XXV.

TABLE XXV

NEGRO EMPLOYEES IN SIXTY-SIX MANUFACTURING ESTABLISHMENTS CLASSIFIED AS SKILLED, SEMI-SKILLED, AND UNSKILLED

==================+===============+=========+=========+=========+========== | Number of | Total | | Semi- | Industry |Establishments | Negroes | Skilled | skilled | Unskilled ------------------+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------- Box manufacturing | 3 | 143 | ... | ... | 143 Clothing | 9 | 203 | 57 | 29 | 117 Cooperage | 2 | 106 | 8 | 45 | 53 Food products[64] | 8 | 7,597 | 229 | 12 | 7,356 Iron and steel | 27 | 3,879 | 434 | 180 | 3,265 Tanneries | 7 | 462 | 175 | ... | 287 Miscellaneous | 10 | 139 | 24 | 1 | 114 +---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------- Total[65] | 66 | 12,529 | 927 | 267 | 11,335 ------------------+---------------+---------+---------+---------+----------

The attempt to classify Negro workers according to occupation failed because the necessary information was not obtainable, especially from large employers. Nevertheless the number of workers in certain occupations reported by a few establishments is suggestive of the fields recently opened to Negroes in Chicago. In 1910[66] there were only thirty-one Negro molders in Chicago, while in 1920 there were 304 reported by ten establishments. In 1910 there were but twenty-eight factory sewers or machine operators, while in 1920 there were 382 in twelve factories. In 1910 there were 934 Negroes employed in clerical occupations as compared with 1,400 in two concerns in 1920. In 1910 there were but 287 Negro laundry operatives in Chicago, while there were 764 reported by twenty laundries in 1920.

6. WAGES OF NEGRO WORKERS

The period of this industrial investigation--the spring and summer of 1920--was one of exceptional demand for labor and of high wages. Employers were glad to get workers of any sort at high pay.[67] In branches of employment where Negroes were permitted to work, their wages were generally the same as those of the white workers. In interviewing many Negro workers the Commission's investigators found practically no complaints of discrimination in wages on the same tasks. And the Chicago Urban League which, through its industrial department, places more Negroes in employment than any other agency in Chicago reported that it had very few complaints of such discrimination.

Some discrimination was practiced by foremen in placing or keeping Negroes at work on processes that yielded smaller returns than those to which white workers were assigned. In the field of common labor, where the largest number of Negroes are employed, some kinds of piecework yield greater returns than others. The tendency of foremen in some plants was to place Negroes on those processes yielding the smallest returns. The following are instances of such discrimination in favor of the white workers in the same plants.

In two large foundries white molders were given standard patterns, which remain the same throughout the year and permit the working up of speed; while patterns that were changed frequently, and made production slower were given to the Negroes. As speed determined the piecework earnings, the Negroes could not earn as much as the white molders in the same foundry.

In the several plants the white workers were favored in the distribution of overtime work; or Negroes were not permitted to work at all on overtime at "time and a half" rates or on Sundays at "double pay" as long as white workers were available.

While in the larger industries there was seldom any complaint about inequality in the basic rate of pay for common labor, restrictions upon the promotion and advancement of Negroes frequently prevented them from earning higher wages. In one department of a large food-products plant Negroes reached the maximum rate of 61 cents per hour after a few months' employment. No further advancement could be had because the superintendent was not willing to place Negro foremen over white workers. A Negro in the starch-mixing department held a skilled position as starch tester. It became apparent that in carrying out his duties many of the starch mixers would be subject to his immediate direction. The foreman apparently did not approve of this and ordered him to teach his duties to a Polish workman. The Negro declined to do this, and the matter was referred to the general superintendent. After an investigation it was decided to permit the Negro to retain his position as tester, but he was given no authority over the men.

In view of the fluctuations in wages, the impracticability of getting actual records of wages from all plants, and the discrepancies which in some instances did appear between reported and actual wages, it seemed desirable to supplement the information of the Commission's investigators. The records of the industrial department of the Chicago Urban League afforded the most complete data on wages received by Negroes that could be found in Chicago. During the year 1919 it placed more than 14,000 Negroes in plants in the Chicago District. In each case, when securing Negro employment, it kept a record of the wages actually offered and of conditions of work. If the Negro made complaint that the wage or work conditions did not prove to be as stated, it investigated the complaint.

Included in these records are the Pullman Company, Wilson & Company (packers), Armour & Company, Morris Company, Swift & Company, Illinois Malleable Iron Company, National Malleable and Castings Company, International Harvester Company, the General Can Company, the Republic Box Company, Chicago Fire Brick Company, Sears, Roebuck & Company, Superior Process Company, Consumers Coal Company, Corn Products Refining Company at Argo, United States Quartermasters' Department, Adams & Westlake Company, Griess Pfleger Tanning Company, and Inland Steel Company.

In the industries listed above, the minimum wage rate per hour is 42.5 cents, which is the minimum rate for the packing industries. The maximum rate is sixty-one cents per hour paid by the Corn Products Refining Company at Argo and the International Harvester Company. Neither of the latter, however, represents a basic wage. The average wage for the thirty-six companies is 48.7 cents. These wage rates cover the most arduous tasks found in the list of common labor. Three items for track laborers are included. Others include freight handlers, yardmen, truckers, sweepers, foundry laborers, etc. Six companies work ten hours per day, twelve companies nine hours, one company nine and one-half hours, seventeen companies eight hours. Four pay bonuses, not including packers, who also pay a bonus in compliance with the award of a judge acting as mediator between the packers and the union.

The building trades are not included, but of the three independent contractors listed the wage paid common laborers is 50 cents per hour, 60 cents per hour, and 70 cents per hour, respectively, for eight hours, while the union rate of pay for common labor is $1.00 per hour for eight hours, time and one-half for overtime, and double time for Sunday.

7. WOMEN EMPLOYEES IN INDUSTRIAL ESTABLISHMENTS

Negro women employed in thirty-one industrial establishments worked, in five of them forty-four hours a week, in fifteen of them forty-eight hours, in seven of them forty-nine hours, and in four of them fifty-one hours. The weekly pay ranged from $9.00 to $15.00 a week as clothing folders, to as high as $20.00 to $35.00 a week as clothing drapers or finishers. Map mounting paid $15.00 a week, book binding $15.00, paper-box making $13.00, tobacco stripping $16.40, core making (foundry work) $16.40, twine weaving $17.40, silk-shade making $10.00 to $18.00, food packing $12.00 to $15.00, mattress making $12.00 to $22.00, riveters (canvas) $15.00, paper sorters $12.00, steam laundry workers (unskilled) $13.00 to $16.00, steam laundry hand workers $18.00 to $29.00, power-machine operators on men's caps $15.00 to $18.00, on aprons $14.00 to $18.00, on dresses $15.00 to $18.00, on overalls (union shop) $18.00 to $25.00, and on overalls (non-union shop) $15.00 to $18.00.

Of fourteen companies employing colored girls as operators, five paid on a piecework basis only. Two paid from $12.00 to $18.00 per week, depending on the skill of the operator, two companies paid $14.00 per week to beginners, one paid $15.00 per week to beginners, three paid $12.00 per week to beginners, one paid $18.00 per week to beginners, the latter being a union shop.

Considerable unrest has been traceable to delay on the part of the managers in promoting beginners above the beginning wage. Girls have been retained at a beginning wage for an unreasonable time after acquiring satisfactory skill and production. This condition is known to the Women's Trade Union League, but no well-directed effort has ever been made to unionize colored workers in the garment trades, except when they have been called in as strike breakers to replace white workers. An instance of this was the strike at the C. B. Shane Company, manufacturers of raincoats, where colored girls were employed to replace striking white union workers. At that time very few colored girls were members of the local union. According to an official of the Women's Garment Workers' Union not more than 125 colored workers have become members.

8. HOTEL AND RESTAURANT EMPLOYEES

_Men._--In about twenty-five hotels and restaurants in which colored men are employed, wages are as follows:

Chief cooks $25.00 to $50.00 per week Waiters 25.00 to 40.00 per week Bus boys 14.00 to 20.00 per week Hotel porters 45.00 to 65.00 per month Dishwashers 15.00 to 20.00 per week Second cooks 20.00 to 35.00 per week Bell-boys 40.00 to 45.00 per month Shoe shiners and washroom porters 15.00 to 17.00 per week

In all of the above-listed occupations the wages are augmented by tips. It is difficult to form an accurate estimate of the amount earned in tips for the reason that it is conditioned upon the character of service rendered and the inclination of the person served to pay for personal service. It would be fair to estimate that in hotels and restaurants known to employees as "good houses" the tips range from $2.00 to $5.00 per day. In a colored restaurant in the neighborhood of Thirty-first and State streets a wage of $5.00 per week is paid to waitresses, while the tips have been known to total five times that amount.

_Women._--The twenty-five hotels and restaurants concerning which the Chicago Urban League's Industrial Department has records, employ women in the occupations and at the wages listed as follows:

Waitresses $ 8.00 to $15.00 per week and tips (board) Chambermaids 25.00 to 45.00 per month and tips (board) Pantry girls 15.00 to 18.00 per week and board Kitchen help 9.00 to 16.00 per week and board

Allowing an average of 35 cents per meal for three meals, $1.05 per day or $7.35 per week should be added where board is included. This would make the following schedule of wages:

Waitresses $15.35 to $22.35 per week Chambermaids 54.40 to 74.40 per month Pantry girls 22.35 to 25.35 per week Kitchen help 16.35 to 23.35 per week

In clerical positions colored men have had very little opportunity, except in the post-office. There are exceptions, however, such as shipping clerks, storekeepers, and bookkeepers.

The girls employed as long-hand entry clerks, typists, checkers, routers, and Elliott-Fisher and adding-machine operators received during 1920 from $15.00 to $16.00 as a beginning wage. The chief supervisor (colored) in charge of 600 girls in one of the large mail-order houses received $23.00 per week, and the assistant superintendent, a white man, received $50.00 per week while studying the mail-order business under the chief supervisor. When the management's attention was called to the inequality, two additional supervisors were added and the work lessened without increase of pay.

Another firm employing several hundred colored girls paid a welfare worker $20.00 per week, while another with half that number of girls paid $25.00 per week.

There was a deep-seated suspicion existing among the clerical force of a firm employing a large number of colored girls that the white girls employed by the same company received a higher wage than that paid the colored girls. The suspicion grew out of the mistake of an employment manager in mistaking a colored girl for a white one.

9. RAILROAD WORKERS

_Dining-car men._--According to the records of the Railway Men's International Industrial Benevolent Association, wages of dining-car waiters prior to 1916 were universally $25.00 per month, with the exception of the Santa Fe, which paid from $35.00 to $40.00 per month for "preferred" runs. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy allowed an additional $3.00 to the $25.00 standard for men in service ten years or more.

In 1918, after the roads had been federalized, the minimum wage became $48.00 per month. In May, 1919, a further increase to $55.00 per month and overtime on a mileage basis was granted. This gave an average of $62.00 per month for so called "transcontinental" runs, that is, service between Chicago and the Pacific Coast.

Effective February 1, 1920, wages were adjusted to an hourly basis, which gave payment for overtime in excess of 240 hours per month. On July 20, 1920, most roads allowed a general increase to dining-car men which brought the average to $65.00 per month.

An official of the Railway Men's International Industrial Benevolent Association estimated that the tips and salary of the average waiter were $105.00 per month, including three meals valued at 35 cents per day. This estimate was accepted by the Federal Railway Labor Board. This low estimate is arrived at because it is generally the custom to feed waiters and kitchen crews on leftovers which would otherwise become waste.

_Porters._--The wages of porters, including tips, is estimated at $105.00 per month. The present salary paid to porters is $65.00 per month. In May, 1919, the minimum basis was $60.00 per month on a mileage basis of $.0055 per mile in excess of 11,000 miles per month. In December of the same year a final adjustment of the wage scale was made in which length of service was taken as a basis. For three years or less the pay was $63.00 per month; for from three to ten years the pay was $66.00 per month; for ten years or more the pay was $69.00 per month. The Railway Men's International Industrial Benevolent Association furnished the above information.

According to the same authority, on January 1, 1921, most roads reduced the hourly overtime for waiters, cooks, and stewards and placed it on a straight time service, with pay ranging between $60.00 and $65.00 per month. A twenty-four-day month was also established. This was equal to a reduction of wages for the class of labor referred to.

In the case of thirty-one orders for porters in stores, restaurants, cafés, and drugstores, office buildings, etc., the wages ran from $12.00 per week to $25.00. Some difficulty was experienced in determining a minimum wage, for the reason that in many instances full time is not required, porters being allowed to do odd jobs on their own account. Of these thirty-one, three received $12 a week, one $13, four $15, two $16, one $17, four $18, two $19, six $20, three $21, one $21.25, one $22 and two $25.

Apartment-house janitors usually are affiliated with the labor unions. An instance of financial benefit is as follows: F----, who is engineer for an apartment in Evanston, before joining the union received $45.00 per month for his services, with quarters in a basement apartment. He now receives $125.00 per month with the same quarters.

Firemen with licenses were offered from $125.00 to $150.00 per month in ten different positions filled by the League.

10. DOMESTIC WORKERS

Eighty-one orders for maids for service in private families were listed with the following results: maximum, $18.00 per week with room and board; minimum, $6.00 per week with room and board; average, $12.84 per week with room and board. Of these, twenty-six were paid $15, eight $14, twelve $12, fifteen $10. Three received $18, and one $20.

_Children's nurses._--Fifteen were listed, of whom five were paid $15.00 per week with room and board, six were paid $12.00, one was paid $7.00, two were paid $5.00, and one was paid $3.00.

_Cooks._--Sixteen were listed as follows: one was paid $25.00 per week with room and board, four were paid $18.00, three were paid $16.00, six were paid $15.00, and two were paid $14.00.

The minimum wage for cooks indicated is $14.00 per week with room and board. The maximum wage is $25.00 per week with room and board, while in the case of children's nurses the maximum wage is $15.00 per week and the minimum $3.00 per week for part time.

_Housemen._--Out of a list of twenty-five orders, a minimum of $40.00 per month with room and board, a maximum of $100.00 per month with room and board, and an average of $65.00 per month with room and board.

_Chauffeurs._--Minimum of $100.00 per month with room and board and maximum of $150.00 per month with room and board. It is difficult to outline the duties of chauffeurs for the reason that they often perform the duties of butler, houseman, yardman, etc., in addition to that of chauffeur.

_Couples._--(Man and wife.) Out of twenty-five orders listed, the following wages were offered: minimum of $85.00 per month with room and board. A maximum of $165.00 per month with room and board.

_Laundresses._--Usually employed by the day. The prevailing rate per day over the past year was $4.00 and car fare, with one meal. This wage was asked by common understanding and without any visible form of organization. Since November 1, 1920, when the unemployment situation became manifest, $3.60 per day, car fare, and one meal has been accepted.

From 1918 to November 1, 1920, a serious shortage of domestic help was noted. Colored girls and women deserted this grade of work for the factories, where shorter hours and free Sundays were secured. The larger pay of domestic employment did not attract the average worker, for the reason that free evenings for recreation and amusement were apparently more desirable than the isolation and long hours of domestic service.

Recently housekeepers secured Negro girls from the southern states and imported Negro girls from the British West India Islands[68] in an attempted solution of the domestic-help problem. Transportation and clothes were furnished by employers and some sort of verbal agreement entered into by which the girls were expected to work out this indebtedness. Instances have come to the attention of the Chicago Urban League which seem to indicate that these agreements have not worked out satisfactorily. For example: One colored woman was brought from a small town in Florida to a Chicago suburb by a white family on such an agreement. After a few weeks' service the employer complained that the work performed by the woman as a general maid was unsatisfactory. Abuse followed. The woman sought to go to a Negro family under the pretence that she wished to return a pair of borrowed shoes. Her employer, fearing that she wished to escape, drove her to the home of the Negro family in his automobile. Once inside the home, she told a story of how her employer had kicked, beaten, and threatened her with a revolver if she attempted to leave. The Negro family gave asked-for shelter and informed the employer that she would not return. After threatening to take her away by force, the employer went away and the woman remained. A suit followed on a charge of assault and battery and the employer was discharged for lack of evidence.

A few weeks ago a white resident of another Chicago suburb applied to the juvenile court for the guardianship of a colored girl. The court, being unable to handle the case, requested the advice of the Chicago Urban League. The details of the case were substantially as follows:

A Roman Catholic organization in Jamaica, British West Indies, sent ten or twelve Jamaican girls to the United States, upon applications of housekeepers, to serve as domestics. Some verbal agreement had been entered into whereby the girls were to accept service as domestics and work out the cost of transportation and clothing at a stipulated rate per week. The arrangement seems to have progressed fairly until the girls became acquainted with other colored people residing in the neighborhood. It was then discovered that they were working at a wage considerably lower than the usual wage. The girl in question, who was a minor but seems to have misrepresented her age when applying for a passport, was receiving $6.00 per week, one dollar of which was paid in cash and the balance deducted to cover the expense of clothing and transportation. After becoming dissatisfied with these wages, the girl left the home of her white employer, who sought to be appointed her guardian so that he could restrain her. A guardian has not thus far been appointed, for the reason that the legal status of the girl and the legality of the contract entered into are doubtful.

III. EMPLOYERS' EXPERIENCE WITH NEGRO LABOR

The entrance of Negroes in large numbers into manufacturing industries and clerical occupations is one of the striking facts shown by this investigation. Shortage of labor due to war conditions created many openings for the Negro. Whether he will remain in these fields and become an increasingly important factor in them will depend in a large degree upon his efficiency and reliability, as well as upon absence of racial friction, satisfactory wages, etc. It was therefore deemed important to learn how the Negro improved his industrial opportunities.

The Commission made some investigation of this subject, seeking the opinion of as many employers as possible who had had experience with Negro workers. The inquiry covered two points: (1) a general question in the preliminary questionnaire, to learn whether Negro labor had proved satisfactory; and (2) a comparison of the Negro with the white worker in efficiency, reliability, regularity, and labor turnover. The facts under each head are considered separately below, following a brief consideration of the difference between the southern and northern Negro.

1. SOUTHERN AND NORTHERN NEGROES COMPARED

Many employers drew a distinction between the recent southern migrants and northern Negroes, and commented upon certain shortcomings of the former, although they expressed themselves as satisfied on the whole with Negro labor.

For instance, the representative of a foundry company with 200 Negroes out of a total of 950 employees said:

It appears to me that the men coming from the South get here and for a limited length of time seem to have a different view of things. They do things that probably the Chicago Negro wouldn't do. They don't seem to know exactly how to control themselves. They are unsettled and to a great degree unsteady. The northern-born Negro is more active. He is brighter in a way and a little more ambitious. The southern Negroes are inclined to work today, lay off tomorrow, and be back the next day on the job again.

A representative of a large machinery-manufacturing establishment employing 1,500 Negroes out of a total of 23,000 employees in Chicago expressed the same opinion in these words:

Our experience with Negroes has a tendency to show that these people do not realize that there is such a thing as steady work. They work for possibly a week or two, then say they are obliged to lay off for some imaginary cause and will probably return within a week or four weeks. We believe they are improving and will be better as time goes on and they become more used to the way work and business are done in the North.

The superintendent of a foundry which increased its Negro employees in five years from six to 125 out of a total of 466 employees was of the following opinion:

The Negro up here from the South never heard of working six days a week and being on time every morning and staying until the job was done. It is entirely foreign to his idea of things, but with a little persistent effort and showing him that it is necessary he soon learns the system the same as the others, and I do not believe he is any worse than the white man after he has been here a year or two.

The superintendent of a company employing more that 2,000 Negroes out of a total of 10,000 employees in Chicago declared:

The southern Negroes have not yet become thoroughly reconciled to working six days a week. Down South they are accustomed to taking off Saturdays, and they are quite frequently absent on Saturday. That is not true of the colored man who has been with us a long time. He is accustomed to the regularity of six days a week, but the men from the South have the weakness of being away on Saturdays.

