Whither Industrial Democracy? The Federal Government and Organized Labour in the Telegraph Industry during the First World War

Abstract

The recent historiography of American labour in the First World War pays special attention to the idea of industrial democracy. The federal government, historians argue in various ways, played a major role in defining that term and affecting how trade unionists, employers and all kinds of industrial and political reformers fought over and applied their own definitions of industrial democracy. In this article I look at one case study of wartime federal intervention in labour relations, between the Commercial Telegraphers' Union of America (CTUA) and the Western Union Telegraph Company. During the war both parties were subject to intervention from the National War Labor Board, the main federal arbitration agency, and then, after nationalization of the telegraphs, the federal Telegraph and Telephone Administration. The experience of the CTUA is more or less at odds with recent general accounts of First World War labour. In this article I argue that this experience points towards a change of emphasis regarding federal-style industrial democracy, placing greater stress on its role in leading directly to the non and antiunion industrial policies practised by many employers in the 1920s, in addition to its encouragement of trade union growth in wartime.