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“’Resentment against being compelled’:
The Australian Arbitration System, Samuel Gompers’ Opposition to Compulsory Arbitration,
and the Big Business Political Economy as the AFL’s Excuse
for Failure to Build a National U.S. Labor Party”
Abstract
Dr David Palmer
School of International Studies
Flinders University, Adelaide
[email protected]
Explanations for the failure of U.S. trade unions to build a successful national labor party
have generally been focused on the era encompassing the 1890s to World War I, when the
American Federation of Labor (AFL) dominated the labor movement. Samuel Gompers
adamantly opposed state-based compulsory arbitration when he led the AFL during these three
decades. His “voluntarist” philosophy rejected not only state intervention in labor affairs, but
also opposed any commitment to a particular political party, including building an independent
party for labor. Late in life he summarized the labor philosophy that guided his career: “During
my entire course I have never attempted to compel anyone to yield to my judgment, much less to
my conclusions. There is inherent in every man a resentment against being compelled to do
anything.” Other American trade union leaders, such as Sidney Hillman of the independent
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), had a different vision that led to support
an American version of “compulsory arbitration” and political party commitment. Until the
1930s, however, this alternative to Gompers’ voluntarism and anti-statism remained a distinct
minority within the movement and made any effort to build a viable national labor party
impossible.
Australia, in contrast, had one of the most advanced compulsory arbitration systems in
the world by the 1910s, underpinned by the strength at state and national levels of the Australian
Labor Party (ALP) and the major decisions of Justice Henry Bournes Higgins, the first president
of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. The success of the ALP and the
implementation of the national system of compulsory arbitration in Australia was preceded by
arbitration boards at the state level and in the Australian colonies prior to Federation. The
arbitration systems in Australia and Great Britain won substantial praise from a number of
prominent progressive intellectuals in the United States, including Carol D. Wright and Felix
Frankfurter. Higgins’ summary analysis, A New Province for Law and Order, the first three
chapters of which were originally published in Harvard Law Review, was particularly influential
among prominent legal scholars in America, as Marilyn Lake has explored. These legal scholars
later joined the judiciary under the Roosevelt administration and had close ties with Hillman’s
ACWA.
Gompers’ resistance to compulsory arbitration was grounded in the hard reality that many
American courts consistently used injunctions to stop strikes, boycotts, and union organizing.
Courts in a number of states acted as de facto governments in ordering arrests and incarceration
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of trade unionists and their leaders, operating in league with companies affected by strikes and
labor actions. Much of the basis of the corporate power over the judiciary was due to the nature
of the political economy of the United States, which was substantially different than Australia’s
political economy at that time. U.S. corporations had developed high levels of technology for
the era and became world leaders in many areas, including automotive manufacturing, steel
production, machine tools, chemicals, and electrical products.
Big business in Australia had considerably less leverage over government for the most
part because there were few large corporations beyond the big mining companies and pastoral
companies. In contrast to the United States, where unionization in heavy industry was virtually
non-existent until the 1930s, Australia’s mining and pastoral industries were heavily unionized
by World War I. It is no coincidence that the most powerful union in these sectors, the
Australian Workers Union (AWU) also came to dominate the ALP both in Queensland and
nationally through the 1930s. As a result, corporate dominance of Australian national politics
before World War I was far less than in the United States. The marked contrast in the two
countries’ economies and the role of big business is evident in contrasting diversity of economic
sectors and the number of large companies in each sector. U.S. economic statistics for this era
list a range of sectors and specific industries, while Australian economic statistics use a single
“manufacturing” category without specific industrial sectors within manufacturing. Most of
Australian industry at the time was geared to machinery for mining and agriculture, and for
limited domestic consumption in the few capital cities.
The American labor movement faced a far more powerful adversary from big business
opponents and their allies in political office, while the Australian labor movement had the
backing of state and national Labor governments after 1900. But Australian labor leaders
organized successfully in the country’s strategic industries unlike the AFL in the United States.
Gompers failed to adapt to changing American economic conditions and the rapidly changing
workforce in new industries. The fundamental reason why the AFL’s organizing strategy failed
was due to its craft union orientation and its “voluntarist” anti-labor party orientation that
prevented it from making headway against the U.S. corporate-influenced judiciary. The only
alternative, which Gompers rejected, would have been to organize and mobilize industrial
workers regardless of occupation, ethnicity, or gender, and to create a movement that could then
gain a degree of political power.
Working class support that elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President and a strong
Democratic Congress in 1932 came in part from from an upsurge of trade union activity during
the Great Depression. When the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), with UMWA and
ACWA leadership, broke from the AFL’s conservatism, a large new sector of organized labor
backed labor law reform that included the National Labor Relations Act and its National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB). This new system can be viewed as an American version of
“compulsory arbitration” because the NLRB’s decisions on employer-employee relations
became binding. Roosevelt’s new appointees to the Supreme Court, which included the
progressives Brandeis and Frankfurter who knew Higgins’ labor philosophy, validated the
legitimacy of the NLRB’s jurisdiction in labor relations cases. However, the labor movement
still did not have its own labor party and instead became bound to the Democratic Party as an
interest group but not its core. By the 1930s it was too late. The Democrats were now
entrenched as workers’ favored party and FDR was the workers’ symbolic leader.
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