In general it was the employers of large numbers of Negroes who differentiated between the southern and the northern Negro. Employers of Negroes in small numbers were more inclined to judge all Negroes by those recently arrived from the South.

2. NEGRO LABOR SATISFACTORY

One of the questions contained in the preliminary questionnaire was: "Has your Negro labor proved satisfactory?" Of 137 questionnaires returned by establishments employing five or more Negro workers, 118 reported that Negro labor had proved satisfactory and nineteen that it had not proved satisfactory.

The significance of these returns is disclosed by Table XXVI, in which the establishments are classified by industries, and the number of Negro employees in establishments reporting Negro labor satisfactory is shown to be 21,640 as contrasted with 697 Negro employees in the nineteen establishments reporting Negro labor unsatisfactory.

TABLE XXVI

NEGRO LABOR SATISFACTORY OR UNSATISFACTORY IN ESTABLISHMENTS CLASSIFIED BY INDUSTRIES

===================+==========+=========+================+================= | | | ESTABLISHMENTS | ESTABLISHMENTS | | | REPORTING | REPORTING | | | NEGRO LABOR | NEGRO LABOR | | | SATISFACTORY | UNSATISFACTORY | TOTAL | TOTAL +------+---------+------+---------- INDUSTRY | NUMBER |Negroes | |Number of| |Number of |Establish-|EMPLOYED | | Negroes | | Negroes | MENTS | |Number|Employed |Number|Employed | | | |in These | |in These | | | | Estab- | | Estab- | | | |lishments| |lishments -------------------+----------+---------+------+---------+------+---------- Manufacturing: | | | | | | Clothing | 9 | 203 | 8 | 191 | 1 | 12 Food products | 8 | 7,597 | 7 | 7,547 | 1 | 50 Iron and steel | 27 | 3,879 | 22 | 3,750 | 5 | 129 Tanneries | 7 | 462 | 6 | 421 | 1 | 41 Miscellaneous[69]| 18 | 713 | 13 | 464 | 5[70]| 249 +----------+---------+------+---------+------+---------- Totals | 69 | 12,854 | 56 | 12,373 | 13 | 481 | | | | | | Non-manufacturing: | | | | | | Railroads | 16 | 5,408 | 16 | 5,408 | | Hotels | 9 | 923 | 8 | 911 | 1 | 12 Laundries | 20 | 764 | 16 | 587 | 4 | 177 Mail order | 2 | 1,773 | 2 | 1,773 | | Public service | 4 | 42 | 4 | 42 | | Taxicab upkeep | 1 | 250 | 1 | 250 | | Miscellaneous[70]| 16 | 323 | 15 | 296 | 1 | 27 +----------+---------+------+---------+------+---------- Totals | 68 | 9,483 | 62 | 9,267 | 6 | 216 +----------+---------+------+---------+------+---------- Totals, all | | | | | | industries | 137 | 22,337 | 118 | 21,640 | 19 | 697 -------------------+----------+---------+------+---------+------+----------

3. NEGRO AND WHITE LABOR COMPARED

At a conference at which Negro and white workers were under discussion a large foundry representative suggested that such a comparison was unfair to the Negro because he was still a newcomer in manufacturing industries and could not be expected to be as efficient, reliable, and regular as the white worker who had been thus engaged much longer. Other employers felt that this point should be borne in mind.

_Efficiency._--Comparing the efficiency of the Negro worker and the white worker, seventy-one employers interviewed (thirty-four manufacturing and thirty-seven non-manufacturing establishments) considered the Negro equally efficient, and twenty-two employers (thirteen manufacturing and nine non-manufacturing) considered the Negro less efficient.[71]

The seventy-one establishments which reported Negro labor as equally efficient as white labor included all of the large employers of Negro labor, with very few exceptions. Ability shown by Negro workers in widely dissimilar occupations and industries was commented upon. The following instances are of interest:

Foundries: "Our star molder in the foundry is a Negro who has been with us twenty years. Our best truck driver is a Negro who has been with us about eighteen years." "About the best grinder we have in one department is a colored man." The superintendent of a large foundry employing 125 Negroes said:

I covered thirty foundries, members of the National Association when I was serving on a certain Committee, and I know that in their departments Negroes have made very good. Out of the thirty foundries, there are half or more which have colored men in now which did not have colored men two years ago. One of the instances, a little foundry I know of, had four men in the grinding department; one colored man and his partner wanted to take the job of running the grinding room. The partner wanted to do it all himself, and is now doing what four men were doing formerly.

That the Negro is apt in learning new work is illustrated by an instance cited by the same superintendent:

I know of a Pullman porter who has been with the Pullman Company twenty years who turned out to be as good a helper as we had in the foundry. Take a man who has made beds for twenty years, put him to carrying melted iron in a ladle, which is a real man's job, and make good at it, and I think he's going some! We had one man who did that and did it well. He was a helper that the different foremen tried to get hold of, wanted to have him with them.

Public service: The probation department of the juvenile court reported six Negro employees. "The colored employees are intelligent, efficient persons. With one exception they are probation officers. One employee is in charge of the probation clerk's office and not only works with white clerks but directs the work of nine white persons."

The office of the recorder of deeds reports seventeen Negro employees in the folio or record-writing department. "The employees are marked on their efficiency. Percentages of efficiency run from 94.5 to 98 per cent among the colored clerks, and several of them averaged 97.9 per cent and 98 per cent for the past three years."

Stock Yards: "Negroes make skilled workmen. They are among the best of what are known as 'knife-men' we have."

Whether Negro labor shows greater efficiency in a working unit composed entirely of colored workers or in a mixed unit of Negro and white workers is an unsettled question. Only a few employers expressed an opinion on this point (not affording a sufficient basis for generalization), but it is interesting to note that of four foundries, one favored the separate unit and three the mixed unit, while a large food-products company had found both satisfactory.

Several employers mentioned the fact that, because of his knowledge of English, the Negro is frequently more efficient than the foreign-speaking worker. One wool warehouse company, for example, reported that Poles were satisfactory under the old method of shipping wool in carloads from a single shipper, but the new system, with shipments of hundreds of sacks tagged with the names of as many shippers, required laborers unloading the cars to separate the shipments into sections. This the Poles were unable to do, while the Negroes did the work very efficiently.

_Reliability._--Does the Negro require more supervision than the white worker in order to secure equally good results? An opinion was expressed on this point by ninety-two employers; sixty-three (thirty manufacturing and thirty-three non-manufacturing establishments) considered that the Negro did not require more supervision while twenty-eight (sixteen manufacturing and thirteen non-manufacturing establishments) considered that he did. The general superintendents of two of the large packing companies expressed contrary views on this point during one of the conferences. One said:

Negroes do not require as much supervision as some of those racial groups who do not understand the language. We can talk to a man and tell him what to do, where to go to do the work and how to do it, we can accomplish a whole lot more than if we had to send an individual with him constantly from place to place to show him how to do it. To that extent the Negro has the advantage over the man who cannot talk the English language.

The superintendent of the other company expressed the opinion that Negroes require more supervision than white workers:

For example, when they are working together in groups, especially after pay-day, they are inclined to wander into isolated spots and shoot craps. We've a good deal of trouble of that kind. They spend their money when they get it more recklessly than white people.

The representative of a food-products company with 500 Negro employees in the working force of 3,000 stated that the company had found no need of greater supervision of Negro workers than of white.

A representative of a taxicab company employing 250 colored workers stated:

We have some colored employees we trust absolutely and as far as any white employees. We have some colored men in the garage, and they take more supervision not because they are colored but because they lack education and are shiftless, but this you would find in the same grade of white workers.

A preliminary questionnaire returned by the president of a laundry company employing eighty-two Negroes out of a total of 110 employees reported:

We have a number of exceptionally good and reliable Negro employees. These men and women need very little supervision. We get some, who have never worked in industries, who require more supervision and are not very steady. On the whole we are pleased with our Negro employees.

_Regularity._--Of the employers interviewed, fifty-seven (twenty-three manufacturing and thirty-four non-manufacturing establishments) expressed an opinion that "absenteeism" among colored workers was no greater than among white workers, while thirty-six employers (twenty-four manufacturing and twelve non-manufacturing establishments) reported that it was greater. In this connection the habits of the southern Negro, commented upon above, would naturally exercise great influence. The superintendent of one of the packing companies employing 2,084 Negroes reported:

Previous to the war and up to the war the Negro was the poorest in attendance in the plant. Since the war his attendance compares favorably with any other class of employees in the Yards. It is pretty hard to explain excepting this, as they lived here longer they acquired better habits, I mean more ambition, and ambition brought about the necessity for better methods of living, better clothing, and they required more money and I guess they found out in a short time that work brought its compensations.

The tendency to work and accumulate a little and then take a vacation is no more pronounced among the colored workers than among the white workers, according to the representative of a food-products company employing 500 Negroes out of a total of 3,000 employees.

_Labor turnover and "hope on the job."_--Of the fifty-two employers expressing an opinion on the comparative labor turnover of Negro and white workers twenty-four (eleven manufacturing and thirteen non-manufacturing establishments) considered the labor turnover about equal, and twenty-eight (eighteen manufacturing and ten non-manufacturing establishments) considered the turnover greater among the Negro workers.

Closely connected with the question of labor turnover among Negroes is the question of "hope on the job," as one alert Negro expressed it. The desire to secure improved conditions of work and higher wages is shared by all workers irrespective of race. If Negro workers are not allowed to advance to better positions in a given plant, or if they are discriminated against by having their efficiency underrated by foremen, the turnover of Negro labor will naturally be high. The attitude of foremen largely determines whether Negro workers will succeed or fail. Superintendents of large plants realizing this fact have taken special care to educate foremen in the treatment of Negro labor.

For example, the superintendent of a tannery with 175 Negroes out of a total of 600 employees notified his foremen that he intended to use Negro labor, and that any foreman who felt that he could not teach colored workers would have to yield his place to someone who could. Frequent lectures to foremen were necessary to make them realize that fairness to Negro labor meant tolerance of a beginner's awkwardness and shortcomings and refraining from the use of insulting terms such as "nigger," etc.

Another company reported that when it attempted to fill skilled positions with Negroes the foremen said they would never be able to teach them as long as they lived. "It couldn't be done." The foremen were told they had to do it, and they now agree that it can be done and are "quite won over to the point of employing Negroes." The experience of this plant led the superintendent to the conclusion that no particular race is especially fitted for any given kind of work.

The superintendent of a foundry employing 2,500 men, of whom 427 are Negroes, said:

The foremen told me one time that they never could get a colored man to grind because he was afraid of the wheel. I thought we'd better try out a few of them. We found that was not the fact at all. One of the best grinders we now have is a colored man.

In discussing the attitude of foremen toward colored labor, the superintendent of another large foundry made this significant statement:

I think 50 per cent of what trouble we who employ Negro labor have is due to inefficient foremen, and the failure is in the foreman directly over the man to understand the Negro. As I see it, the Negro must be handled differently from the Pole whom we have usually had in the common labor capacity. We cannot handle the Negro the same as we could the Pole. Our foremen have not been accustomed here in Chicago in our shops to handling Negroes, and at times I have a real fight to see a Negro get an absolutely square deal.

The industrial secretary of the Chicago Urban League, referring to a large firm engaged in the manufacture of machinery, remarked:

I find the attitude of the company liberal. Negroes are advanced to high-grade positions, although some foremen need education in order to have them take the proper attitude toward the employment of Negroes. One foreman set their efficiency down to 75 per cent; the matter was taken to the efficiency department and his statement was found to be untrue. This bears out the point that Negroes will not succeed where foremen do not intend them to succeed.

Despite occasional statements that the Negro is slow or shiftless, the volume of evidence before the Commission shows that Negroes are satisfactory employees and compare favorably with other racial groups.

4. NEGRO WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

Before the war created openings in industry for Negro women, they were even more definitely restricted in their choice of occupations than were Negro men. Restricted opportunity is evident from the fact that, in 1910, almost two-thirds of the gainfully occupied Negro women in Chicago were engaged in two occupational groups, "servants" and "laundresses not in laundries," these being included among those in domestic and personal service who numbered more than three-fourths. The enumeration of Negro women gainfully employed in Chicago in 1910 classified in the census according to industries is given in Table XXVII.

TABLE XXVII

NEGRO WOMEN GAINFULLY OCCUPIED IN CHICAGO IN 1910, CLASSIFIED BY INDUSTRIES

========================================+=========+=========== | | Percentage Industry | Number | of Total ----------------------------------------+---------+----------- Manufacturing and mechanical industries | 998 | 11 Trade and transportation | 96 | 1 Professional service | 323 | 4 Clerical occupations | 163 | 2 Domestic and personal service: | | Laundresses not in laundries | 2,115} | Servants | 3,512} | 78 Other domestic and personal service | 1,336} | General and unclassified occupations | 337 | 4 +---------+----------- Total gainfully occupied | 8,880 | 100 ----------------------------------------+---------+-----------

TABLE XXVIII

NEGRO WOMEN IN FIFTY ESTABLISHMENTS CLASSIFIED BY INDUSTRIES IN 1920[72]

==============================+==========+=========+=========|============ |Number of | | Total | Total |Establish-| Total | Negro |Negro Women Industry | ments |Employees|Employees| Employees |Reporting | | | ------------------------------+----------+---------+---------+------------ Manufacturing: | | | | Tanneries | 1 | 600 | 175 | 50 Iron and steel | 3 | 10,435 | 1,729 | 74 Slaughtering and packing | 3 | 20,990 | 4,818 | 437 Cooperage | 2 | 327 | 106 | 30 Clothing | 9 | 1,405 | 203 | 202 Other needle trades | 3 | 775 | 325 | 325 Box making (paper) | 3 | 995 | 143 | 104 Miscellaneous | 3 | 1,543 | 95 | 73 +----------+---------+---------+------------ Totals | 27 | 37,070 | 7,594 | 1,295 | | | | Non-manufacturing:[73] | | | | Hotels | 4 | 550 | 250 | 69 Taxicab upkeep | 1 | 1,600 | 250 | 100 Laundries | 16 | 1,511 | 664 | 543 Mail order | | | | (clerical occupations)[74]| 2 | ... | 1,773 | 1,400 +----------+---------+---------+------------ Totals | 23 | ... | 2,937 | 2,112 ------------------------------+----------+---------+---------+------------

To learn the special problems concerning Negro women in industry, one conference was devoted to the industries recently opened to them. Representatives of four establishments employing a total of 1,713 Negro women attended the conference. The investigation of the 101 establishments (employing five or more Negroes) disclosed the presence of women in a large majority of cases, but in a number of instances the management was unable to tell the sex of workers from the records kept and gave the investigator the total number of Negroes employed without classification by sex. Of the 137 establishments reporting, forty-two had no Negro women employees; forty-five kept no separate sex records; fifty reported separately the number of Negro women workers.

Comparing the industries in which Negro women were employed in 1910 with the figures quoted for 1920, a striking increase is seen in the total engaged in manufacturing, 998 being the total Negro women reported for all manufacturing establishments in Chicago in 1910, as compared with 1,295 Negro women reported by twenty-seven establishments in 1920.

Comparisons for special industries and occupations show the contrasts between 1910 and 1920 in Table XXIX.

TABLE XXIX

=================================================+======+=======+========== | | |Number of Industry | 1910 | 1920 |Establish- | | | ments -------------------------------------------------+------+-------+---------- Sewers and sewing-machine operators in factories | 25 | 527 | 12 Slaughtering and packing-house operatives | 8 | 437 | 3 Box making (paper) | 3 | 104 | 3 Tanneries | 0 | 50 | 1 Clerical occupations | 163 | 1,400 | 2 Laundry operatives | 184 | 543 | 16 Taxicab cleaning | 0 | 100 | 1 -------------------------------------------------+------+-------+----------

Labor shortage was given as the reason for employing Negro women and girls by all of the firms employing them in large numbers. The outlook for Negro women in industry when there is a labor surplus is uncertain. Employers employing 1,713 Negro women represented at a conference, May 18, 1920, agreed that there were no indications of a reduction of employment. This question is considered at length hereafter in "Future of the Negro in Chicago Industries."

EXPERIMENTS WITH NEGRO WOMEN WORKERS

Employers' opinions regarding the character of Negro labor without reference to sex were considered above. Particular comments concerning male workers were quoted there, comments upon women workers are now given. Four employers of Negro women in large numbers within the past two years gave the Commission the benefit of their experience. They were two mail-order concerns, a manufacturer of automobile spring cushions, and a wholesale millinery shop.

The mail-order house which established a large office for Negro entry clerks in September, 1918, was the first to try the experiment. It had no precedent to guide it and "did not know how the colored girl would act in business." The unit was opened with ninety girls, and increased in the fall of 1919 to 650 girls, who were given the promise of advancement and Negro supervision. In the early summer of 1920, when the investigator visited this office, there were 311 girls at work, as follows:

Operators on Elliott-Fisher machines 30 Mail-order workers 76 Instructing new girls 9 Checkers 138 Supervisors 5 Mail opening, sorting, etc. 27 Posting 26

They were above the average in education, 75 per cent being high-school graduates and 12 per cent having had two or more years in college.

The employment manager said that misunderstandings had arisen occasionally, due to the colored girl being oversensitive and suspicious. "The colored girl seems to suspect that her employer is going to put something over on her. She is suspicious of any whites that come in her vicinity and is ready to believe that any white person is prejudiced against her on account of race."

The Negro welfare worker for this unit suggested that what might seem supersensitiveness was often overzealousness on the part of girls who have not had experience enough to judge their limitations or qualifications. Being eager to succeed, they are very much disappointed when advancement does not reward their efforts: "I think the best type of colored girl we have in business is very ambitious. This is her first opportunity, and she feels that she is really a pioneer making history for her race. She is possibly a little overzealous, but can be made to get the right attitude and accept it all very gracefully."

Another characteristic of Negro girls, in the opinion of the employment manager, was an "excitable nature" which made it possible for a good leader to influence them readily:

They complain of a change of supervisors, for instance. You attempt to shift supervisors from one point of the office to another and you immediately receive a petition signed by all the girls, saying, "We love So-and-So, and please don't change her." This is not to be criticized too harshly, but it does represent something that does go on. It shows inexperience. The white girl would expect that those things would take place. The colored girl, not having been in the office very long, would feel that the fact that the supervisor was changed was something derogatory to the supervisor.

The whites didn't want to act as instructors, and the colored girls didn't want to receive instructions from the whites. By being very careful in the girls that were selected, and showing the white girls where they were wrong, and then attempting to show the colored people that these girls were not to exercise supervision, but were merely to be instructors, both sides came to an understanding on it, and we had pretty good results. The white girls that we had over there became very used to it and usually hated to leave, but we have always insisted that they leave as soon as the girls learned the work.

During the conference on Negro women in industry the representative of this mail-order establishment was asked why the Negro workers were put into a separate unit instead of being intermingled with white girls. He answered:

The first reason is that we haven't any room. The second is, I imagine, because the officials who started the office and who have carried it on since felt that it wouldn't be policy. We haven't discussed the question because we've never had occasion to consider such a move seriously. Our main office is not large enough to accommodate any more employees than we have white employees in the house. We keep that office constantly recruited up to its present strength, and there has never been any necessity or any reason to seriously consider bringing colored girls in with the white girls....

Another thing to consider there would be the type of girl that we employ. They are all young girls, mostly under twenty-five years, and they don't think for themselves; they are influenced very easily by what other girls say. You take one girl in an office of that size who was very anti-colored, and it wouldn't be very long until her sentiment would spread and pretty soon you'd have a strong sentiment against the colored girls.

If a colored girl should want to obtain employment in that part of our concern where we now employ all white girls, even if she were very competent she would undoubtedly have some trouble in securing employment in that department.

