to paralyze the country’s railway system but to wreck the railway men’s organizations as well.  It was finally brought to an end through the efforts of the national leaders, and a telling effect on the situation was produced by an announcement by the newly constituted Railroad Labor Board that no “outlaw” organization would have standing before it.  The Board issued an award on July 20, retroactive to May 1, increasing the total annual wage bill of the railways by $600,000,000.  The award failed to satisfy the union, but they acquiesced.

When the increase in wages was granted to the railway employes, industry in general and the railways in particular were already entering a period of slump.  With the depression the open-shop movement took on a greater vigor.  With unemployment rapidly increasing employers saw their chance to regain freedom from union control.  A few months later the tide also turned in the movement of wages.  Inside of a year the steel industry reduced wages thirty percent, in three like installments; and the twelve-hour day and the seven-day week, which had figured among the chief causes of the strike of 1919 and for which the United States Steel Corporation was severely condemned by a report of a Committee of the Interchurch World Movement,[93] has largely continued as before.  In the New York “market” of the men’s clothing industry, where the union faces the most complex and least stable condition mainly owing to the heterogeneous character of the employing group, the latter grasped the opportunity to break with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union.  By the end of the spring of 1921 the clothing workers won their struggle, showing that a union built along new lines was at least as efficient a fighting machine as any of the older unions.  It was this union also and several local branches of the related union in the ladies’ garment industry, which realized the need of assuring to the employer at least a minimum of labor efficiency if the newly established level of wages was not to be materially lowered.  Hence the acceptance of the principle of “standards of production” fixed with the aid of scientific managers employed jointly by the employers and the union.

The spring and summer of 1921 were a time of widespread “readjustment” strikes, or strikes against cuts in wages, especially in the building trades.  The building industry went through in 1921 and 1922 one of its periodic upheavals against the tyranny of the “walking delegates” and against the state of moral corruption for which some of the latter shared responsibility together with an unscrupulous element among the employers.  In San Francisco, where the grip of the unions upon the industry was strongest, the employers turned on them and installed the “open-shop” after the building trades’ council had refused to accept an award by an arbitration committee set up by mutual agreement.  The union claimed, however, in self-justification that the Committee,