Colorado Labor Wars - A Labor Dispute Escalates

A Labor Dispute Escalates

In late 1902, the Western Federation of Miners boasted seventeen thousand members in one hundred locals. Bill Haywood, its powerful secretary treasurer and second in the chain of command, had adopted much of the industrial unionism philosophy of his mentor, former WFM leader Ed Boyce. Boyce had gone toe to toe with Samuel Gompers, head of the conservative AFL, over the question of union philosophy. Boyce and Haywood took to heart a lesson from the phenomenal success of the 1894 Pullman Strike when the American Railway Union (ARU) voted to join in solidarity, and also from the U.S. government's subsequent crushing of that strike with U.S. marshals and the United States army. From an industrial unionist point of view, that strike offered the opportunity for victory when members of the ARU selflessly voted support, yet was lost when leaders of the AFL failed to heed the call for a general strike in Chicago to defend the railway workers.

Where craft unionists of the AFL variety might have drawn the lesson that it was better for union workers to fight for members of their own craft, Haywood adopted the philosophy that labor needed more, not less, industrial unionism. To Haywood, a miner's union such as the WFM organizing other workers in the industry simply made good sense. A logical extension of that philosophy, then, was that all workers in an industrial union ought to be willing to stand up for the rights of other workers. When it came to those who milled the ore, Haywood believed he had the necessary weapon to force the mill owners to negotiate: the solidarity of the workers in the mines that fed the mills.