The result of the experiment with the colored unit, he said, was highly satisfactory: "We have been very favorably impressed.... The girls have made very rapid progress, in fact they surprised all of us. Their progress along lines of leadership, as supervisors, etc., has been remarkable."

About six weeks after this conference the colored unit was closed. The reasons given were lack of business, trouble with the lessor of the office, and failure to find another convenient location. A letter of recommendation was given to each employee showing that her service had been satisfactory, and a letter was also sent to the Urban League, through which the women had been employed, explaining why it had been necessary to close the office and emphasizing the fact that this action should not be considered in any sense a reflection upon the Negro workers employed.

The other mail-order house opened a unit for Negro women in the fall of 1918, with 650 women who worked until the end of the "fall rush" in January, 1919. In the following fall the unit was again opened, with 1,050 Negro women; and the office was still in operation in 1920. This office was just outside the "Loop" district. The sudden influx of Negro girls there caused complaints by the local restaurants, fearing the loss of old patrons in handling this new business. The company then installed an "at cost" cafeteria service. The work of these girls was clerical, billing, labeling, addressing, etc. Considering their inexperience, their service has been highly satisfactory. The employment manager said: "It's not a defect in their minds, it's a defect in the country. They haven't had the opportunity to gain the education and experience needed for responsibility; the Negro girl is equal to the Italian or Bohemian in working ability and superior for executive work, such as instructing or supervising." Among 143 girls interviewed in the entry offices of these two mail-order houses only three expressed dissatisfaction with the conditions of work. The girls seemed to take pride in the fact that they had succeeded in "making good" in a new and attractive field of work.

The experiment of the establishment manufacturing automobile spring cushions had a very modest beginning. A factory was rented in the Negro residential area on the South Side, and twenty machines were installed to test out Negro women as sewing-machine operators. Gradually the number increased to 120 in this plant, and a second plant was opened in the same vicinity with about the same number of operators. During the year 1919-20 there were 250 Negro women employed as machine operators in these two plants. The superintendent considered that they required less supervision than the white workers in the company's other shops and rated them equal to white workers in efficiency. "We could take our best white girl and our best colored girl, and they earn about the same amount of money on piecework rates, in the same number of hours."

The superintendent of the wholesale millinery establishment represented in conference considered that the employment of Negro women in that industry had outgrown the experimental stage. Although a long period of training is necessary in order to become a skilled milliner (four years for hand sewers, eight years for machine operators), Negro women were keen to learn the trade and willing to accept the low wages paid to beginners. Of the forty-seven Negro women employed on the day of the investigator's visit, thirty-three received less than $12.00 a week and forty-two received less than $15.00 a week. These women were all employed as hand sewers, and in the opinion of the superintendent they had done "just as well as the white. They learn as quickly and are as persevering, and in every respect equal to the whites as far as their work is concerned. We are absolutely satisfied with their work."

Other industries in which Negro women are engaged in considerable numbers include laundering, the manufacture of clothing, lamp shades, gas mantles, paper boxes, barrels, and cheese making. An investigator from the Commission visited establishments employing Negro women in each of these industries.

_Laundry operatives._--The fact that 543 Negro women laundry operatives were reported by sixteen laundries, as contrasted with 184 in all Chicago laundries in 1910, gives evidence of an increase in the number of Negro women in this field proportionately much greater than the increase in Negro population in Chicago in the same decade. The opportunity to work in a laundry was practically denied to Negro women until labor shortage forced laundry owners to tap this reserve labor supply. Negro women were eager to desert work as domestic servants and "family washer-women," with the social stigma and restricted human contact involved, to enter laundries where more independence was possible, hours were better standardized, and association with fellow-workers enlivened the work day. The employment department of the Urban League experienced great difficulty in supplying the demand for domestic servants and laundresses in the home, but had no difficulty in filling openings in laundries.

The work of Negro women in this field has proved satisfactory except in a few establishments. Of the twenty laundries which reported Negro labor satisfactory or unsatisfactory (included in Table XXVI), four failed to report separate figures covering male and female employees. Of the remaining sixteen establishments, twelve, with a total of 409 Negro women, reported Negro labor satisfactory, and four with a total of 134 Negro women, reported Negro labor unsatisfactory. The complaint in two instances was unwillingness to work overtime and on Sundays. In both these instances the employees interviewed complained that hours were long (nine-hour day) and the treatment by the management harsh and inconsiderate.

Laundries which did not make a practice of requiring overtime and Sunday work found Negro women workers cheerful, loyal, and industrious. The employees interviewed in these establishments expressed satisfaction with working conditions and with hours.

One efficiently managed laundry, employing seventy-six Negro women and six Negro men, out of a total of 110 employees, reported: "We have a number of exceptionally good and loyal Negro employees. These men and women need very little supervision. We got some who have never worked in industries. They require more supervision and are not very steady. On the whole, we are well pleased with our Negro employees."

_Sewing-machine operators and sewers._--Denial of opportunity to enter the sewing trades is evidenced by the small number of Negro women listed in the 1910 census as sewers and sewing-machine operators in factories, the number being twenty-five. That this exclusion was not because of any natural inaptitude for sewing is indicated by the fact that the 1910 census listed 867 Negro women as seamstresses not in factories. Negro women have entered millinery work and proved apt hand workers; they have also proved efficient sewing-machine operators in the manufacture of automobile cushions. The lampshade manufacturers employed Negro women as hand sewers and found them to be efficient workers. The clothing establishments which reported Negro women workers found them satisfactory machine and hand workers, with the exception of one apron factory which complained that they are shiftless, often unreasonable, and do not stick to the job. An investigation of this establishment by the Urban League disclosed the following facts: The shop was located in a shabby-looking, unclean store, inadequately heated by a coal stove. The work day was nine and one-half hours, and piece rates on several operations were so low that it was impossible to earn a decent wage. In this case the large labor turnover was evidently a healthy protest against poor working conditions.

_Other industries._--Three paper-box-making plants employing Negro women were investigated. They reported that Negro women had proved unsatisfactory, either slow or lazy. The experience of a cheese factory is worth noting in this connection. Because Negro women appeared to be slow at their work it was decided to measure their tasks. It was then found that many were doing as well as and some better than the white girls in whose places they were working.

Whether such tests had ever been made in the box-making plants does not appear. The employees interviewed in one box factory complained of low wages and no chance for advancement. Negro women in this plant were averaging only $2.40 a day. A cooperage company reported fifteen women stave carriers and fifteen machine operators. Negro labor in this plant was reported satisfactory. Negro women in the garage of a taxicab company, cleaning automobiles, have shown themselves not afraid of hard work; 100 Negro women were reported working in this capacity. Negro women as Pullman-car cleaners have also proved satisfactory.

Before the war Negro women were popularly thought of as a class of servants unfitted by nature for work calling for higher qualifications. It is difficult to say how long this popular misconception might have survived had it not been for the labor shortage which forced employers to experiment with Negro women workers and to learn with surprise that they were as teachable as white women and became as efficient workers after receiving the necessary training.

IV. INDUSTRY AS THE NEGRO SEES IT

1. ATTITUDE TOWARD INDUSTRIAL OPPORTUNITIES

In order to learn the attitude of the Negro toward his work, and his special problems, including the treatment accorded him by foremen and by fellow-workers, 865 Negro employees were interviewed by a Negro investigator at their work or at home. Less than 1 per cent of those interviewed complained of disagreeable treatment by white workers. Approximately one-half had no complaints to make about conditions of work. On the contrary, they expressed themselves as being glad of the opportunity to work and earn good wages.

The attitude of a large number of the workers interviewed is illustrated by the following:

C---- W---- was referred to in one of the industrial conferences before the Commission. The superintendent of the foundry said he was the "star molder" in the plant. When interviewed C---- W---- said he had come to Chicago in 1910 from Kentucky because he was tired of being a flunkey. He had been in the high school for two years, but could only get work as janitor in a public building in his home town. After coming here he worked in a foundry as a molder's helper until he learned the trade. "I was getting 38 cents an hour then, but I got on piecework and my wages have steadily gone up. I'm an expert now and make as much as any man in the place. I can quit any time I want to, but the longer I work the more money it is for me, so I usually work eight or nine hours a day. I am planning to educate my girl with the best of them, buy a home before I'm too old, and make life comfortable for my family. There is more chance here to learn a trade than in the South. I live better, can save more, and I feel more like a man."

R---- N----, who is working as a helper in the same foundry, says he has just gone from one job to another. In the South he worked on a section gang on the railroad most of the time. "Didn't have to know much to get a job on the section gang--just able to lift." Friends here wrote him of the chances to make money, so he came because he was just drifting anyway. When he got here he thought Chicago was "full of life." Every night for a month he went to cabarets. He likes his work and his wages. "My wife can have her clothes fitted here; she can try on a hat and if she don't want it she don't have to buy it. I can go anywhere I please on the cars after I pay my fare, and I can do any sort of work I know how to do."

When M---- G---- came to Chicago in 1900 he thought it "the biggest place in the world and the world didn't reach much further. Life is easier here because you can make more money. Working conditions are better than in the South, but they could be better still." He worked as a butler in the South, but when he came to Chicago he got out of personal service and became a laborer in the Stock Yards. Later he went to Gary, Indiana, to the steel works, where he is earning about $40.00 a week. His wife is doing clerical work in a mail-order house and is going to night school three nights a week to learn typing.

H---- B---- with his family left Mississippi in 1916 and came to Chicago, where he found work as a coal heaver at $3.20 a day. His wife sorted paper in a junk house at $10.00 a week, and his daughter entered a canning department at the Stock Yards at $18.00 a week. When Mr. B---- was interviewed in June, 1920, he was working in the Stock Yards and earning $27.00 a week for an eight-hour day. He said he didn't have to work nearly as hard here as in the South and was earning enough money so his wife could stay at home. "In the South you had to work whether you wanted to or not unless you were very sick. White people did not work there as they do here. They made the Negro do the work. Men and women had to work in the fields. A woman was not permitted to remain at home if she felt like it. If she was found at home some of the white people would come to ask why she was not in the field and tell her she had better get to the field or else abide by the consequences. After the summer crops were all in, any of the white people could send for any Negro woman to come and do the family washing at 75 cents to $1.00 a day. If she sent word she could not come she had to send an excuse why she could not come. They were never allowed to stay at home as long as they were able to go. Had to take whatever they paid you for your work."

M---- H---- "likes the air of doing things here." He is able to earn enough to keep the family without having his wife go out to work. There are four "youngsters," the oldest being eight years old. Mr. H---- came to Chicago in 1918 from Tennessee. He complained that there was not much work for a man in his home town. He did whatever odd jobs turned up. People there were talking about the chances in Chicago, so he came here and went to work as a monument setter on the West Side. Later he found a better-paying job in a mattress factory and was able to send for his family. He is now working in a foundry and makes $35.00 a week but finds it hard to live on this. If he can go to night school he feels he will be able to earn more money.

Mrs. L---- works as an entry clerk in a mail-order house and likes everything connected with the place. She used to be a maid in a private family but says she wouldn't work in service again "for any money. I can save more when I'm in service, for of course you get room and board, but the other things you have to take--no place to entertain your friends but the kitchen, and going in and out the back doors. I hated all that. Then, no matter how early you got through work you could only go out one night a week--they almost make you a slave. You can do other work in Chicago and you don't have to work in such places."

Mrs. L---- had taught school in Atlanta, Georgia. After her husband died she had tried to get back in the school but could not. Friends here advised her to move to Chicago, so she sold her property in 1915 and came here. She got work in the Stock Yards but gave music lessons on the side to help keep up expenses. "I hated the surroundings at the Yards and the class of people who worked there, so when I had a chance to work in a mail-order house I changed. The first work here was filing. I learned it very quickly and tried so hard to make good that they made me a supervisor." She likes the freedom of the North and the opportunities to advance in work. Her ambition is to get into the public schools as a teacher.

Miss T---- S----, twenty-two years old, started to work when she was fourteen, helping her mother cook for a large family in Lexington, Georgia. Her mother died when she was about seventeen, and she continued to work in the same family about three years. Then some relatives persuaded her to come north with them in 1919. She worked as a waitress in Chicago until her cousin got her a job in a box factory. "I'll never work in nobody's kitchen but my own any more. No, indeed! That's the one thing that makes me stick to this job. You do have some time to call your own, but when you're working in anybody's kitchen, well, you're out of luck. You almost have to eat on the run; you never get any time off, and you have to work half the night, usually. I make more money here than I did down South, but I can't save anything out of it--there are so many places to go here, but down South you work, work, work, and you have to save your money because you haven't any place to spend it."

Many of those interviewed were grateful for the opportunity to work overtime at overtime rates. A number complained that they were able to spend but little time with their families, or in recreation, because they were compelled to live in districts far from the plants in which they worked, so that two, and often three, hours a day were wasted on the cars. The Negroes who had come to Chicago within the past two or three years as a rule were satisfied with conditions of work, including hours, wages, and treatment.

2. COMPLAINTS ABOUT CONDITIONS OF WORK

Among the Negroes who had lived in Chicago for a longer period the most insistent complaint was lack of opportunity for advancement or promotion. This was occasionally coupled with the complaint that foremen discriminated in favor of the white workers. In certain industries no complaint of treatment by foremen was made, while approximately 10 per cent of those interviewed in three industries (mentioned below) complained of discrimination in favor of white workers, in the distribution of work, in recognition of efficiency, or in permitting the earning of overtime rates. The industries registering the greatest percentage of complaints were: (1) foundry and iron and steel mills, (2) Stock Yards, and (3) railroad dining-car and Pullman service. The common complaints in each of these fields are considered briefly below.

_Foundries and iron and steel manufacturing._--The ninety-three Negro employees interviewed in fourteen establishments in this field were of different grades of skill: fifty-nine unskilled, twelve semi-skilled, nineteen skilled, and three apprentices to skilled trades. The length of time in the plant varied from a week to twenty years (forty-one employees less than one year, and eighty less than five years). To the inquiry, "Is anything wrong with your conditions of work?" fifty answered, "No"; sixteen complained that hours were too long (in these cases the men were working a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week); ten complained of low wages; six that foremen or straw bosses were not fair in the distribution of work or of "heats"; four complained that straight-time pay only was allowed for overtime, three that working gangs were reduced without decreasing the work demanded or increasing the pay of the men who remained; one thought that Negroes were paid lower wages than white workers; one said the work in his plant was much dirtier than it need be; and two were dissatisfied because shower or locker accommodations were insufficient.

A foundry company employing twenty Negroes out of a total of eighty employees was one of the establishments reporting Negro labor unsatisfactory. Negroes interviewed there complained of harsh and unfair treatment by bosses and said that Negroes usually did not stay longer than thirty days. The employment manager of a large foundry employing 427 Negroes out of a total of 2,488 employees told the investigator that the foremen in the plant would refuse to use Negroes if white labor could be obtained, and if such a time should come the foremen would have their way, because it took years to make a foreman, but a laborer could be picked up any day. The investigator was not permitted to interview any of the employees at this plant, but he visited some of them at their homes. They complained of harsh treatment by foremen, reduction in piece rates without notice, and discrimination in favor of white workers. The labor turnover reported by this plant was 70 per cent for Negro as compared with 14 per cent for white workers. This contrast is readily accounted for when the attitude of foremen toward Negroes is known.

Negroes interviewed at one of the plants of another foundry company employing seventy-five Negroes out of a total of 300 employees complained that the foreman in one department established conditions discouraging to Negro workers. He had an even number of Negro and white workers employed as partners on a certain process of piecework rates, each doing one-half of a joint task. When a man was absent, partners would be shifted about so that a Negro worker would be left without a partner instead of a white man. This handicapped the single worker by slowing down the process so he could not earn a full day's pay. Complaint was also made that the same foreman allowed white workers to accumulate a supply of material for their work, although he ordered Negro workers to stop this practice, thus forcing them to lose time in making frequent trips for material.

In a large iron and steel plant a few of the workers interviewed complained of unfair and abusive treatment by foremen. Numerous complaints had likewise come to the attention of the industrial secretary of the Urban League, who took the matter up with the chief of the industrial-relations department of the company. An investigation was ordered, and it was found that a certain foreman had made a threat to drive all the "niggers" from the department. This foreman, who had been employed by the company for more than sixteen years, was discharged as a result of the investigation. The company states that considerable pressure has been brought to bear for the foreman's reinstatement, but that it will not reinstate him because it wants his case to be a warning to others in the plant who may be prejudiced against Negro workers. The discharged foreman has been told that he may seek employment with the company in some other capacity, with the loss of his seniority rights.

In contrast with conditions in the preceding cases, the investigator found no complaints of mistreatment by foremen or other causes for dissatisfaction among Negro workers at another foundry which employs 125 Negroes out of a total force of 466 employees. Negro labor in this foundry was reported "satisfactory" and as efficient as white labor. The attitude of foremen evidently contributed to the contentment and success of Negroes in this plant.

_Stock Yards._--Interviews with seventy-four Negroes employed in the Stock Yards disclosed much dissatisfaction with treatment by foremen. Specific instances of discrimination were cited in great detail, leaving no doubt in the mind of the investigator that these workers felt that they did not have an equal chance with white workers in many departments in the Yards. Some of those interviewed were well pleased with the treatment of present foremen, but had worked in other departments in the same plants where they said foremen had been unfair and insulting to Negroes. The Negroes interviewed, with one exception, considered their treatment by white fellow-workers good or "O.K." The following are typical of the complaints made by the men interviewed in three of the large establishments in the Yards:

G---- R---- had worked in one plant in the Yards for four years. He said that he was not given a chance to make overtime, while Poles who had not been with the company as long as he had were given this privilege.

Another worker had been dismissed by a foreman when a white worker in the boiler room had shut off the supply of water for washing hogs. No blame was attached to the real offender, but the Negro worker was discharged. He wrote a letter to the general superintendent, who investigated and ordered his reinstatement. The foreman then tried to reinstate him as a new hand, which would deprive him of his seniority rights.

Another worker interviewed said that one assistant foreman had openly made the statement that he would not work with "niggers."

The foreman over pipe fitters was accused of placing new Negroes on the hardest work, with no one to give assistance. He permitted white men to work as helpers for two or three months, and then to quit for a month or two and return as pipe fitters, advancing them over Negroes who had more training for the work.

The foreman in the sheep-killing department of one of the plants was said by one worker to make advancement difficult, if not impossible, for Negroes. Another worker complained that this foreman had recently taken one man off the jaw-trimming machine but ran the chain just as fast, with the evident intention of overtaxing the remaining Negroes and reporting that they were not equal to the job.

The foreman in the hog-killing department was charged with showing preference to the Poles in shoulder sawing. If a Negro made complaint to the superintendent and was sent back with instructions to the foreman, the latter would try to "burn" the Negro out with work.

It would seem from the discussion of the representatives of the packing companies before the Commission that the Negro in reality has little opportunity for promotion in the Yards. There are no Negro foremen over mixed gangs. The highest position a Negro is able to reach is that of subforeman over a group of Negro workmen. The general superintendent of one of the packing companies admitted that he had never tried out a Negro as foreman over a mixed gang because he wouldn't want to work under a Negro himself. Such an attitude on the part of a general superintendent closes the door to experimentation and limits the opportunities of even the most capable Negroes. It was this same official who said, as previously noted, that Negro labor required more supervision than white labor, and that the turnover of Negro labor was greater. Lack of "hope on the job" would seem an adequate explanation of both conditions.

_Railroad dining-car and Pullman service._--Negroes are used as dining-car waiters on all roads running out of Chicago which carry such accommodations. Certain of the roads also use Negro cooks and kitchen help. The dining-cars on all roads are in charge of white stewards. The source of greatest complaint among the 204 Negro waiters interviewed was the arbitrary use of authority by the stewards and the fact that color bars Negro waiters from becoming stewards. They say that when stewards are needed, intelligent and experienced Negroes are passed over and white men, often entirely ignorant of the work, are taught their duties by these Negroes and are then placed in authority over them. One road carrying seven dining-cars uses white stewards on two cars and the remaining five cars are in charge of Negroes called "waiters in charge." Negroes complained that these men get little more than the wages of a waiter, and in many cases do all that is required of steward and waiter.

