National Civic Federation - Opposition

Opposition

The NCF's approach of bringing representatives of business and the labor movement together for negotiations drew criticism both from the anti-union conservatives of the National Association of Manufacturers, who opposed acknowledgement of any right of collective bargaining, as well as from socialists and syndicalists on the left, who saw in the NCF a concrete example of class collaborationism which would dull the desire of the masses for radical change.

One of the rivals to Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor (AFL) was the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Formed on the western frontier of the United States, the WFM was "not yet 'broken in' to the discipline of business management" practiced by eastern labor leaders. The WFM formed the Western Labor Union (WLU) as a rival to the AFL, because the miners feared that the AFL wanted to crush the anti-capitalist spirit of their organization. Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin have written that the miners saw the purpose of the NCF as,

...to housebreak unionism, to confine its growth to those fields where management could use it, and to emasculate it by a united front of labor leaders and captains of industry against all socialistic and insurgent elements.

According to this view, the NCF stood for "responsible unionism," in which union members were expected to follow the dictates of conservative union leaders whom Mark Hanna referred to as "the labor lieutenants of the captains of industry." Fully aware that lieutenants take orders from captains, more militant union leaders saw Gompers' participation in the NCF as a "sellout."