Montana labor news., 1938-09-01
LABOR DAY
Statement
By JOHN L. LEWIS

international President of the United
Mine Workers of America and Chair
man of the Committee for Industrial
Organization.
Since last Labor Day industrial
workers and the nation as a whole
have suffered from a sudden and
pronounced depression. Such move
ments gather momentum as they
move on. One after another the
barriers to deflation are broken
down. Money goes into boarding
and credit disappears when most
needed; workers are discharged,
wages cut, farm commodity prices
fall, family reserves are exhausted
and the buying power of the masses
dries up.
Men may dispute over the relative
causes of these economic reverses,
but it cannot be denied that the one
that began last fall was hailed with
unveiled qualification by privileged
wealth and its reactionary retainers.
At its conference last September,
the Committee for Industrial Or
%ganization gave warning of the i'm
pending depression and called upon
government to take timely steps to
reverse the movement and to miti-
gate its evils. While the debates
went on over corporate taxes and
government guaranty of mortgages,
the Committee for Industrial Organ
ization and Labor's Non-Partisan
League organized public demand for
federal relief for the unemployed
and destitute, and for renewed gov
ornamental participation in public
works. Already this program, be-
latedly adopted, is turning us into
the direction of renewed prosperity.
But the CLIO is committed to a
broader policy for promoting a sound
economic balance in our country. It
stands for a fairer sharing in the
national income by both farmers and
industrial workers. It seeks to mo-
Billie labor that its power may be
effectively exercised to that end. It
seeks to organize labor that its rights
may be respected in the play of our
economic institutions and that its
counsels may be respected in the
fu%nctioning of our political institu-
tons. It seeks no change in either,
but believes that under both there
can be more justice done to those
who toll.
The CLIO was born of the COM
~placency and inertia of those who
had so long assumed direction Of
the labor movement in America, who
insisted that labor unions must be
patterned on craft distribution, and
who denounced as heretical any eff
fort towards industrial organization.
They have met our efforts to Or
ganize the unorganized with sneers,
reprisals, sabotage and vilification.
Processing a desire for unity, they
have engaged in a civil war to de-
stroy the labor movement which the
CLIO has carried to such extraor-
binary success. They have denounced
labor laws and repudiated political
friends of labor on the announced
ground that the me might shelter
the rights and the other befriend the
interests of their fellow workers.
But the labor movement marches
on. The industrial spies will go, the
machine guns and gas bombs will
be outlawed, the union busters will
disappear from arrangements; con
tracts for wages and working condi-
tons will be negotiated between
corporations and employees upon a
basis of common rights. The labor
union will become one of our cher
ished economic institutions, and in
dustrial democracy will take its
proper place under flag.
Unemployment reserves, old age
pensions, the Labor Relations Act,
the Wage and Hour Law, all are the
result of the militant crusading of
those who have seen the common
interests of all workers, and not
those who regard the labor move
ment as having eliminated in a few
skilled craft organizations.
In the justice that is done to all
who toll lies the prosperity of the
nation and the perpetuity Of u