to close down an employer's establishment until he yields to their demands. Furthermore, in times of industrial peace the union often succeeds in preventing the employer from building up in his establishment a reserve army of nonunionists by the adoption and rigid enforcement of various closed-shop rules, which are designed to shut off the employment in organized shops of non-union workmen. Control of the labor supply in an industry, however, presupposes the power of union officials to organize the majority of the workmen in that industry, and this organization is not always possible. When, therefore, the ordinary methods of organization have failed, or are at the outset seen to be inoperative, the union must devise a supplementary resource. This resource has been, in this country, the boycott of the products of unfair firms.

In consonance with this view it has been stated that "for the enforcement upon employers of the union trade regulations, the Printers rely upon two resources: (a) the control by the union of the workmen in the trade, (b) the power to divert patronage from employers who do not observe the regulations." And what is true of the Printers in this respect has been true in varying degrees of the great majority of American and of a few foreign labor organizations. The inability of the unions to regulate the conditions of manufacture of a product has led to efforts to prevent its sale. From this general analysis it follows that the boycott should emerge under those conditions (1) where organization of the labor force is impossible and (2) where organization is fraught with such difficulties as to make it unlikely.

(1) In modern industry practically the only workman unions would be precipitated. Similarly, should the Fuller Construction Company, for example, discharge union bricklayers in San Francisco, the bricklayers' and masons' union would call out on strike its members employed by that same company in other cities. For a fuller description of these forms of the closed shop see F. T. Stockton. "The Closed Shop in American Trade Unions," in Johns Hopkins University Studies, ser. xxix, no. 3, chs. iv, v.

G. E. Barnett, "The Printers: A Study in American Trade Unionism," in American Economic Association Quarterly, third series, vol. x, no. 3, p. 259.

whom it is totally impossible to organize is the convict labborer. By reason of his confinement under the absolute control of prison authorities as regards all of his activities, he is not susceptible to trade-union pressure. His wages, his hours of labor, and his working conditions are determined not by individual bargaining, but by state or municipal contracts in the making of which he has no voice. Working, therefore, as he does for low wages in active competition with the more highly paid free labor, he has always been recognized as constituting a menace to the prosperity of union members. As a result, either in self-defense or in sympathy with the workmen in other trades many labor organizations early in their history have declared boycotts upon prison-made products. Unions, for example, like the Coopers, the Granite Cutters, the Stone Cutters, the Broom Makers, and the Garment Workers, whose products have always come into direct competition with the products of prison labor, have for years carried on continuous boycotts upon prison products.

(2) Organization is difficult or unlikely when the employer is strong enough to resist union attempts to organize his workmen and when the employees are of such a character as not to desire membership in a labor union. Thus, for example, in 1887 the Knights of Labor found it impossible to organize the workmen of a large steel plant in Pittsburgh because the employers, by an elaborate system of espionage, were able to detect those workmen who had been converted to unionism and would dismiss them as soon as they joined the Order. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had also made similar unsuccessful attempts to organize the plant. As a consequence, a boycott was imposed by the Knights of Labor on the product of the company. Occasionally the resistance of an employer to

8 Proceedings of the Eleventh Regular Session of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor, 1887, pp. 1669, 1794. A similar situation obtained in the efforts of the metal polishers' union to organize the National Sewing Machine Company. For nine years this firm had been able to prevent the organization of its workmen by having the "foremen of all departments of the company dis

the efforts of labor unions to organize his employees is increased by his membership in an employers' association. The Upholsterers' International Union, for example, tried to organize the upholsterers, carpet workers, and drapers in the employ of several department and dry-goods stores in New York. The owners of these stores were combined in an employers' association that was opposed to the organization of these workingmen. The union therefore requested the imposition of a boycott on Macy, Siegel-Cooper, and other employers who were most prominent in the deliberations of the employers' association."