The outstanding complaint concerned the drawing of the color line in promotion. In view of the fact that many college graduates are serving as waiters, it would seem absurd to say that Negro waiters are incapable of performing a steward's duties, which consist of receiving and checking supplies for the car, seating dining patrons and issuing checks to them, having general supervision of the other employees on the dining-car, and making daily reports to the car superintendent of business transacted. Race prejudice on the part of administrative officials of railroads seems to be the only explanation for barring Negroes from becoming stewards, in view of the fact that Negro waiters have been used in dining-cars for over forty years and have been accepted by the white traveling public as a matter of course, though some contend that some patrons who accept Negroes as waiters would object to seeing them in positions of stewards, particularly if that brought white employees under them.

Negroes are employed in large numbers in Pullman cars as porters, cleaners, cooks, and mechanics. The main complaint made by the sixty porters interviewed was poor wages and necessity of dependency on tips to make a decent living. The wages of porters, as stated by a representative of the Pullman Company before the Commission, are:

The minimum rate for a porter on a standard sleeping or parlor car is $60.00 per month; when running in charge of one car the rate is $70.00 per month; when running in charge of a private car the rate is $75.00 per month; but when operating in charge of two or more cars the rate is $155.00 per month.

In 1914 the minimum was either $27.50 or $30.00 per month. Asked whether the Government Railroad Administration had anything to do with the increase granted by the Pullman Company, he indicated that the Pullman Company was under the direction of the Railroad Administration.

Another complaint by Pullman porters was that no promotion was possible for them, since only white men are used as Pullman-car conductors. The explanation of the company, given by one of its representatives at a conference with the Commission, was: "It is merely carrying out an ancient and honorable custom--we started out with white conductors and colored porters and have always continued that way."

Interviews with Negro workers revealed individual differences in attitude and temperament, but the more ambitious and thoughtful Negroes expressed the conviction that they were barred by color from positions for which they were better qualified than the white men who held them. Their complaints were largely variations of the same theme--race discrimination.

V. INDUSTRIES EXCLUDING THE NEGRO

Several important industries in Chicago have not yet employed Negroes. The traction companies (both elevated and surface) do not employ them as conductors, motormen, guards, or ticket agents. The large State Street department stores have no Negro clerks, and taxicab companies do not employ colored drivers. In these industries, which depend directly upon the public for patronage, it is to be expected that the employing of Negro help will be determined by the employer's views of the wishes of his patrons. If there is any fear that they are unfavorable, any individual employer in a competitive industry will hesitate to try the experiment alone. The employment managers of five State Street department stores made the following statements:

1. Our customers would object to colored salespeople, I am sure.

2. We have never employed any Negroes in our Chicago establishments. I don't care to go into the matter. It will not do you any good and will not do us any good.

3. Customers and white employees would object if they were used as clerks.

4. No Negroes are ever employed because we have sufficient white applicants.

5. If we ever tried using Negroes as clerks the white workers would make trouble, I am sure of that. Our customers would object. A good many are from the South and would make trouble even if Chicago people did not.

One large taxicab company, employing 250 Negroes for repair work and upkeep of automobiles, does not employ Negroes as drivers. A representative of this company stated that the company had gone as far as many employers, and often farther, in the employment of Negro labor; that it had done this in a progressive way, one step after another, but had "not yet got as far as employing Negro chauffeurs," although this might come in time. When asked whether he thought such action would affect the company's business unfavorably he said, "I do not know. It is a matter that I have never thought about."

The Chicago Telephone Company does not employ Negro telephone operators. Its only Negro employees are porters, window washers, and maids. A representative stated that it has always had sufficient white applicants for positions as telephone operators and has not considered taking on Negro girls, although the suggestion has often been made that Negro operators be used at the Douglas Exchange (located in the Negro area of the South Side). This official thought there was very little possibility that they would employ Negro operators in the future. He feared objection from white employees.

In connection with the foregoing it may be borne in mind that the company has answered complaints of poor telephone service within the past few years with the statement that it is difficult to secure capable girls, and that the Telephone Company is continually advertising for girls as operators.

_Social waste involved._--The industrial secretary of the Urban League has called attention to the large number of educated Negro girls who are unable to secure industrial openings where education is required. It is impossible to estimate how great a social waste is involved in relegating trained and educated Negroes to inferior positions, and there is evidence that such waste is considerable. Negroes with college training are found working as waiters; young women college graduates are frequently forced to serve as ladies' maids, theater ushers, or in some other capacity where they are unable to use their educational training. The fact that it was not difficult to find over 1,500 Negro women of more than average education for clerical positions in two Chicago mail-order houses when the opportunity offered is some indication of the extent of the social waste when Negroes are not used in other positions which require training.

VI. RELATIONS OF WHITE AND COLORED WORKERS

The entrance of Negroes into new industries and occupations means that the workers already in these fields will meet increased competition. The self-interest of white workers in a given shop may therefore cause them to resent the presence of Negro workers. On the other hand, through contact and association with Negroes during working hours, white workers may come to look upon Negroes, not as members of a strange group with colored skin, but as individuals with the same feelings, hopes, and disappointments as other people. Whether the hostile attitude prompted by self-interest or the friendly attitude born of understanding, acquaintance, and daily association will prevail in any given shop depends on many factors, over some of which the workers involved have no control. Some of these are:

1. The attitude of the management when Negro labor is first introduced.

2. Circumstances under which Negroes are hired, whether because of recognized labor shortage, or as strike breakers, or to reduce labor costs.

3. The attitude and characteristics of the particular Negroes employed.

4. The attitude of the white workers toward Negroes as a result of previous contacts with Negroes.

The spirit displayed in the shop is likely to spread beyond it and affect relations between the races on the streets and in cars and other public places. It is therefore important to know what the relations between white and Negro workers are, both because of their importance to the Negro in industry and their bearing on the broader social aspect of race problems.

1. RACE FRICTION AMONG WORKERS

Information concerning race relations in industry was received from employers through questionnaires returned by 137 establishments employing a total of 22,337 Negroes, through interviews at places of business with representatives of 101 employers, through industrial conferences held by the Commission, and through interviews with 865 Negro workers. Since the best judges of the existence of race friction would be the Negro workers themselves, who would bear the brunt of any ill-treatment resulting from such friction, it was considered that any extended canvass of opinion among white workers beyond the inquiries made in connection with the trade-union investigation was unnecessary.

Race friction between white and Negro workers sufficient to interfere with output would militate against the use of Negro labor. The fact that Negro labor has proved satisfactory in the great majority of cases where it has been used is therefore indirect evidence that race friction is not pronounced in Chicago industries. Direct evidence from employers on this subject was also secured in answer to a specific question on the point. Out of 137 establishments employing Negroes, which returned questionnaires, only two reported that race friction was a disturbing factor in their plants. The facts in these two cases were as follows:

In a steel-manufacturing plant there was a total of 1,300 employees, of whom seventeen were Negroes, eleven men and six women. During the steel strike of 1919 Negroes were employed in this plant in large numbers. Feeling was antagonistic on the part of the whites, "particularly Austrians and Slavonians." The total number of Negroes employed during the strike and the turnover were reported as "an average force of 175."

Friction in the foregoing case was probably due to the heritage of bitterness over the use of Negroes as strike breakers and to irritation caused by the low grade of workers employed more than to difference in color. They were described by the manager as "irresponsible and shiftless."

In the other case fear of Negroes' competition rather than race prejudice was apparently the cause of friction. The manager of a wholesale millinery house employing forty-three girls in one department, out of a total of 700 employees, said:

We decided to take on colored help in June, 1919. Our white people resented very much the fact of employing colored people in our business, and I believe the blame, if there is any, lies as much with the whites as with the blacks in the difficulties we have had. I find a great resentment among all our white people. I couldn't overcome the prejudice enough to bring the people in the same building, and had to engage outside quarters for the blacks. We had a meeting of our colored operators after employing the hand workers. We thought it would be nice if we would start a school for machine operators. It was, of course, rumored that we were going to do this, and I received a delegation from our sewing hall who said they resented the idea. They wouldn't listen to it at all, and I had to abandon the project. Their argument was: "If you let them in it won't be long until we are out entirely." The attitude against the colored is only the same as it was against the Slavs or the foreign races when they first intruded in the field. There was no prejudice, particularly against the color. In millinery establishments in New York City colored girls and white girls work together and do not seem to have any trouble, but, we can't do it here.

The resentment felt by the white girls in this shop may be accounted for in part by a fact to which the manager apparently attached no importance. In speaking of the loyalty and good spirit of the Negro girls, he said casually:

In a few instances, where we have had difficulty in getting work done by the whites, we have been able to use the colored workroom as a level. We have sent it over to them and gotten it out. The white girls have refused either through stubbornness or some condition to get the work out.

Friction was also reported between women employees in a plant where relations between the men of both races were reported harmonious. This plant which manufactures machinery, has a total of 6,647 employees, including 1,225 Negro men and sixty Negro women. A representative of the company said:

Among the girls we had quite a lot of trouble in some departments against our hiring colored girls. To every colored girl employed we lost five white girls. There was friction in the washrooms due probably to race, though it may have been personal.

The report from a foundry employing 950 men, of whom 200 were colored, said:

As a rule if any objection is made to working together it comes from the white men (Polish) on the grounds that the colored man is being given the preference.

A laundry company employing ten Negroes out of a total of thirty-five employees, reported that when the first Negro girl was employed the white girls threatened to quit. The manager asked them to wait a week and, if they still objected, he would let her go. There was no further objection; they grew to like her.

The reports of employers regarding the absence of friction between white and Negro workers is borne out by the testimony of Negro workers themselves. Among 865 Negroes interviewed in all the industries covered, the number who complained of disagreeable treatment by white workers was practically negligible. It is possible that some Negro workers among those interviewed at their work places, sometimes with white fellow-workers and foreman near by, felt hesitancy in voicing such complaints. But the fact that the information was sought by an investigator of their own race, and confidentially for the Commission, may be considered as a factor likely to encourage the expression of any grievance, especially if felt at all deeply.

Conditions of work in large foundries would seem to offer plenty of opportunity for friction even where workers are all of the same race. This is particularly true of foundries where the piecework system prevails. The work is done in the confusion of smoke, heat, dust, and noise, with men shouting at each other, each striving to be first to receive this pouring of molten iron from the vats. Notwithstanding the fact that the work is carried on under great tension, the ninety-three Negroes interviewed in fourteen foundries, when asked how they got along with the white men with whom they worked, said: "Good," "Fine," or used other words to indicate friendly relations. Not a single complaint was made against treatment by white workers in any of the foundries or iron and steel establishments investigated.

One interesting instance of happy working relations in which several nationalities of whites were involved was found at Hull-House. A Negro has been in charge of the Coffee House there for six years. He had nine employees working under him: three Negro girls, one German boy, one Greek man, two Polish girls, and two Italian women. The Greek man and the two Polish girls were in the employ of the Coffee House when he took charge. The others have all been employed for a considerable period. In commenting upon the amicable relations of people representing so many different races and under a Negro manager, he said, "We are all working for a living, and there will be no discrimination. It is very simple. The thing to do is to get acquainted."

2. WORKERS REFLECT ATTITUDE OF MANAGEMENT

When the employment of Negroes is decided upon, there is an effort to make the change with as little disturbance as possible to white workers. Frequently the manager tries to imagine himself in the place of his white workers in order to discover what their reaction will be. In so doing, he considers, not what they will think or feel, but what a man with his own social background would feel in their position. The attitude of the management therefore determines whether Negro workers shall be segregated or treated like other workers in the plant without regard to color. Separation once decided upon and partitions erected, white workers may insist upon the distinction being maintained where they would not have raised the point in the first instance. Establishments following both courses gave the Commission the result of their experiences. Of 101 establishments employing five or more Negroes each, eighteen maintained separate lavatory and toilet accommodations for Negro workers. This condition was accepted without complaint in some establishments, while in others it was a source of dissatisfaction among the Negro workers, who resented this manifestation of "Jim Crowism" in the North. The fact is worthy of note that the eighteen establishments reporting separate accommodations or separate departments for colored workers employed but 2,623 Negroes out of a total of 22,337 covered by the investigation, or slightly more than 11 per cent. The remaining 89 per cent, or 19,714, were using all accommodations in common with white workers.

One large foundry company employing 427 Negroes out of a total of 2,488 employees tried a different method in each of its three plants. In one a partition in the locker and shower rooms was erected, to which the Negro workers objected. The general superintendent said he would not have consented to the erection of the partition in the first place, but he was afraid to take it down. In the second plant separate lavatory accommodations were provided in connection with separate departments for Negro and white workers on different floors, and there was no trouble. In the third plant, where no color distinctions were made, all workers using the same lavatory accommodations, the manager never heard of any complaint from white or Negro workers.

In another foundry employing 125 Negroes out of a total of 466 employees the representative said that the Polish workers had objected "that the colored people used the showers and basins all the time and they did not get a chance to. We checked up on this and limited some of our showers to colored only, and we only had two men use the white showers in something like two weeks, time, and in the colored there was something like 200 baths taken." The use of the same accommodations in this plant caused no further complaint after this incident. Another foundry reported that the white and Negro workmen ate lunch and smoked together. There were no separate accommodations and there was no ill-feeling whatever. Another firm employing 500 Negroes out of a total of 3,000 employees reported: "The relationship between our Negro and white employees is very friendly. During the past year we have not had a single encounter of any kind between the white and colored workers. They work together in most of our departments, use the same locker rooms and washrooms, and eat in the same restaurant in the plant." In one foundry the superintendent was nearly compelled to install separate accommodations because of stealing in the locker rooms. Suspicion was aroused against the Negro workers, and the white workers had a shop meeting to demand separate accommodations. The manager said: "The same day the janitor caught a red-headed Irish boy red-handed. We paraded him through the shop and made quite a grandstand operation out of it, and it ended my troubles from that time on, but if I hadn't caught him I might have had to maintain separate locker rooms."

There were only six establishments which maintained separate departments for Negro workers. In some cases segregation was effected by a partition; in others by maintaining a complete Negro unit in a different part of the city. The second plan has worked satisfactorily, but segregation by partition in the same plant is resented by Negro workers. Representatives of the largest employers of Negro labor expressed the opinion that erecting a partition, by drawing the "color line," causes friction which in all probability would not otherwise appear.

The industrial secretary of the Urban League, who has been actively interested in extending the range of opportunity for the Negro in industry, firmly believes that the attitude of the management on racial matters is reflected by the employees, that wherever an uncompromising stand is made for fair play for all employees, racial differences do not cause annoyance. He cites the following incident as one of several tending to support his view:

During the fall of 1919 the general manager of the S---- F---- P---- Company was approached on the subject of employing colored girls. To our surprise, it was discovered that colored girls were already employed by him in all branches of the industry, and mixed freely with white employees. There was no discrimination in the character or kind of work or the use of plant facilities. Mr. N---- explained that he had never thought of segregating white and colored workmen, and the wisdom of his plan had been proved by the experience of his father, who employs both white and colored girls, but keeps the groups separated by a partition. According to Mr. N---- the partition had been a source of trouble for the reason that the placing of the partition itself indicated that the company intended to make a difference between white and colored workers. This put each group in a frame of mind which caused them to resent the presence of any worker on the side of the partition on which she was not employed. The elder Mr. N---- realized his mistake but did not dare to take the partition down, fearing that by so doing he would precipitate further trouble which would result in the most desirable girls in each group quitting the plant.

Foremen, because they personify the management in the mind of the workmen, play a large part in shaping the attitude white workers adopt toward Negroes. If the foremen are antagonistic or insulting in their treatment of the Negro, white workers find favor with the foremen by adopting the same attitude. A construction company employing sixty Negroes reported:

There were always difficulties with this gang when the Italian foreman was here, as he constantly endeavored to place Italians at work displacing some very good Negro workers. When I was sent here I dug under the difficulties and found the Italians were very clannish and were using the foreman to carry out the plan of giving every Italian who came along a job, at the expense of some Negro's job. I am a French Canadian and have worked with colored men before. After failure in trying to get Italians to see how bad the old system was, I was forced to let all the Italians go. I have an excellent gang of Negroes now.

The representative of a large foundry said:

I believe I have a harder time to get the Polish foremen to handle Negro help than any other. Our foremen are accustomed to handling the Polish workers pretty rough. While employers don't want that, it goes on that way. A Pole is "cussed" around and does not care what he is called. It's all the same to him, but a colored man is a pretty thin-skinned individual. You call a colored man something, and he will grab his hat and is gone. He thinks that when the foreman uses those words he means it. He will not stand for the same kind of language that the Polak will.

3. USE OF NEGRO LABOR TO UNDERMINE WAGES

If Negroes are introduced into a plant during a strike and retained afterward, a period of strained relations between white and Negro workers is almost certain to ensue. They are given a similarly unfavorable start when they are introduced to reduce labor costs. In the smaller establishments, where wages and conditions of work were not well standardized, white workers were suspicious that Negroes were working for lower wages, and the Negroes suspected that they were being paid lower wages than white workers. It is obvious that where mutual distrust and suspicion are present, friction readily develops which may lead to serious social consequences.

To what extent Negroes are being paid lower wages than white workers it is impossible to say. In this connection the Chicago Urban League made the following statement:

The charge of inequality in the wages of white and colored workers is frequently made, but the League is not always permitted to inquire into wage scales, and therefore verification of some of these rumors has been impossible.

The League has taken up this matter with such companies as ----, ----, ----, and numerous others, with the result that in each instance the statement has been made that white and colored workers receive the same pay for the same work. There is a deep-seated suspicion, however, that this is not true. In some cases this suspicion seemed to be justified. Complaints have come to our attention where colored people have been mistaken for white in the offices of the ---- Company and employed at a higher rate of pay than that given colored girls for similar work. This, however, has never been verified. Pay inequalities have been explained away by larger experience, seniority, superior production, etc., in favor of whites.

The employment manager of one company has told representatives of the Chicago Urban League that the colored girls employed in their South Side Branch Office started at a wage in excess of that given white girls for similar work in their main office.

The statement can be correctly made, however, that many employers of colored girls, particularly in the needle trades, have refused to pay colored workers a wage equal to that of white. There are well-known instances of sweatshop tactics used on colored girls because of their inexperience in industry and lack of organization.

An official of the Women's Garment Workers' Union reported that ---- Company, upon finding that they had to pay the union scale of wages, requested the local to supply white girls instead of the colored girls who were already in his employ. The colored girls were employed to replace the striking whites.

No complaint has come to our attention of inequality of wages in union shops employing white and colored workers, or in any of the larger industries. Colored workers are usually exploited in the smaller shops. White workers have been known to refuse to work in shops paying white and colored workers the same wage.

All of the representatives of employers appearing in conferences and all but one of the representatives interviewed stated that Negro and white workers were being paid equal wages in their establishments. The exception was a wholesale hardware company where the employment manager admitted paying Negroes "a dollar or two less per week" because they could not be shifted from one department to another as readily as white workers on account of prejudice of workers or foremen in certain departments.

It was learned that employers occasionally refuse to hire Negro unionists when they learn they must pay them "white men's wages." Unionists allege that even Negro employers object to paying Negroes the same union scale as white workers. To the extent that Negro labor is being used to undermine wage standards, misunderstanding and race friction develop.

