THE THREAT TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT
makes it the most reactionary pronouncement on the subject yet made by a union convention in America.
5. The raising of salaries of leading officials from $7000 per year to $9000 in the case of the secretary and vice-president and from $8000 to $12,000 in the case of President Lewis.
Additional Evidence.
A NUMBER of other points are to be noted which show:
1. The determination of the Lewis machine to force the union to turn its back on its militant traditions and accept a policy of "efficiency unionism."
2. The connection between the drive against the trade unions as weapons of the workingclass in the labor movement as a whole and rampant reaction in the U. M. W. A.
These points are:
1. The whole tone of the speeches and documents of the official caste. As in the needle trades unions the Communists and the left wing were the target of all attacks. The machine never discussed any point of the left wing program on its merits. The capitalist press chronicled, and commented approvingly upon the assaults on the 1eft wing. The Indianapolis News said that the U. M. W. A. convention was a guarantee that the leaders of the American labor movement "were the most bitter foes of un-American principles."
2. President Green of the American Federation of Labor was brought to the conVention to aid the Lewis machine in its war on militant trade unionism. He devoted the greater part of his speech to denouncing the left wing in the needle trades and repeated all the slanders concerning the left wing leadership which the capitalist pres had given columns of space to in the weeks preceding the convention.
Green's speech proved conclusively the direct connection between the general offensive of the right wing and the struggle in the U. M. W. A.
3. Secretary-Treasurer Kennedy, a former socialist, took the lead in the convention offensive against the left wing.
4. The Lewis machine, in spite of the desperate condition in which the union is placed thru the failure of the leadership to organize the non-union fields, the increase of non-union coal production to between 62½ and 70 per cent of the entire output, the loss of membership (19,000 members were lost during the period of great employment which preceded the convention) and the expiration of the Jacksonville agreement on April 31, did not bring forward a single proposal for building the union.
Neither did it advance any program for the immediate struggle against the operators.
The Condition of the Union.
ACCORDING to the official figures contained in the report of the secretary-treasurer, the U. M. W. A. has decreased in strength from 400,000 in 1924 to 273,000 in 1927.
Thousands of former union miners have been driven out of the union fields and forced to scab for the first