Furthermore, where the labor organizations are confronted not only by hostile employers, but also by laborers who are themselves indifferent or opposed to organization, the placing of a boycott is inevitable. This difficulty is encountered in the organization of woman and child labor, on the one hand, and of unskilled laborers in the so-called open shops, on the other. The argument often advanced by the carpenters to justify their boycott of non-union trim is that the women and children working in the wood mills cannot, because of their ignorance and indifference, be organized into effective labor organizations that could be expected to strike for improved working conditions and higher wages. A former secretary of the New York District Council of the Carpenters, writing of the difficulties which confront organized labor in the open shop, states that organized labor "has come to many citadels which cannot be carried by the assault of strike. These are 'open-shops.' Parleying with those within has failed. New weapons must be brought into play and a siege begun." And the most effective of the new weapons is the boycott.

charge men as soon as they join a labor union." Finally, therefore, the company was boycotted (Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, 1903, p. 106).

Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, 1903, p. 125.

10 E. H. Neal, "The Open Shop," North American Review, May, 1912, p. 618.

Most boycotts, however, are imposed to supplement long drawn out and apparently unsuccessful strikes. In practically every strike that is not won during the first few weeks, the unionists, fearful lest it be doomed to failure, seek to exert additional pressure upon the employer by boycotting him. The Garment Workers entered in 1895 upon a strike against the Rochester Clothing Manufacturers; two years later, the strike having by that time become hopeless, the convention of the union decided to wage a vigorous boycott against the manufacturers and in that way bring them to terms." In his report to the convention. of 1896 the secretary of the American Federation of Labor writes that "the history of strikes and lockouts of late years proves they are not won, in the great majority of cases, because of the lack of scabs." but that the boycott is a most important element in determining the issue.13

"12

The earliest instances of boycott in the United States seem to have been forms of the sympathetic strike or the boycott on materials. The general strike of the New York cordwainers in 1809 was caused by the fact that the employers originally involved" had attempted to have their goods manufactured in other shops, and had, consequently, precipitated strikes among the workmen of other employers, who refused to contribute to the production of unfair goods.1 In 1827 the journeymen tailors of Philadelphia struck against several master tailors. When the master tailors later attempted to have their work done in other

11 Report of the General Secretary to the Sixth General Convention of the United Garment Workers, 1897, in the Garment Worker, January, 1898, pp. 4-14.

12 Proceedings, p. 25.

18 "Es [the boycott] erscheint als eine Ergänzung des Strikes" (v. Waltershausen, "Boycotten, ein neues Kampfmittel der Amerikanischen Werkvereine," in Jahrbücher für National Ökonomie u. Statistik, vol. 45, p. 5); "The industrial boycott almost invariably but not always or necessarily, is a phase of the strike or lockout, but it sometimes exists apart from either" (J. Burnett, “The Boycott as an Element in Trade Disputes," in Economic Journal, vol. i, p. 164).

14 Hall, Sympathetic Strikes and Sympathetic Lockouts," in Columbia Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, vol. x,

shops, the strikers succeeded in persuading the journeymen there employed to refuse to do any work while the orders of the unfair firms were being received.15 Within the category of boycotts on materials falls the action taken by the journeymen stone cutters of New York, when in 1830 they imposed a boycott on convict-cut stone. "Most of the stone cutters," they said, "have entered into a voluntary agreement to refrain from working stone from the states' prisons, and deputations have been sent to those who continued to work such stone."'16

Apparently one of the first instances of the boycott on commodities, where the appeal was to the workman not as a producer but as a consumer, was the boycott imposed in Baltimore in 1833 at a meeting of "the citizens generally upon master hatters who had combined to cut the wages of their journeymen.17 In October of the same year the Association of Printers of New York decided, at the suggestion of an employer, to publish the “names of all employing printers who do not pay the scale of prices." Similar lists were published in one form or another until April, 1840. For several months in 1836 a fair, as well as an unfair, list was published in the Union and Transcript, a penny daily labor paper, published by the Printers' Union during a few months of that year. In April, 1840, however, the union was sued for libel, and the publication of the unfair list ceased.18 Although the printing of these lists may have been designed to divert patronage from unfair employers, it is not entirely clear that the prime motive for their advertisement was not to keep union laborers from working for these employers rather than to persuade consumers to withdraw their patronage.

15 Third Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor, p. 1122.

16 New York Sentinel and Workingman's Advocate, June 30, 1830, P. 3.

17 J. R. Commons and H. L. Sumner, Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. vi, p. 100.

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18 G. A. Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6," in Annual Report, New York Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1911, Part I, pp. 145, 153.