4. RELATIONS OF WHITE AND NEGRO WORKERS DURING THE RIOT

In contrast with the violence that characterized street encounters during the riots it is significant that no unfriendly demonstrations occurred between workers in any of the establishments covered by the investigation, according to statements made by representatives of employers. On the contrary, white workers are said by employers to have expressed sympathy in many ways with their Negro fellow-workers. The general superintendent of one of the largest packing companies in the "Yards" emphasized the good feeling that existed between the workers at this critical time:

I think this Commission ought to know that there wasn't a single case of violence in what we call Packingtown during the race riot, and the morning that the Negroes were brought back to work in this packing-house there was not a single argument--there wasn't a single indication in this plant of any racial feeling. In fact the two classes of common labor we have are the Slavs and the Negroes, and they met as old friends. In many instances they put their arms around one another's necks. In one particular instance a Negro and a Pole got on an elevated truck and rode all around this plant simply to signify to the rest of the workers that there was a good spirit existing between the two. There was nothing in the contact between the Negro and the Pole or the Slav that would indicate that there had ever been a race riot in Chicago, and there was nothing from the beginning of the race riot to the end that would indicate that there was any feeling started in the Stock Yards or in this industry that led up to the race riot.

That there was at least one case of mob violence is shown by the report of the coroner's jury which investigated the riots. William H. Dozier, a colored man, was killed in the Stock Yards, according to this report. The jury's finding in this case was:

We find that during the race riots at a point about Cook Street and Exchange Avenue in the Union Stock Yards, and at about 7:15 A.M., July 31, 1919, deceased, a colored man, was struck by a hammer held and wielded by one Joseph Carka, that the deceased ran east on Exchange Avenue toward the sheep pens at Morgan Street, that he was followed and chased by a mob of white men, and that while so running the deceased was struck by a street broom, held and wielded by one Joe Scovak, and that he was also struck by a shovel in the hands of an unknown white man, and by one or more stones or missiles thrown by one or more unknown white men; injuries sustained causing death.

This was the only serious case of violence in the Stock Yards discovered, although a number of rumors were investigated, which could not be substantiated by facts.

Because of the nature of the work in the "Yards" and the presence of knives and other dangerous implements which could be turned to ready use, it is significant that more rioting, with deaths and injuries resulting, did not take place. But it is also true that the riot, which started on Sunday afternoon, became so serious by Monday morning that few Negroes made an effort to reach their work at the Stock Yards.

VII. FUTURE OF THE NEGRO IN CHICAGO INDUSTRIES

The investigation of the Negro in industry points to the conclusion that Negro labor has made a satisfactory record, and that there is little race friction in evidence between white and Negro workers. What the future will hold for him depends upon many complicating factors, some of which are: renewal of immigration in large volume, depressed business conditions, attempted reductions in labor costs, increasing unemployment, falling wages, the announced determination of many employers' associations throughout the country to undermine the strength of unions by establishing the "open shop" which might involve the use of Negro labor, and the admitted prejudice of foremen against Negro labor in many plants. It was labor shortage which forced employers to experiment with Negro workers in new fields. Whether Negro employees will be retained when a surplus of white labor is available is an open question.

Employers' representatives, in April and May, 1920, stated (with one exception) that no reduction in labor force was contemplated; that when such reduction became necessary, efficiency and seniority rights would determine which workers would be retained; that the question of color would not enter into the decision in any way. The employment manager of a firm employing a very large number of Negroes expressed the general opinion of the employers' representatives when he said:

I feel that our house will continue to run a colored office as long as they can run it as efficiently and economically as they could a white office; while, on the other hand, if they could not run it as efficiently and economically of course they wouldn't run it, because it's just a matter of dollars and cents, and as far as charity and good will goes, all good business men have it, but they are not going to run their business according to that entirely.

On the other hand, the employment manager of an establishment which had experienced friction between white and Negro workers was of the opinion that white workers resented the intrusion of Negroes. He thought that this feeling would be a factor if a time came when there was an oversupply of labor; that Negroes would then have to give way because no employer would be strong enough to resist the resentment of white workers; and Negro workers would thus be thrown out of work and would be a standing menace to the community.

The investigations and inquiries of the Commission in industry took place almost entirely in the period from March to September, 1920, and the statistics concerning Negroes employed were gathered in the earlier part of this period. During these months the general industrial situation was such as to demand all the labor, both white and Negro, that could be secured. In the autumn of 1920, however, a period of decline began, with increasing unemployment. This affected both white and Negro workers. Its own investigational staff no longer available for additional service, the Commission sought information concerning these changed conditions, so far as they affected Negro workers, from the industrial secretary of the Chicago Urban League. Through its industrial department the League places more Negroes in employment than any other agency in Chicago. The industrial secretary made the following statement on November 20:

At the present time the unemployment among colored people has reached what seems serious proportions. While there is no indication that colored people are suffering more in this respect than any other group, the constantly swelling number is a cause for grave concern. For three weeks our employment office has been crowded with job seekers. At first it appeared that those who failed to take their work seriously suddenly found themselves unable to get employment, but now hundreds of men with good records have been forced out by temporary "shut downs" and reduced forces of various plants.

During the working days included between November 15 and 20, our attendance record is 1,073 job seekers with only 131 openings. One month ago the attendance figure was 571 persons for the equal period (259 men and 312 women).

Our labor reports for May, 1920, indicated an attendance of 941 males and 739 females; about 1,000 orders for male help and about 500 for female help; there were 722 placements for males and 371 for females. The total attendance was 1,680; orders, 1,500; placements, 1,093.

A casual survey including most of the leading industries ... shows a general decline and a letting off of workers. Some few report difficulty in keeping their present forces.

There have been some complaints of discrimination against colored workers, but few comparatively.... Most industries are keeping their proportionate share of Negroes. In some instances the proportion has been slightly increased....

During the week, workers have registered from cities in states from Mississippi to Michigan. Detroit predominates, where the automobile industries show a marked depression.

Women's work presents a very discouraging outlook. Hundreds of needle workers are out of employment by the closing of many of the smaller shops which employed colored girls. The Women's Trade Union League reports many workers unemployed, due to the slowness of the trade. Immigrant white girls are said to be consuming much of the work offered to domestics.... Colored women seem in most cases as reluctant as ever to accept domestic employment.

The present unemployment problem is probably as serious as any the League has known. What shall become of the army of jobless men is a problem serious and perplexing.

As a result of the necessity of reducing costs in response to depressed business conditions, managers of establishments employing both white and Negro workers may be tempted to pit Negro and white workers against each other, paying Negro labor less than white labor as a means of forcing down wages or undermining labor-union organizations. Such attempts would certainly be conducive to increased racial animosity. On the other hand, managers who are hostile to Negro labor may take advantage of the change in the labor situation by discharging Negroes indiscriminately, replacing them with white workers.

During the period of business depression which had already begun, both white and Negro workers seemed certain to lose some of the advantages which they had gained as a result of the labor shortage caused by the war. After the industrial depression has passed, discrimination against the Negro, to whatever extent it may exist, will make the recovery of lost ground more difficult for Negro workers than for white workers. In considering the question of race discrimination, it is evident that the Negro who has lived in the North for a number of years feels keenly the fact that color bars even the most capable members of his race from the hope of promotion to executive or administrative positions, while prejudice on the part of persons in authority prevents the rank and file of Negroes from developing the degree of efficiency which they could develop if they knew their efforts would be judged on merit alone. Where advancement is precluded by color, the incentive supplied by recognition of effort is lacking.

One door of escape from the discouraging prospects held out in industries managed by white men, where there is no chance for promotion to executive positions, is the opportunity for an increasing number of the more ambitious Negroes to enter business among members of their own race. According to Black's _Blue Book_ (1919-20) there were over 1,200 Negro business houses and professional offices in Chicago in 1920. Among others, the list included five banks, forty dentists, fifteen druggists, twenty-four employment agencies, six hotels, three insurance offices, forty-eight real estate offices, eleven newspapers and magazines, 106 physicians, seventy lawyers, 161 barber shops and billiard rooms, and 120 hairdressing parlors. Although the list of Negro business men in Chicago is growing rapidly, it must necessarily remain but a small percentage of the total Negro population. The great majority of Negroes gainfully occupied will continue to be employees in industry. Therefore the fact that a large number of Negroes feel that discrimination is practiced and that, no matter what abilities they show, they can "go so far and no farther" in industries managed by white men is of great importance in any consideration of race problems. These men are the more thoughtful, aspiring members of their race, and their opinion accordingly carries more weight than the opinion of an equal number of care-free Negroes who may consider that the high wages of the present are an offset for all handicaps. Negroes who feel keenly the injustice of unequal opportunities are the ones to seek expression in Negro newspapers and magazines with the aim of arousing widespread resentment against race discrimination. Men who frequently would not resent discrimination directed against themselves are stirred to resentment by well-told recitals of injustice to others. Specific instances may seem to be of trifling importance, but in being retold they reach an ever-widening audience, which is constantly growing more race conscious.

B. ORGANIZED LABOR AND THE NEGRO WORKER

I. INTRODUCTION

Industry involves the continuous contact of more whites and Negroes than any other field. It therefore affords wide opportunity for the operation of racial misunderstanding and friction. It is also a field in which the lines of economic interest are so tightly drawn and so closely watched that any misunderstanding or friction is thereby greatly accentuated.

Irritation and clashes of interest have been conspicuous in the relations between labor unions and Negro workers. This friction has extended to the relations between whites and Negroes generally. The efforts of union labor to promote its cause and gain adherents have built up a body of sentiment that cannot easily be opposed by non-union workers. The strike breaker is intolerable to the union man. Circumstances have frequently made Negroes strike breakers, thus centering upon them as a racial group all the bitterness which the unionist feels toward strike breakers as a class. This tends to increase any existing racial antipathy or to serve as concrete justification for it.

On the other hand, Negroes have often expressed themselves as distrustful of the unions because prejudice in the unions has denied them equal benefits of membership. They often find that their first opportunity in a new industry comes through the eagerness of a strike-bound employer to utilize their labor at wages more than they have previously earned, even if less than the union scale. This often tends to make them feel that they have more to gain through affiliation with such employers than by taking chances on what the unions offer them.

There is a gradually increasing sympathetic understanding by unionists of the struggle of Negroes to overcome their handicaps, and an increasing realization of the importance to the unions of organizing them. Negroes are themselves showing more interest in efforts toward organizations, but there is still much mutual suspicion and resentment in their relations.

To understand these relations it is necessary to know (1) the policy and attitude of organized labor toward the Negro and how its expressed policy is carried out in practice; and (2) what the Negro believes the facts to be and what his attitude is toward organized labor. In its investigation the Commission used the following methods of inquiry: Questionnaires were sent to all labor organizations; interviews were held with union officials and members, both white and Negro, with officers and members of Negro "protest" unions, with non-union Negroes, and with persons who were not connected with unions but had certain special information. Ninety-one persons, of whom twenty-five were Negroes, were interviewed. Trade-union meetings were attended by the Commission's investigator. Union constitutions, magazines, convention reports, etc., were collected and studied. Conferences were held by the Commission at which the following labor leaders and organizers presented their information and views:

George W. Perkins, president of the International Cigarmakers' Union, and prominent in the affairs of the American Federation of Labor since its organization.

Victor Olander, secretary-treasurer, Illinois State Federation of Labor, and vice-president of International Seaman's Union.

John Fitzpatrick, president, Chicago Federation of Labor.

W. Z. Foster, organizer of the American Federation of Labor in the steel and packing industries.

A. K. Foote, Negro, vice-president of Stock Yards Labor Council and secretary-treasurer, Local 651, Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of America.

I. H. Bratton, Negro organizer for Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of America.

John Riley, Negro organizer for the American Federation of Labor in the Stock Yards district.

Max Brodsky, secretary-treasurer, Local 100, International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

Agnes Nestor, president, Women's Trade Union League.

Elizabeth Maloney, treasurer and organizer, Chicago Waitresses' Union.

Robert L. Mays, Negro, president of an independent Negro union, the Railway Men's International Benevolent and Industrial Association.

II. POLICY OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR AND OTHER FEDERATIONS

From its beginning the American Federation of Labor has declared a uniform policy of no racial discrimination, although this policy has not been carried out in practice by all the constituent autonomous bodies. At its fortieth annual convention, held at Montreal, Canada, in June, 1920, a plan was presented to "use every means in its power to have the words 'only white' members stricken out of the constitution" of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, an organization which exercises jurisdiction over 100,000 colored employees, although barring them from membership, and "admit the colored workers to full membership in their Brotherhood or have them relinquish jurisdiction" over these Negro employees and allow them to establish a brotherhood of their own.

This failed to receive favorable action, but a resolution was passed reaffirming the position taken at the Atlantic City convention in 1919 that "where international unions refuse to admit colored workers to membership, the American Federation of Labor will be authorized to organize them under charters from the American Federation of Labor." This means that in such cases the American Federation of Labor itself becomes the national or international union of such locals. According to the information given to the Commission by George W. Perkins, "the American Federation of Labor has organized hundreds of local unions and thereby directly attached to the American Federation of Labor colored workers." President Gompers states: "Of the 900 unions affiliated directly with the American Federation of Labor there are 169 composed exclusively of Negroes."

A brief reference to the history of the national federations which preceded the American Federation of Labor shows that the foregoing policy has been followed since shortly after the Civil War.

The National Labor Union (1866-72), at its first convention in 1866, was the first national federation of labor unions to deal with the problem of meeting Negro competition after the Civil War. The formation of trades unions among colored people was favored. In 1869 Negro delegates were admitted to the annual convention. A separate national Negro Labor Union, formed in 1869, was short-lived. The unfriendly attitude of the unions toward the Negroes was the subject of bitter comment at the various sessions of the latter organization. The Knights of Labor, which rose to prominence after the decline of the National Labor Union, admitted all workers without regard to color. Many Negroes in the South joined the organization. When the leadership of organized labor shifted from the Knights of Labor to the American Federation of Labor in the late eighties, the Federation continued to express the policy of no racial discrimination and has stood for that policy to the present time.[75] At the convention of the American Federation of Labor in Atlantic City, 1919, there were present about fifty Negro delegates, men and women. A large number of Negro delegates also attended the last convention of the Federation at Montreal.

The policy of the Illinois State Federation of Labor was outlined to the Commission by Victor Olander, secretary-treasurer, as follows:

The State Federation of Labor is under the jurisdiction of the American Federation of Labor, and the laws governing the national would necessarily govern the state federation, so that in respect to law they are the same. I might add that they are carrying out the law in much the same manner with respect to the Negro. There hasn't been a convention of the Illinois State Federation of Labor held in many years that hasn't had in attendance Negro delegates. That is the usual thing at every convention. There is no discrimination.

The Chicago Federation of Labor is the city central body of the various local unions in Chicago which are connected with the American Federation of Labor. Each of these local unions elects delegates to represent it at the semi-monthly meetings of the Chicago Federation. Negro delegates take an active part in these meetings, and are cordially received. The Federation and its president have been very active in all efforts to organize Negroes, especially in the Stock Yards, the steel industry, and the culinary trades.

III. POLICY OF NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL UNIONS

In considering the policy of national and international unions, that of the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor will be discussed first, and following this the policy of six of the most important of the independent internationals.

1. UNIONS AFFILIATED WITH THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

The American Federation of Labor has consistently followed a policy of no racial discrimination. It has, however, no power to compel its constituent national and international unions to follow this policy. The question of race discrimination by an autonomous national or international union has been frequently the subject of spirited discussion at American Federation of Labor conventions, but the outcome has been merely a recommendation to the offending union that the discrimination be discontinued. Since strict autonomy of national and international unions is recognized in the constitution of the American Federation of Labor, no more effective action can be taken.

In order to learn the racial policy of the 110 nationals and internationals affiliated with the American Federation of Labor inquiries were sent to each, and direct responses were received from sixty-nine. The policy of twenty-five additional unions was learned through their district councils or locals in Chicago. Thus all but sixteen of the 110 national and international unions in the American Federation of Labor were covered. Of these, two were suspended from the American Federation of Labor in 1919-20. Only three have locals in Chicago, and all have little significance for Chicago. Information concerning the racial policy of the sixteen unions not heard from was supplied by labor leaders in touch with the whole union situation and able to speak with authority on this subject.

Of the 110 national and international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, eight expressly bar the Negro by their constitutions or rituals. These unions are: Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America, International Association of Machinists, American Association of Masters, Mates, and Pilots, Railway Mail Association, Order of Railroad Telegraphers, the Commercial Telegraphers' Union of America, American Wire Weavers' Protective Association, and Brotherhood of Railway Mail Clerks.

Thus 102 of the 110 national and international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor admit Negroes. Not all of these unions, however, have Negro members, notwithstanding the fact that Negroes are eligible to membership. In accounting for the absence of Negro members, twenty-eight national and international unions reported "no Negroes in the trade," or "no applications ever received." Certain of the 102 nationals and internationals reported a small Negro membership with the following explanations:

Eleven stated that employers discriminated against Negro members of the union--wanted white men if they had to pay the union scale of wages.

Seven internationals and five delegate bodies reported that special efforts were now being made to organize Negro workers.

Twelve internationals called attention to long periods of apprenticeship--four had a three-year period, six a four-year period, and two a five-year period--as a factor which accounted for the failure of Negroes to join.

In their comments, some of these union officials unconsciously express their prejudice, sometimes attributing traits to the Negro which they seem to take for granted as being characteristic. The following are some examples:

No Negroes have applied for membership in our union or did not have nerve enough as it requires lots of climbing.

We do not have any Negroes in our organization, but there is nothing in the constitution which prevents them from becoming members after they have learned the trade. No one has ever made application for a Negro. I judge this is because they have to blow in the same pipe [in glass blowing].

I find nothing in our laws which bars Negroes from becoming members of this union, but in my thirteen years in this office I have never known one to make application for membership. This may be due to the hazardous nature of our work.

Ours is usually very hard work. Negroes as a whole do not like hard work. They instead very often prefer employment where they can get along at their own gait or in their own way, especially working in gangs.

National and international unions which had Negro members in appreciable numbers reported the following facts:

Sixteen had Negro officers or organizers.

Twenty-three reported that relations between the races in the unions were undisturbed by race prejudice.

Thirty-three stated that Negroes had belonged to the union for the following periods:

Number of Unions

2 years or less 12 2 to 4 years 8 4 to 6 years 1 6 to 8 years 2 8 to 15 years 4 20 years 4 25 years 1 35 years 1

2. UNIONS NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR

There are a number of unions[76] not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, of which the most important are: the four railway brotherhoods--Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, Order of Railway Conductors of America--Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). The four railway brotherhoods exclude the Negro by constitutional provision. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the Industrial Workers of the World admit the Negro and make special efforts to organize Negro workers. The I.W.W. has its main foothold in the lumber, mine, and textile industries and does not have any strong unions in Chicago.

Disregarding the classification of nationals and internationals based upon affiliation with the American Federation of Labor, a review of the figures presented above shows that 104 national and international unions admit the Negro, and that twelve exclude the Negro by written provision.

The outstanding fact with reference to these twelve organizations is that, with the exception of the Wire Weavers, they are all connected with the transportation industry: seven are members of the American Federation of Labor Railway Department and the other four constitute the big "railway brotherhoods." The latter are sometimes referred to by members of the unions as the "aristocrats in the labor movement." All of these unions, except the Masters, Mates, and Pilots, have been organized more than twenty years. None of the unions formed within the last twenty years, except the Masters, Mates, and Pilots, excludes the Negro.

In these crafts, excepting such trades as carmen, machinists, clerks, and firemen, it may be that in general the Negro would not be much of a factor at present, because these trades demand an amount of education and skill not yet possessed by a large percentage of Negroes. But this by no means proves that the Negro would not acquire the necessary skill and education if opportunities in these trades were actually open to him.

The Railway Department of the American Federation of Labor is composed of fourteen craft unions, all but two of which exclude the Negro worker. The Stationary Firemen and Oil Men of the American Federation of Labor Railway Department are openly soliciting Negro members. The only other craft organization which admits Negroes is the Maintenance of Way Craft, which really means the common labor group. Negroes can get into this craft through an auxiliary charter to a Negro local. Regardless of how skilled or how intelligent the applicant may be, or how logically he falls into some other craft, he can only come in through one or the other of these two craft unions.

The attitude of the railway brotherhoods is typified in remarks made to an investigator for the Commission by a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks who is now serving on an important public commission. He was emphatic in upholding the brotherhood's policy of excluding Negroes. "As long as the engineers have anything to say about it, they certainly will not get in." He said that the modern locomotive was a highly complicated and scientific mechanism, and that the Negroes "did not have brains enough to run one."

As showing the contrasting view of another trade-union man, an employee of the public commission mentioned said that he had been a member of the United Mine Workers since 1901, and in that organization no color line is drawn; that he had worked beside Negro miners and feels no prejudice. He pointed out that the national conventions of the miners always have a large representation of Negro delegates, and some of the ablest and best speakers come from the Negro race. He expressed the feeling that the policy of the railway brotherhoods is a mistake, and is a case of "swell-headedness."

The general exclusion policy of the railway brotherhoods and certain of the unions in the Railway Department of the American Federation of Labor has created a feeling of bitterness among Negroes which spreads beyond these crafts and is directed against unions in general, notwithstanding the constructive and progressive policy of the many unions which admit Negroes. In the transportation crafts it has led to the formation of a "protest" Negro railway union.

_The Railway Men's International Benevolent Industrial Association._--This organization is a labor union open to Negro railway employees. It is a protest organization which has grown up because of the exclusion of Negroes by the railway brotherhoods and certain unions in the Railway Department of the American Federation of Labor.

The Association was organized May 12, 1915, and has seventeen locals in Chicago and a membership of about 1,200, all railway employees. The leaders of this group disclaimed any intention of building up "a rival American Federation of Labor among Negroes," but stated that, as far as they were personally concerned, they would be willing to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor in its proper department, _providing_ all forms of discrimination in national and international unions, both in constitution and practice, were done away with, and the Negro worker was assured of equal treatment and opportunity with the white worker. They realize that the highest welfare of both groups depends upon co-operation. But, as to what the membership would want to do when that time comes, they of course do not know.

Mr. Mays, the president of the organization, was asked by the Commission's investigator what he would do in a situation where both Negroes and whites were organized separately, and the whites were going out on a strike and had requested the Negroes to come out also. He stated that several such local strike situations had arisen in the South, and that he had advised the Negro union in each of these cases to use its own judgment, but that if it decided to support the white unions, it should, before doing so, have a joint committee of both groups meet and make it understood absolutely that any agreement finally reached with the employers must include both groups on equal terms. In one case, after such an agreement had been reached and the men had gone back to work, the employer tried to keep out certain Negroes, but the white unionists insisted that the agreement must be lived up to.

The officials of this organization are exceptionally capable Negroes; its advisers are professional men, well educated and thoroughly familiar with the history and tactics of white labor unions.

A more definite statement of the purpose and policies of this protest organization was made before the Commission by R. L. Mays:

The Railway Men's International Benevolent Industrial Association really protests as an organization against unfair and bad working conditions of the employer and against unfair practices on the part of the American Federation of Labor and the railway brotherhoods.

This is the crux of the problem as we see it. We agree with the policies and principles of the American Federation of Labor so long as they are American and in the interests of the workmen, but if their practices are against Negroes, then we are against the American Federation of Labor unflinchingly.

_Question_: To what extent have you found their practices unfair to the colored people?

_Mr. Mays_: There are fourteen unions in railway employment in the American Federation of Labor. The United Brotherhood of Railway Employees has been accepting Negroes in full membership, but the other thirteen organizations do not accept Negroes in membership. As a matter of fact, they are secured on contract, which is the greatest holdback for the Negroes and breeds more distrust on the part of the Negro in these places, so far as the American Federation of Labor is concerned.

Before the roads were under government control certain discriminatory practices were found in the South, but now you will find colored men in certain skilled positions. In the Brotherhood of Carmen, if a colored man is not organized into the local union, he cannot advance automatically from repair to car building. He might be a member of one of these local unions chartered by and affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. But under contract they say their members must be white, and they use only white men. In the South our men have enjoyed these jobs; under war conditions they were brought here, but under this contract no Negro can be employed as a carman, although he has all the experience in the world. They refuse to take the colored man but take the white man. No colored boy can go in as an apprentice and work up to a skilled mechanic's position. Consequently they are reducing the Negro railway worker to a position of common laborer and automatically are keeping him down. If this is the condition in the railways in the North, I say it will prevail everywhere. I have said that it is a northern prejudice coming South.

IV. ATTITUDE AND POLICY OF LOCAL UNIONS IN CHICAGO

1. WHITE AND NEGRO MEMBERSHIP IN CHICAGO LOCAL UNIONS

Much effort was made to obtain statistics of white and Negro membership in local trade unions in Chicago. Information was sought through requests addressed to the national headquarters of all national and international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor for data as to any local unions they might have in Chicago. Requests were also addressed directly to these local unions as listed in a directory published by the Chicago Trade Union Label League. Further requests were addressed to local unions in Chicago directly affiliated with the American Federation of Labor as listed in a directory of all such unions published by that organization.

It was difficult to ascertain the exact number of local unions in Chicago. Those covered embraced, however, as full a list as could be supplied by trade-union offices in Chicago. But the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor said that the number of local unions was changing so continually by reason of the organization of new ones and the consolidation of two or more into one, that no accurate list was available.

Data for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and for the Railway Men's International Industrial Benevolent Association were obtained directly from those organizations.

Reports were received from the railway brotherhoods saying that they exclude Negroes, but giving no data as to the number of white members.

The information which was obtained may be summarized as follows:

Members

371 local unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, comprising locals of national and international unions so affiliated, and also federal and local unions directly affiliated with the American Federation of Labor 253,237

11 local unions of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America 40,000

17 local unions of the Railway Men's International Industrial Benevolent Association 1,200 ------- 294,437

The total Negro membership reported for Chicago by the foregoing organizations was 12,106. The number of locals through which this Negro membership was distributed cannot be stated with any approach to accuracy, due to the fact that in a number of cases the district council or the national body reported the membership for its Chicago locals jointly. In such cases it could not safely be assumed that each of the locals in question had Negro members. Disregarding all such cases, however, there still remains a total of at least eighty-five Chicago locals for which, individually, Negro members were reported.

It is interesting to note that, judging by the figures here shown as to white and Negro membership in local unions in Chicago, the proportion of Negro union members to the Negro population in Chicago is almost exactly the same as the proportion of white members to the white population in Chicago.

2. METHODS OF DEALING WITH NEGRO APPLICANTS

If the unions which bar the Negro are chosen as examples, organized labor might appear to be very unfair to Negro workers. On the other hand, if unions which admit them into the same locals and have Negro organizers and officers are chosen as examples, it might appear that there was no prejudice whatever against Negroes on the part of trade unions. Neither extreme would represent the facts. On the basis of policy toward the Negro, unions in Chicago may be divided into four classes or types. These classes are:

A. Unions admitting Negroes to white locals.

B. Unions admitting Negroes to separate co-ordinate locals.

C. Unions admitting Negroes to subordinate or auxiliary locals.

D. Unions excluding Negroes from membership.

The existence of these classes indicates the fact that the union attitude and policy toward the Negro cannot be summed up by any simple generalization. Each class or type has its own policy, and even within the class there are minor variations of attitude and policy.

A. UNIONS ADMITTING NEGROES TO WHITE LOCALS

Wherever and whenever Negroes are admitted on an equal basis and given a square deal, the feeling inside the union is nearly always harmonious. This is true in such unions as the Butcher Workmen's, Hodcarriers', Flat Janitors', and Ladies' Garment Workers', which include important fields of Negro labor in Chicago.

_Stock Yards' unions._--The Stock Yards' strike of 1904 was broken by the use of Negroes. This was the opening wedge for the admittance to the union of the large number of Negroes which followed. No organization thereafter could hope to amount to anything in the Yards unless it took in Negroes. From 1917 until the riot of 1919 Negroes in large numbers were joining the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen's Union of North America. Forty locals were formed. The Negro was welcome to join any local he desired, whether it was predominantly Polish or Irish or Negro. However, the majority gravitated to Local 651, which was composed mainly of Negroes and had Negro officers and organizers and headquarters near the "Black Belt."

This was not unnatural, since the headquarters of the various local unions are distributed over the city with a view to their convenience for the members. Most of the Negro members live within the "Black Belt." The most active Negro organizer in the city is connected with this local. Negroes living outside this area belong to the locals nearest their homes.

Efforts to organize Negro workers in the Yards are commented upon in the _Negro Year Book_ of 1918-19 in the following paragraph:

That the unions are doing much to organize Negro labor is indicated by the fact that of the more than ten thousand Negro workers in the Chicago packing houses, over 60 per cent are reported in the unions. The International Union of Butchers' Workmen, which has jurisdiction over 90 per cent of the employees in the packing houses of the country, has three paid Negro organizers. In other lines of work there is equal activity in organizing Negro labor.

The unions succeeded in securing an agreement under which Judge Samuel Alschuler was mutually accepted by the packing companies and the unions as an arbitrator on matters affecting working conditions in the Yards, especially hours and wages. This agreement applies to all who work in the Yards, whether in or out of the union, but, according to labor leaders, union action and union money "put it across." Consequently there was the feeling that all who benefited should join and help share in the expense, and a feeling of hostility toward such Negroes, and whites as well for that matter, who did not join because they found that they could get all the benefits of the arrangement without paying dues.

While the Commission's investigator was interviewing the officials of one of the unions of the packing industry at their headquarters, a number of the white members dropped in to pay their dues. In conversation they showed, quite unsolicited, that considerable feeling existed because the Negro workers were not coming into the union. They felt that the Negroes were receiving all the benefits secured for the workers by the unions without paying their proportion of the expense of the organization. In fact, several used rather strong terms with the words "fink" and "scabs."

The sentiment of the men present seemed to be that, while mistakes had been made on both sides in the 1904 strike and since, the antagonistic feeling had been pretty largely eliminated, as was shown by the large Negro membership prior to the riot, and they said that every effort was being made at that time and since to bring the Negro into the union. Conferences had been held with Negro ministers and other organizations explaining the position of the unions, literature had been distributed, and a great deal of money had been spent through Negro organizers, and yet the results were disappointingly small. These white union men contended that they were opposed by an effective combination of "packers'" influence hard to beat and intensively interested in keeping the races apart for its own purposes in opposing union organization.

_The Hod Carriers_ have sixteen locals in Chicago with a large total membership. No racial record is kept, but Negroes are admitted without discrimination into all of the unions. A few years ago the Negro membership was between 1,200 and 1,400; at present with an increase of 300 to 500 from the South, the secretary of the executive council estimates the total Negro membership to be at least 1,700, most of whom have joined two locals. The president of the Evanston union and the vice-president of the Chicago Heights union are colored. No feeling of discrimination exists, all being treated alike as long as they pay their dues and live up to the rules. The Hod Carriers have joint arbitration agreements with the employing contractors' associations in this industry, and no strikes have been called since 1900.

_The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union_ is another illustration of a union which accords Negroes the same treatment as white members, and where the relationship is entirely harmonious. This union has never drawn the race, creed, or color line and is trying to leave out the word "white" and "colored" from its minutes and reports. The Negro girls came into this industry as strike breakers within the last three years.

The officials of this union, in interviews and in testimony before the Commission, claimed that whenever any friction did arise it was due to the fact that the employers in this industry discriminated against Negro girls and paid them less than white girls. The agreement between the ladies' garment manufacturers and the union provided a weekly wage of $37.40 for skirt and dress operators--85 cents per hour for a forty-four-hour week. Negro operators in non-union factories for the same work were being paid from $18.00 to $25.00 per week. Union skirt and dress finishers were being paid $26.40 per week--60 cents per hour for forty-four hours. Negro operators in non-union factories averaged $15.00 per week for the same work and frequently worked longer than forty-four hours.

The relations of whites and Negroes in the union were discussed before the Commission by Max Brodsky, a representative of the union, who said:

As a result of the 1917 strike we have now about 450 colored women workers in our industry. We lost the strike, and this is how the colored women got into our industry. Now the union knew the object of the colored women coming into our industry, and we decided to have them organized just like the white women and girls, so we established this particular union. They are at present conscientious union girls and women. It was the policy of the union not to discriminate against the colored women who broke the strike in 1917. This helped us.

At the same conference, Agnes Nestor, president of the Women's Trade Union League, testified as follows:

_Miss Nestor_: In the ladies' garments work, the unions have taken in colored girls on the same basis as the white girls. They made a colored girl a chairman of their shop meeting. There is no feeling there with them as far as I know.

_Miss McDowell_: Didn't they elect a colored girl as shop steward where they had both white and colored girls?

_Miss Nestor_: Yes.

As an illustration of employers' discrimination against Negro workers, and of the efforts of the union to protect Negroes when they become members of the union, the case of a manufacturer was cited whose shop had only Negro workers. Shortly after the union had organized them they were locked out. Later the employer was willing to settle "providing you sent us a set of white workers." The union refused to do this and called a strike.

The union claimed that in many recent cases where Negro girls were sent out on jobs the employers would refuse them when they found out that they had to pay them the same scale as white workers. During 1917-18, owing to the war, the manufacturers worked in harmony with the unions because they had to; since the war, and largely within the first few months of 1920, the manufacturers have opened many shops on the South Side employing only non-union colored girls. In the various strikes in which this union has been engaged for this same period, the strike breakers have been Negro girls secured for the employers through a Negro minister acting as a labor agent or solicitor.

_The Flat Janitors' Union_ has a membership of approximately 5,000, of whom 1,000 are Negroes. It includes many nationalities with strong racial feelings, yet, as stated by Mr. Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, rarely is any complaint made against this union by Negroes.

Interviews with the president and other officials, attendance at a session of the Executive Board, and attendance at a crowded meeting of the union, where transaction of general business, nomination of candidates for the coming election, and initiation of new members occurred, gave the Commission's investigator ample opportunity for observation of the attitude toward Negroes.

This union, organized in 1904, started out with a Negro as recording secretary and business agent. At the time of the interviews, the vice-president and three members of the Executive Board were Negroes. These had been elected for a three-year term. At the general meeting attended, the Negro officers were renominated unanimously to hold office for a period of five years. In addition, several more Negroes were nominated as stewards and as delegates to the Chicago Federation of Labor.

According to the members, discrimination in this craft is practiced by the flat and apartment owners. The experience of the union is that as soon as a Negro is taken into the union and demands the union scale the owner calls up the union and says, "If I have to pay these wages I'm going to get a good white man."

The position taken by the union is that if a Negro has had the job he must be allowed to stay there and get the scale, and the union will back him up in the fight for it. The threat of a strike against a building is usually effective.

Inquiry among Negro janitors in the residence districts brought up a case in which one Negro claimed that Negroes were forced into the union and then usually found themselves discriminated against by the white members, especially by Belgians, and soon or later, were squeezed out of the good jobs. However, this Negro admitted that he had not attended a union meeting since his initiation, except to stop in to pay his dues, and that he had never made a complaint to the Negro officer of the union. The officers of the union admitted that there was, in the many racial groups in this craft, strong racial feeling, especially among Austrians and Belgians, who seemed to feel that whenever a janitor died or left the job, or an assistant or helper was needed, such job should always be filled with members of their own nationality. However, the Negro officials claimed that with three Negroes on the Executive Board and a Negro vice-president, any complaint coming from a Negro would surely be fairly dealt with; but that unless their attention was called to unsatisfactory conditions the union could not be expected to know of them, and in such cases it was not the union that was to blame, but the member himself.

Frequently, in those unions in which the Negroes are not admitted into the same locals with the whites, the reasons given for putting them into separate locals or auxiliaries is that the white members object to the close physical contact or association in meetings, especially where there is some element of ritual in connection with the meetings. At the meeting of the Janitors' Union attended by the investigator, new pass words were given out, and all members, white and Negro, had to come before the Negro vice-president, who whispered the words to each and they in turn repeated them to him. Not the slightest hesitancy was noted on the part of the white members, but rather a hearty handshake or a slap on the back seemed to be the rule. Again, in taking in nineteen new members, four of whom were Negroes, the major part of the ceremony was performed by the Negro vice-president. At this meeting, packed to standing-room and attended by well over a thousand members, Negroes were a large percentage of those present. These were not confined to a group by themselves, but were scattered in all parts of the hall and seemed to be in cordial conversation with the white members.

A number of interesting comments by members and officers of unions admitting Negroes on equal terms with whites were volunteered, either in interviews or in correspondence. In one union of 700 highly skilled workers receiving $1.50 an hour, or $12.00 a day, no Negroes were found to be members, although they are not barred by the constitution. It was suggested that the five-year apprenticeship period discouraged Negroes. It was further noted that admittance was by a two-thirds vote, a provision which could easily result in the exclusion of any race which two-thirds of the members did not like. The investigator's report of his interview says:

The business representative of this union was strongly of the personal opinion that unions had made a mistake in ever admitting the Negro into any of the unions. He claimed that the employers' only interest in them was as a lever to keep wages down for the workers.

Two other members of the League took a contrary position and held that Negro labor was in the field, and that while the employer's interest in the Negro was simply to play one group against another to keep expense down as low as possible, it was really up to labor itself to solve the question and that the Negroes must be taken into unions. They admitted that undoubtedly prejudice existed, but that it was gradually being overcome.

Other comments are as follows:

From an officer of the Teamsters and Chauffeurs: "We have had one Negro holding office as trustee for several years. So feeling is brotherly."

From an officer of a specialized mechanics' union: "There has been no sign of race feeling or hatred since we have been organized. We have six officers (one colored). I myself, being colored, have no complaints whatever against my white brothers."

From a Negro officer of the Mattress Makers: "Discrimination and race prejudice does not exist in this union. We are one happy family. It seems impossible to organize the other Negro mattress makers. Would appreciate some assistance."

B. UNIONS ADMITTING NEGROES TO SEPARATE CO-ORDINATE LOCALS

Certain unions organize Negroes into separate locals which are in all respects co-ordinate with the white locals belonging to the same unions. The reason for maintaining separate Negro locals is either (1) preference of the Negro workers for locals of their own, or (2) unwillingness of white workers to admit Negroes to white locals. It often seemed that the second indicated the real situation, the first reason being given as an excuse for it.

The important factor is the reason for the existence of separate Negro locals rather than the fact of separation. This is illustrated by the experience of the Painters' and Musicians' unions on the one hand, and that of the Waiters' Union on the other.

During July, 1920, twenty Negro painters applied to the Painters' District Council for membership in the Painters' Union. They passed the required examination but, instead of being placed in the existing Painters' Union, were given temporary working permits which identified them as members of "South Side Colored Local." They immediately suspected that some effort was being made to place them in a separate Negro local in which they could not get the full benefits of union membership. They then went to discuss the matter with the editor of a Negro paper which had expressed the point of view of many Negroes concerning labor unions in its editorial columns. This editor told them his belief that the Painters' District Council was merely duplicating the practices of several other unions in the city, and was attempting to limit these men to a "Jim Crow" union. They returned to the president of the District Council, who explained that he had to keep track of all temporary permits issued, and inasmuch as the charter for their local was not yet issued he could not know the number until issued. He had to put the description on the cards to identify the men temporarily.

A charter for the local was given from national headquarters, and the new cards were issued, designating them simply as members of Local No. ----. The membership of this local, exclusively Negro, grew from twenty to seventy-five in two months. One of the Negro officials of the local stated that its members had been working in all parts of the Chicago District, including the North Side and Evanston, and that they had a representative on the District Council. The attitude of the white workers, he stated, was a little cool on the first day, but there is now no evidence of friction. He thought that the members of this local were well pleased and happy.

_The Negro Musicians_ are organized into a strong separate local, chartered in 1902. It has a membership of approximately 325. It has held the Municipal Pier dance-hall contract for three years, and besides many other contracts in the city. It furnishes players for various occasions for a considerable territory outside of Chicago. This group much prefers its own union, but works jointly with the large white union, the Chicago Federation of Musicians, whenever matters come up affecting both organizations. Both unions have the same wage scale.

Where Negro workers are permitted to join white locals but prefer to have their own colored local there is no feeling that they are discriminated against, occasional joint meetings with white locals being characterized by friendly interest and good fellowship. Where, however, a union closes the door of its white locals to Negroes and organizes them into separate locals because the white members object to contact with Negroes, a very difficult situation exists. This condition is illustrated by the methods of the Waiters' Union in Chicago.

Negro waiters are not admitted into the white Waiters' Union, but are placed in the Pullman Porters and Dining-Car Waiters' Union, which is a local affiliated with the same international as the white Waiters' Union. The makeshift of putting Negro waiters, although employed in city hotels, restaurants, and cafés, into this local is pointed to by Negroes as unmistakable evidence of discrimination.

The culinary strike in Chicago, which started May 1, 1920, resulted in failure for the unions concerned largely because Negroes acted as strike breakers. This is easily accounted for by the fact that seventeen years ago Negro waiters lost their positions in many of the first-class hotels and restaurants in the business district through circumstances in which they felt that they had been "double-crossed" by the unions, of which they then were members.

The Negro strike breakers in 1920, however, found themselves again displaced, this time through the action of employers. A typical instance was found in the restaurant of a hotel patronized largely by people of German descent, the managers as well as many of the former waiters being of German extraction. These waiters, some of whom had been employed for many years in this restaurant, were members of the union and went out when the strike was called. The managers replaced them with Negroes. The latter filled the positions with apparent satisfaction for nearly a year, when suddenly they were all discharged and the old waiters taken back.

A regular patron of the restaurant, a man of German descent, expressed vigorous views upon the "injustice" with which the Negroes had been treated by the management, which should have appreciated their service through the period when the former waiters caused trouble. He said he had always found the Negroes efficient and willing, and many of them "very intelligent fellows." Although of the same nationality as the managers and the former waiters, many of whom he had known for years, he did not let this national feeling blind him to what he considered most unfair treatment of the Negroes. He said that he had discussed the matter with one of the managers and had been told that the reason why the Negroes had been discharged and the old waiters taken back was because of complaints against the Negroes by patrons of the restaurant. He added, "I think that's bunk."

A change in the officers of the Waiters' Union at the recent election has placed in power a group which recognizes that the entire policy of the culinary unions must be co-ordinated and proper provision made for the large Negro element in the field. If this is not done, it is felt that a rival Negro union may be organized, similar to that organized by the Negro railway workers. In fact, even now a beginning has been made toward such an organization by a few high-grade Negro waiters who have been in active charge of the waiters of several of the large hotel dining-rooms during the recent strike.

C. UNIONS ADMITTING NEGROES TO SUBORDINATE OR AUXILIARY LOCALS

The practice of admitting Negroes to subordinate locals appears to be very unusual in Chicago. The investigation disclosed only one instance where the policy of the union was to admit Negroes only to subordinate locals. The Commission is not at liberty to publish the name of this union, which makes the following provision for Negro locals in its constitution:

Where there are a sufficient number of colored helpers they may be organized as an auxiliary local and shall be under the jurisdiction of the white local union having jurisdiction over that locality; and minutes of said auxiliary local must be submitted to duly authorized officers of said white local for their approval.

In shops where there is a grievance committee of the white local, grievances of members of said auxiliary local will be handled by that committee.

Members of auxiliary locals composed of colored helpers shall not transfer except to another auxiliary local composed of colored members, and colored helpers will not be promoted to ... or helper apprentice; and will not be admitted to shops where white helpers are now employed.

Auxiliary locals will be represented in all conventions by the delegates elected from the white local in that locality.

The officials of this union stoutly maintain that the provisions above quoted are not discriminatory, and they are at a loss to explain why attempts to organize Negro workers in Chicago into auxiliary locals have not met with success.

D. UNIONS EXCLUDING NEGROES FROM MEMBERSHIP

Chicago locals which exclude the Negro do so either in conformity with the laws of their national unions or in the exercise of "local option." Locals belonging to the national and international unions which bar the Negro by written provision in their constitutions or rituals are obliged to follow the same racial policy as their parent bodies. This number includes the Chicago locals belonging to the eight American Federation of Labor national unions which exclude the Negro, and the locals of the four railway brotherhoods which likewise exclude the Negro by constitutional provision.

In addition to the locals which are bound to follow the policy of their nationals, there are certain other locals which are known to reject Negro applicants. By allowing their locals to practice "local option" or to require a majority or two-thirds vote for election to membership, the progressive policy of certain American Federation of Labor national and international unions which admit the Negro is nullified.

The Machinists' Union has frequently been referred to as a union which, although complying in its constitution with the American Federation of Labor policy of no racial discrimination, still effectually bars the Negro by a provision in its secret ritual. In effect, however, there is no real difference between such a policy on the part of the Machinists' Union and that of the unions which apparently practice exclusion as an unwritten law. With the Machinists' Union must then be grouped such unions as the Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers' International Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers of America, and United Association of Plumbers and Steam Fitters of United States and Canada. The Electricians' Union has only one Negro member out of a total membership of 11,000 in Chicago.

V. ATTITUDE OF NEGROES TOWARD UNION ORGANIZATION

From its attitude toward labor unions the Negro population of Chicago may be considered in four groups: (1) racial leaders outside the labor movement--ministers, editors, politicians, etc.; (2) Negroes with a special interest in opposing unions; (3) Negro workers outside of the unions; (4) Negro workers within the ranks of the unions.

1. RACIAL LEADERS OUTSIDE OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

Within this group are found many sincere workers for the welfare of the race. Their attitude is determined by the apparent practicability of courses of action for Negroes in relation to the unions. These attitudes again depend upon their familiarity with the principles and purposes of unionism. They recognize that the entrance of large numbers of Negroes in industry has been recent. The belief is that the employers rather than the labor unions provided this first opportunity, and since, under most frequent circumstances, the holding of these positions has been due to the kindly attitude of employers, they felt that first loyalty was due to them.

They have also been affected by experiences with labor unions which in the past have not been disposed to accept Negroes freely into membership with them.

Although the interest of employers in securing Negroes has not always been merely the granting of an opportunity for work, where Negroes have entered as strike breakers they have usually remained. This recent entrance into industry has made them, for the first time, a considerable factor, and they feel that the unions, recognizing their importance to the accomplishment of union aims, are making appeals to them for membership, not out of a spirit of brotherhood, but merely to advance their purposes.

These considerations have largely determined the attitude of many Negro leaders, especially the ministers, some of whom have been requested by employers to recommend members of their congregations for jobs in various fields of industry. At a recent industrial convention of Negro organizations controlling the employment of thousands of Negro workers, it was decided that Negroes would not be sent as strike breakers to plants where the strikers' unions accepted Negroes, and that they would advise Negroes to join the unions wherever possible, but that where Negroes are offered positions by employers in trades where Negroes are excluded from the unions, they would not be advised to forego the opportunity.

An intelligent Negro woman, who has been active in trying to acquaint ministers with union aims and methods, commented upon the fact that until recently Negro ministers knew very little about unionism, except that employers were opposed to it. This was enough to influence many ministers to urge Negro workers to stay out of labor unions and thus demonstrate their loyalty to employers who had given them a chance in industry.

A prominent Negro leader, a member of the Illinois legislature, stated his position respecting unions, at one of the industrial conferences held by the Commission, as follows:

I want to confess that I have never felt that I could intelligently advise the colored people who ask me whether laboring people should join the unions. It has been the opinion of the leaders of our race for years that employers of labor felt more kindly toward colored labor and were less concerned about the color of the workmen--were only concerned about the character of the service. We felt as leaders of the race that the labor employer was given a square deal much more than the employee himself.... We had a strike here of waiters several years ago when the Kohlsaat lunchroom waiters were involved. I was the president of a men's Sunday club, and some labor agitators got the colored boys to join the white Waiters' Union, and I remember when the matter came before the club I told them, "They raised your wages to the white man's scale, and the white men are raising you out in the street," and that is what they did too.... I have been somewhat influenced by that experience.

2. NEGROES WITH A SPECIAL INTEREST IN OPPOSING UNIONS

The rift between employers and labor unions has provided a field of exploitation for certain less responsible Negroes. Their operations have occasioned bitter feeling between Negroes and labor unions and have accomplished little or nothing for the Negro workers. A Negro editor of a small and irresponsible paper advises Negro workers not to join the white man's union, but instead to join a union which he has formed and of which he is president. He is looked upon with suspicion by representative Negroes of Chicago, who believe that he is willing to sacrifice the best interests of the race to serve his own purposes. A well-informed Negro outlined the method employed by the editor in question to represent himself to employers of labor as one who controls large numbers of Negro laborers. In furtherance of this plan, which appears to have prospered, he organized a group which he called the "American Unity Labor Union." The appeal on the one hand to Negroes was that white unions would not admit them on an equal basis and that white employers preferred Negro non-unionists to white unionists and would pay them the same wages while according them better treatment. To white employers he represented the Negroes as being opposed to unions because they were white men's unions, and as such discriminated against Negroes, and that they belonged in large numbers to his organization, which was designed to improve the quality of Negro labor by increasing Negro pride in special and unmixed endeavors.

That certain employers did give money for this kind of service is apparent in several instances. A Negro ex-clergyman secured for a long period something like $2.00 per capita for every Negro supplied by him to any one of ten iron foundries in the Calumet district.

The following are typical of advertisements which appear regularly in the paper of the Negro editor referred to above:

WANTED

100 Building Laborers to work in the city of Chicago at Building Scale Wages. Union Job. If you are not a Union man you can get a permit to work as a Union Man at ---- Indiana Avenue.

Do not pay $33.00 to join a white man's union, when you can join the black man's union for $5.00 and work on any building in Chicago.

WAGE EARNERS CLUB

American Unity Labor Union was organized March 10th, 1917, Chicago, Illinois.

GET A SQUARE DEAL WITH YOUR OWN RACE

Time has come for Negroes to do now or never. Get together and stick together is the call of the Negro. Like all other races, make your own way; other races have made their unions for themselves. They are not going to give it to you just because you join his union. Make a union of your own race; union is strength. Join the American Unity Packers Union of the Stock Yards, this will give you a card to work at any trade or a common laborer, as a steam fitter, electrician, fireman, merchants, engineers, carpenters, butchers, helpers, and chauffeurs to drive trucks down town, delivering meat as white chauffeurs do for Armour's and Swift's, or other Packers. A card from this Union will let you work in Kansas City, Omaha and St. Louis, or any other city where the five Packers have packing houses.

This Union does not _believe in strikes_. We believe all differences between laborers and capitalists can be arbitrated. Strike is our last motive if any at all.

_Get in line for a good job. You are next. Office, ---- Indiana Ave._

THE WORKING MEN'S CLUB

Join the American Unity Steel and Metal Union, a Union of your own race with officers of your own race with a President. A card from this Union will entitle you to work any place in the United States as a steel and iron worker, craneman, engineer, molders, rail straighteners, and any job that it takes brains and skill to do and common laborer. _Join one big union and demand a square deal with your own strength_. 8 hour day's work.

_Get in line for a good job. You are next. Office, ---- Indiana Ave._

All classes and kinds of work waiting for good people in our Association.

During the latter part of December, 1920, the editor in question visited the large daily newspapers in Chicago and presented an article which purported to tell of a large mass meeting of his union at which this group decided that they would work at the Stock Yards, steel mills, and all other plants in Chicago and the Calumet region and at all foundries and factories at a 15 per cent discount on wages previously paid for skilled labor, and 10 per cent on common-labor wages. Although only one paper gave any attention to this statement, the opinion of some of the more responsible Negroes was expressed in a Negro newspaper in Chicago, which characterized the man as "a public nuisance" and his story as "bunk."

3. NEGRO WORKERS OUTSIDE OF UNIONS

Negro workers outside of the union ranks often do not see any necessity for unionism or do not understand its aims and methods; many are frankly suspicious of the good intentions of white unionists toward Negroes; others condemn unions generally because of some bitter experience with a particular union, while still others are enthusiastic believers in unionism and expect to join a union at some time. Several shades of opinion are illustrated by the following quotations taken at random from interviews with a large number of Negro workers.

H---- G----, thirty-four years old, left a farm in Georgia to come to Chicago in October, 1919. Employed as a laborer in a paper-box manufacturing plant. He said he didn't know much about unions but couldn't see what good they were doing. They made prices go up, but wages didn't go up with prices. If unions did any good he would join, but he can't see that they do.

W---- W---- had spent nearly all of his life hauling logs to be made into ties for railroads. When he came here from the South he worked as a trucker in the Quartermaster's Department of the army until the department closed. After loafing half a month, he got his present job trucking at a box factory. Unions would be all right, in his opinion, if they let all of the men in who would do right, but when they don't, they do more harm than good. He used to belong to the Butchers' Union at the Stock Yards and "got along fine," but he quit butchering. He intends to get back in a union if possible. Strikes are too hard on the man that "ain't in the union; strike out here recently and now we can't make overtime and we hardly make enough in regular time to live on. Unions are secret--I can't remember all the bunk about them now, but you pay dues and go to meetings, something like a lodge I guess. If anything goes wrong on your job you tell it in meeting, and your branch of the union takes it up with the people. You don't have any of that worry on yourself. They are all right if you are on the inside, but mighty hard if you ain't."

J---- McN----, forty-two years old, had been a farmer in the South all of his life until he came to Chicago in January, 1920, and went to work in the Yards as a meat trimmer. He has been asked to join the unions but hasn't done it as yet--he isn't quite sure they mean a square deal by the colored man, although he can't see why they would ask him to join if they didn't. Don't know much about the "workings of 'em" but they pull together, sort of "lodge like." He thinks everybody who belongs is mighty "close mouthed" about what they do at the meetings. He knows that they pay dues and have assessments, that they look after sick members and have some sort of initiation.

J---- L----, fifty-two years old, is foreman over the truckers in a box factory. He said: "Unions ain't no good for a colored man, I've seen too much of what they don't do for him. I wouldn't join for nothing--wanted me to join one at the Yards but I wouldn't; no protection; if they had been, the colored men who belonged might have worked while the riot was going on; only thing allowed out there then was foreigners. If a thing can't help you when you need help, why have it? That's the way I feel about unions. I tell you they don't mean nothing for me."

H---- S----, twenty-four years old, had lived in Chicago only two months. He said: "Well I don't know, you see these other folks been here longer than me; they ain't joined, and I reckon they know more about it than me. No, they didn't have no unions where I comed from--ain't nothing there anyway but farmers. I reckon, though, if I had a chance I might join. They can't do much harm here to a fellow."

J---- H----, thirty-eight years old, came up from Alabama in 1916 with about thirty other men during the big rush from the South. They went to work almost immediately at the Stock Yards, where he worked as a laborer, stripping bacon. After he quit this he was out of work for nearly a month. He heard about the wool mills. They put him on the very first day and he has been there ever since.

He does not belong to a union. He "would join one if I had a chance and it meant anything to me materially." He does not understand them, "can't understand why they strike and keep men out of work."

M---- L----, forty-two years old, came to Chicago from Tennessee in 1894. He said: "I tried every job under the sun since I came. My first job was porter in the Palmer House; made good tips here but not very much salary. Changed to bellboy; was finally made head bellboy; stayed there four years; boss made me mad and I quit. Along about this time I met my wife. I wanted to make her think I was a regular man, so got a job as a laborer in a foundry. Since then I've gone from one foundry to the other. Work got so hard I quit one time; went on the road; stayed there for about four years, then went back to the foundry work; worked for Illinois Malleable for three years first time; had trouble with straw boss; he fired me; went to McCormick's but they didn't pay so well, so I got back on my old job. Yes, unions are the best thing in the world for a working man. If I'd been in a union my boss couldn't have fired me that time. I wish it was so you could join a union regardless of your color. We need protection on our jobs as well as the white man. I guess though that time is coming. I don't know much about the workings of a union, but I do know it's a protection to the man who belongs."

F---- D----, twenty-eight years old, does not belong to a union because there are no unions in the car shops where he works. He says unions are the best things in the world if the right kind of people are at the head, and if all the fellows will join, but when half of them won't join, unionism won't do because it just means loss of your job.

R---- R----, thirty-four years old, has been working in Chicago three months at his regular trade as a stove joiner. He learned to join stoves at a mill in Helena. He has never had a chance to join a union, but all the white men in the mill at Helena belonged, and they fared lots better than the Negro men. He wants to join one here the very first chance he gets. He is a skilled laborer, knows he can put out as much work as any man doing his line of work, feels he should be paid as much as anyone else, and knows the only way this can happen to him is to get in a union where he has some protection and backers. There is a union where he is, but he hasn't been asked to join it yet. He says he has found out that the colored man, if he wants the same thing as a white man gets, has to get in things with them.

Mrs. N---- M---- found work as a maid in a Chicago hospital after she was deserted by her husband. She wants to save money enough to run her while she takes "nurse training." She did not know anything about unions until she went to the hospital. The nurses there had a union, and she saw just how much they can mean to people. "They usually make the employers do the right thing by the people; unless the nurses asked too much they got what they wanted." That was what made her decide she wanted to be a nurse; she saw how square they were with each other, and how the union made them pull together regardless of whether or not they liked each other. That is what she liked about the unions: "They make you treat the other fellow right regardless how you feel toward him."

Nellie W----, age thirty, doing clerical work in a large mail-order establishment, said that "unions don't mean anything to colored people. The only reason they let them in when they do is so they can't become strike breakers." She didn't know how her husband felt about unions, as they had never talked about the matter, but she knew that she wouldn't join one.

O---- L----, thirty-eight years old, had migrated from Georgia in the summer of 1917. To him unions are "the best thing that ever came the colored man's way. Out here [in a box factory] it doesn't make quite so much difference whether I'm in one or not, but if I ever go back to my trade as plasterer, that's the first thing I intend to try and do. You get protection, you get more money, and then too the white man gets a chance to see that you are not all for yourself, for when you are in a union you work for everybody's good."

H---- has been a head waiter in a hotel. He believes the big reason why Negroes are not strongly enthusiastic for unions is because they feel they will not get square treatment. This he based upon continual references to the 1903 waiters' strike.

The attitude of indifference or suspicion so frequently encountered among Negro workers outside of the unions is attributed by white and Negro labor leaders and union men to the following reasons: (_a_) traditional treatment of Negroes by white men; (_b_) influence of racial leaders who oppose unionism; and (_c_) influence of employers' propaganda against unionism.

The traditional treatment of Negroes in the South, increasingly reflected in the North, has made the Negro suspicious of the white man's sincerity. Negroes, therefore, naturally feel that they will not get a "square deal" in white unions. In support of this attitude the waiters' strike of 1903 is still cited as an instance of "double-crossing" by white unions.

This strike was so often referred to by Negroes as a justification for their attitude toward labor-union policies that it seemed worth while to attempt to learn the facts, even though seventeen years had elapsed since the strike occurred.

Two organizers for the American Federation of Labor, a newspaper editor, an officer of the Negro local during the strike, the head waiter of one of the large hotels (all Negroes), and John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, were asked to tell the facts.

Reports are conflicting in many instances. However, the explanations of circumstances as presented to the Commission are as follows:

The union of cooks and waiters involved in the strike of 1903, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, had a membership of 20,000, of whom over 2,000 were Negroes. The Negroes had only recently been taken into the union as a separate local under their own officers. The strike first centered on Kohlsaat's chain of restaurants. This lasted seven weeks, during which time all of the union members were out. The strike terminated in circumstances on which there is general disagreement. Negroes state that the white unionists "double-crossed" them, and when Kohlsaat refused to take back the Negro waiters who had walked out with the whites the latter went back to work and left the Negroes without jobs. It is known that during the general excitement the charter of the Negro local was revoked, although no one appears to know how or by whom this was done. The white union leaders have frequently attempted to absolve the union of responsibility for this situation and place the blame on the Kohlsaat restaurants and the _Chicago Herald_, controlled by Kohlsaat. John Fitzpatrick, before the Commission, referred to the incident thus:

_Commissioner_: Concerning the waiters' strike several years ago, the Kohlsaat strike, were they unionized under your direction in order to raise the scale of dinner men [they were known as dinner men] to the union scale? What was the success of it as far as the colored waiters were concerned?

_Mr. Fitzpatrick_: They weren't organized for financial purposes. They were organized as workers. We felt they ought to have our co-operation, so we went out to organize them. The Kohlsaat newspaper was one of the instruments by which they perpetrated the conspiracy, and some other papers went into a scheme and tried to bring about an atmosphere of fear and suspicion between the colored and white workers.

It was Sunday, and the charter of the colored workers was in my possession. That night they met, and I was installing officers at Twenty-third Street and Washington Avenue. That morning the _Herald_ ran a front-page story, first column, teeming with a set-up against organized labor and warning the colored workers to beware.

When I got up on the platform I read the story to them and said, "That sets up one side of the story, and there is a conspiracy to destroy your rights. What do you want to do about it?"

They said, "We will go ahead. We know what the employers want and you go ahead and instal us." They went ahead and got into that strike. The employers said: "We are going to supplant colored men with white union girls." We told them we wouldn't permit union girls to go on the job. The Kohlsaats begged of us to give them white union women, and we refused to do so.

Now then, while this was going on, the newspapers had different reports out, and they went out and had the charter of this local revoked. How they did it, I don't know. But I have my own notions how a newspaper operates. I think that a newspaper has influence and money and other things, and that is the only way I can account for that thing happening. They went to the international organization to revoke the charter of this organization.

This whole situation was obscured by a mass of charges and counter-charges, but the fact that the strike failed was evident enough. Regardless of what the facts actually were, there is a widespread belief among Negro workers that the colored waiters were "double-crossed" by white unions in this strike. Since it is men's belief about facts which determines behavior, it is not surprising to find that Negro strike breakers could be found in large numbers to take the place of waiters who went on strike in May, 1920.

The influence of some employers is also a factor in the attitude of Negroes toward labor unions. In many open shops the employers and unions are engaged in a continuous struggle. In such cases, if persuasion and argument fail, there is an effective instrument in strike breakers. For this purpose Negroes have frequently been used. Instances in Chicago are found in the strikes in the steel industry, the Stock Yards, and the culinary industry. Many labor leaders and union members believe that welfare clubs, company Y.M.C.A.'s, glee clubs, and athletic clubs are encouraged and supported by employers as a substitute for a form of organization which they cannot control. The subsidizing of social movements and churches is regarded as one of the means employed by large employers to insure this reserve of strike breakers. The union organizer in the steel strike, W. Z. Foster, stated at one of the conferences held by the Commission that, after an address to the Negro steel workers at a church in Pittsburgh, the Negro preacher had said to him: "It nearly broke up the congregation, but we decided you were going to speak here in this church." The organizer continued:

Then I got the underneath of all this thing and found that this church had lost a donation of $2,500.00 from the Steel Corporation for allowing me to speak. They had tried to block my speech to these colored workers in Pittsburgh. Whenever it's a question of a donation to a poor, struggling church like that, we know what usually happens.

The statement made by George W. Perkins, president of the Cigarmakers' International Union, was typical of the view of labor leaders:

If you go to the root, you will find that economic reason; the employers, not all of them but many of them, in our industry as well as others, will divide the workers if they can. That is the history all along. They will divide them, not because they are black and white, but to keep them divided so they won't unite in the organization.

Another labor leader, acting as an organizer in large industries in various cities, stated at another conference:

I want to tell you that a strike breaker is a very precious animal for the employer, and if he thinks he has a great body of colored workers in this country who are apt to learn trades with very little practice, as an inexhaustible well of strike breakers, he is not going to stop at a little thing like propaganda. He will find plenty of excuses to keep men out of the union. In the Stock Yards, in the steel industry, he will find arguments and he will carry on propaganda.

The difficulties inherent in the whole question of organizing Negroes were probably best brought out before the Commission by W. Z. Foster, who took a leading part in organizing Negroes in the Stock Yards, the most important industry in Chicago so far as Negroes are concerned:

We found in the steel industry that the colored worker was very unresponsive to organization. The same was true in the packing industry. Let me give you first what steps we took in the packing industry in Chicago in 1917, the big campaign which resulted in the organization of men. The first meeting we had we sat around a table and talked it over, and we realized that there were two big problems, the organization of the foreign worker and the organization of the colored worker. We shortly dismissed the problem of organizing the foreign worker, but we realized that to accomplish the organization of the colored worker was the real problem. When we went into the packing-house situation we were determined to organize the colored worker if it was humanly possible to do so, and I think I can safely say that the men who carried on that campaign realized fully the necessity for the organization of the colored worker, not wholly, or at least not only, from the white man's point of view, but from his own point of view to a certain extent. In other words, we were not altogether materialistic. We like to think that we were a little bit altruistic in the situation. There was a total employment of twelve or fourteen thousand. We found that we had tremendous opposition to encounter.

First of all it took this attitude, that the colored man would not be allowed to join the unions at all. We met that broadcast with such circulars as those already shown. I wrote some of them up myself as secretary of the council, inviting these men in such a way that these colored men could not help but realize that there was nothing to this argument that they would not be allowed to join the union.... The next argument that developed was, "Sure, the white man will take you into his union because you are in the minority." But we fought all of these arguments, and we organized a local union on State Street.

Then the argument was raised that it was a "Jim Crow" proposition. It was quite general along State Street that it was a "Jim Crow" proposition. It seemed to make no difference what move we made, there was always an argument against it, so we overcame the "Jim Crow" argument by combining the white locals and the black. We said to the boys: "This is not a colored local. This is a neighborhood local of miscellaneous locals. Any colored man can belong to this local." We told the white men: "You are free to come in here and join this union."

Well, we punctured that argument that there was discrimination in the Stock Yards, and I would challenge anyone to show where the unions in the Stock Yards campaign have discriminated against the colored man. There may have been isolated cases of an individual here and there, but I will say this, and I was on the organizing committee and probably in closer touch with the situation than anyone else here in the city with those four or five thousand colored workers that we organized, I dare say that 40 per cent of the total amount of grievances that were presented by all the workers in the Stock Yards came from these colored workers, and the standing instructions were to look after them very carefully....

But the more we tried to help the colored worker the more intense the opposition was, because there was a force working against us, and we could not help but feel it. We got it from the colored people themselves, and it is a fact that some of the organizers were actually afraid to go around to some of these saloons and poolrooms where they congregated because of the agents of the packers, or whoever was responsible for that propaganda, and they felt that their lives were in danger.... Out in the Stock Yards we could not win their support. It could not be done. They were constitutionally opposed to unions, and all our forces could not break down that opposition.... We tried to make our appeal quite general in scope. We got the best organizers. A good colored organizer is very rare--a man who is thoroughly qualified to represent the trade-union point of view. We tried to find one and picked out a colored member of the Engineers' Union, a man highly honored in all the trade unions of Chicago.... The reason the colored man gave for not joining you will find in the circular "Beware of the White Man's Union," and that the only way that they can ever make any headway in the industry is to stick in with the boss and then when there is a strike to step in and take the jobs that are left there....

Race prejudice has everything to do with it. It lies at the bottom. The colored man as a blood race has been oppressed for hundreds of years. The white man has enslaved him, and they don't feel confidence in the trade unions. But there is more real fraternal feeling among the black and white workers than in any other grade of society.... As soon as the colored man becomes a factor in industry, he is going to be organized, providing he does not become a victim to the line of tactics that are laid out by the employer. In the steel strike he lined up with the bosses.

4. NEGRO WORKERS WITHIN THE UNIONS

Negro workers inside the ranks of such unions as the Stock Yards', Janitors', and Hodcarriers', types of the unions which accept Negroes with complete equality, feel, with very few exceptions, that they are being given a "square deal" by the unions. By coming into the unions they say they have been able to secure better working conditions and higher wages. They express satisfaction with the treatment accorded them by white unionists on the job and at meetings, where the grievances of Negro members are given the same attention as the complaints of white members. The situation in the unions mentioned has been so fully described already in this report that there is no need for further details on the friendly relationship which exists between white and colored members of these unions. Many Negro unionists look to labor organization as one of the most promising solutions of race problems.

VI. THE NEGRO AND STRIKES

The attitude of Negro workers during strikes is closely connected with the attitude of Negroes toward union organization. As stated before, there are many cross-currents at work, some tending to keep Negroes out of unions and others impelling them toward the unions. All the forces at work to prejudice the Negro against union organization are factors which help to explain his willingness to take the place of striking white workers. The loyalty of the Negro during strikes by white employees was referred to by a number of the representatives of large employers attending the industrial conferences held by the Commission.

Some of the most conspicuous cases coming to the attention of the Commission in which Negroes have taken the place of white strikers or have remained at work during strikes are the following:

The Stock Yards strike of 1904 lasted from July 4 to the middle of September. The general superintendent of one of the plants in the Yards, appearing before the Commission, said: "The strike was called at 12:00 o'clock. Every employee practically that we had went out. Within two or three days we had any number of colored employees return to work.... I'd say Negroes helped us to break the strike by coming to work. A number of Negroes that we understand belonged to the union did not remain out more than two or three days. Practically all the Negroes came back before the strike was called off."

The strike in the Corn Products Refining Company plant at Argo, where, in the summer of 1919, before the strike, 300 Negroes were employed, during the strike 900, and when it was over about 500.

The steel strike of 1919. Representatives of several of the iron and steel plants stated that Negroes had helped to break this strike. The _Inter-Church World Movement Report on the Steel Strike of 1919_ (p. 177) lists the "successful use of strike-breakers, principally Negroes, by the steel companies" as the second cause of the failure of the steel strike. "'Niggers did it' was a not uncommon remark among company officials."

The waiters' strike in 1920.

Less important cases were the following:

A clothing shop where Negro women broke a strike in 1916 and continued in the employ thereafter. A wool warehouse and storage company which used Negroes at slightly higher wages to replace striking Polish laborers in 1916, and have since continued to employ Negroes.

The strike of Pullman-car cleaners about 1916. Negroes were used as strike breakers and have since been employed in large numbers, men cleaning the windows and outside of cars and Negro women doing most of the inside cleaning.

Many other instances where Negroes have been used as strike breakers could be cited.

During a strike, feeling runs high and the word "strike breaker" or "scab" carries with it a decided stigma among the strikers. White workers ordinarily do not try to understand why the Negro acts as he does. They do not reason that the Negro is often loyal to the employer because he feels that the employer, sometimes at considerable risk, has opened to him industrial opportunities which, translated into wages, mean better living conditions for himself and his family. If the white worker took into account the struggle of the Negro to gain entrance into the fields outside of personal service, the latter's eagerness to take advantage of any opening, however created, might be better understood and regarded with more tolerant spirit.

What bearing this use of Negro labor has on the attitude of white workers toward Negroes depends upon whether the subject is approached from the point of view of the employer or of the trade unionist. Representatives of the packing companies emphasized the employers' appreciation of the Negro's loyalty and discounted the antagonism caused by Negroes serving as strike breakers, while trade-union leaders and others having the workers' point of view emphasized the seeds of dissension that were sown by such action and contended that the good will of the employer gained at such a cost was in reality a handicap to the Negro. White workers feel that Negroes who serve as strike breakers are helping to earn for their race the stigma of being a "scab" race. This is especially serious in the case of Negroes, because color identification makes it easy to focus hatred for the "scab."

Union leaders and social workers who participated in the conferences held by the Commission condemned the practice of some private employment agencies in sending Negroes to plants as strike breakers without informing them that a strike was in progress. Investigations in several states have disclosed such practices of some private employment agencies, "misrepresentation of terms and conditions of employment" being the most frequent abuse, according to the report of the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations: "Men are not informed about strikes that may be on at places to which they are sent, nor about other important facts which they ought to know."[77]

Private employment agencies following such practices try to do so against colored as well as white workers, although with probably less success because of the ability of the Negro to speak English. However, the part played by private employment agencies in supplying Negro strike breakers in Chicago appears to be of relatively little importance. Ordinarily agents of employers find Negro strike breakers directly by going into the Negro residence section with autos or trucks and recruiting the number of men desired. The industrial secretary of the Urban League made the following statement regarding Negro strike breakers:

According to all information available to the Chicago Urban League, it does not appear that any of the private employment agencies except the one conducted by R. G. Parker, editor of the _Chicago Advocate_, who advertised for cooks and waiters to break the strike of the Cooks and Waiters' Alliance during the National Republican Convention in June, 1920, have been instrumental in strike breaking.

The method used in the organization of strike breakers among colored people is not well defined. Generally labor scouts work directly for companies affected by strikes. These scouts have frequently applied to our office for workers, but we have refused assistance. The men are usually gathered from the streets, poolrooms, or wherever they can be found. It is the policy of the Chicago Urban League not to interfere in strikes unless the striking unions have refused to admit colored workers to their membership. The League is not opposed to unionism, but is interested primarily in the welfare of colored workers.

VII. ATTITUDE AND OPINIONS OF LABOR LEADERS

From the eleven representative labor leaders attending the trade-union conferences held by the Commission, from the various interviews by the investigators with these and other union officials and members, and from letters received from labor officials from various parts of the United States, it was apparent that there were certain definite views held by most of these leaders as to the relationship of organized labor to the Negro. These views are summarized and set forth in the following pages:

1. GENERAL PUBLIC HAS RACE PREJUDICE

Race prejudice exists generally in all groups of the white race and only changes slowly. The worker is just as much subject to it in the beginning as are the members of all other groups.

2. UNIONS FAIRER TO NEGRO THAN ARE OTHER GROUPS

The unions have given the Negro a fairer deal than other social institutions or groups, such as department stores, clubs, churches, theaters, fraternal organizations, hotels, and railways.

3. UNIONS BLAMED FOR CONDITIONS THEY CANNOT CONTROL

Unions are many times blamed for situations in which Negroes are not admitted to an occupation or industry over which the unions have no control, the exclusion existing because the attitude of either the public or the employer prevents the entrance of Negroes into the industry. For example, Negroes are not employed in Chicago as motormen or conductors on surface or elevated transportation lines, as telephone operators by the telephone company, as sales clerks in department stores, as chauffeurs by taxicab companies, nor as upholsterers and drapers by firms sending such employees to work in private homes.

The position taken by the unions is that they cannot organize a miscellaneous public, but that they can only organize those that have the jobs, that as long as street and elevated lines do not employ Negroes as motormen and conductors the unions cannot take them in. True, there might be objection on the part of the members in these unions, but the question has never come up. Also the traction companies are not in business to reform public opinion and so, because the public might object, do not engage Negroes in these jobs. In this their position is similar to that of the large taxicab companies, which, however, employ non-union workers. They have Negroes in the garages but not as chauffeurs, probably because they believe that the general public would object if Negroes were employed as chauffeurs. In such cases the unions feel that they are not responsible, any more than they are accountable for the policy of the telephone company which engages no Negro operators. Among other large businesses must be listed the department stores, which have no Negroes as sales clerks.

Exclusion of Negroes from a trade or industry results in inability to join the unions in such trades. This fact is well illustrated by the Upholsterers' Union, which has three branches--furniture upholsterers, drapers, and mattress makers. Upholsterers and drapers are frequently sent out by the large stores to residences of customers, and the stores will not risk offending customers by sending a Negro into their homes. Consequently there are no Negroes in these branches of the union. The mattress makers' local, on the other hand, has more Negro than white members, and the secretary of the union is a Negro. This situation would not be possible if Negroes were excluded from employment in mattress factories. In view of the fact that the Upholsterers' Union freely admits Negroes into the mattress makers' local, Negroes would also, no doubt, be admitted into the locals of the upholsterers and the drapers if employers hired Negroes for such work.

4. EXCLUSION POLICY CONDEMNED

The policy, wherever it exists, of excluding Negroes from unions, whether by direct or indirect means, is considered wrong and shortsighted by the great majority of labor leaders. They believe that the small group of "aristocratic and conservative" unions cannot long withstand the American Federation of Labor policy of organizing Negroes in local and federal unions, nor the policy of the more progressive national and international unions. As the number of Negroes increases in the unions now admitting them, as the number of Negro delegates to city centrals, like the Chicago Federation of Labor, increases, and as the number of delegates to conventions of the State Federation of Labor and to the American Federation of Labor increases each year, more and more pressure is being brought to bear on these unions from without and also by the progressive leaders from within, so that gradually all barriers will be swept aside. That a gradual change is taking place in the policy of many unions is evidenced by the following instances:

_International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers._--"In 1902 a local union of Negro stationary firemen in Chicago could not be chartered because the white local union would not give its consent."[78] In 1920 the president of Local 7, Chicago, reported as follows:

The symbol of our organization is, "We shall not discriminate against creed, color or nationality." The membership of our organization is open to the Negro as much as to any other man who earns his living by the sweat of his brow. I should say, offhand, that we have approximately about 100 Negroes who are members of our Chicago local and who take an active part in all of our deliberations. So far as has come under my observation the feeling towards these men has always been of the most cordial nature.

I am, however, free to say that we have found that a great many of the employers, who do not desire to play fair, use the Negro to offset any high standard of wages which the organization may deem proper and just, and I have found, in my experience, an endeavor on the part of some of the employers to only use the Negro when he would want to maintain a lower standard of wages, but when compelled by force of circumstances to pay a living rate of wages, immediately a request would be made on the organization that the Negro be removed and a white man furnished. This we emphatically refuse to do. If the Negro was efficient and competent to perform his duties prior to the establishment of a living wage he certainly should be competent enough to perform the same duties afterwards.

_Metal Polishers' International Union._--The general secretary informed the Commission:

At the last international convention held, the question of Negroes entering our trade was taken up, and the delegates anticipated that, at some future time, Negroes would be employed, and we felt that, if the manufacturers were left under the impression that we would refuse to accept them into the organization, it would be an incentive to the Manufacturers' Association to import Negroes or hire them, so a resolution was passed that any skilled polisher, buffer, or plater, even though a Negro, should be admitted to our organization.

_International Association of Machinists._--Although at its convention at Rochester, New York, in 1920, this union again voted down the proposition to strike out the word "white" from its ritual, there was significance in the fact that seven resolutions were introduced at the convention to remove the excluding provision. These resolutions came from unions in the following cities: two from different locals in Chicago; one from Columbia, South Carolina; one from Akron, Ohio; one from New Haven, Connecticut; one from Tucson, Arizona. Resolutions opposing came from Bakersfield, California; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Whistler, Alabama; and Savannah, Georgia. As an instance of enthusiastic appreciation of the mutual advantage to whites and Negroes of joint effort in union organization with no discrimination the following comment from an office of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees' National Alliance was received by the Commission:

We have one local union composed of white and colored workers--that union is located in the city of Boston, Massachusetts; roughly speaking, there are approximately 400 in a total membership of about 2,000; at our convention held at Providence, Rhode Island, last August, one of the delegates from that union was a colored man. Six years ago Boston colored waiters woke up, and so did the whites, to the fact that for decades they had been used one against the other by their employers; they got together, and they affirm with considerable emphasis that amalgamation has proved beneficial.

5. UNIONS INSTRUMENTAL IN REMOVING RACE PREJUDICE

Labor leaders emphasize the influence of contact in union meetings in promoting a friendly understanding between white and colored members. They point out the fact that the Negro ceases to be a stranger or an object of prejudice when once he has identified himself with the union. A common interest in common problems binds the members together, and a spirit of loyalty to the union develops in the effort to realize the aims of the group. White members come to have a more kindly feeling for a Negro within the union group than they have toward a white man who remains outside the union ranks. Said one union leader:

Some day the white worker is going to coax the black man to line up with him; all that he needs is a crusader's heart and a genuine desire to make the black man and himself free, and when he succeeds there won't be, in the economic field at least, the differences which now exist, due to this pitting of one race against the other and both being walloped by the action.