Liberal media and politicians are sounding the alarm about one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders last month that eliminated the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, saying it will lead to more labor strife. Only four mediators remain at the agency today, down from 143.
“If you don’t have that agency, you’re going to have more disputes,” Lynn Rhinehart, former general counsel of the AFL-CIO and senior counselor to the labor secretary under former President Joseph Biden, told Bloomberg Law April 8. But labor “disputes” come from the offensive by the bosses against working people caused by the bosses’ drive to defeat their competitors and boost profits.
The history of federal mediators is a long record of assisting the bosses against the workers and the unions. Whatever Trump’s goal is, their disappearance is good for the working class.
These “independent” mediators have been well-remunerated by the bosses’ government. As of this month, their going salary is nearly $100,000 a year, with the top dogs raking in more than twice that amount.
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service was set up by Congress in 1947 as part of the notorious anti-union Taft-Hartley Act. This law, adopted to make going on strike more difficult and placing other restrictions on the unions, was known by workers as the “slave labor bill.” It gave the president the power to use court injunctions to declare strikes illegal and impose “cooling off” periods.
The shuttering of the mediators’ agency is part of broader cuts the Trump administration is implementing on the size of the bloated federal government. Some of them deal blows to programs workers need, like the Postal Service and Social Security, while others, like the mediators, target government bureaucrats whose main task is to “administer” working people.
The capitalist government dispatches federal mediators when they think they can help the bosses bludgeon or cajole labor into making concessions and taking down their picket lines. They claim to be impartial, or, even better, “friends of labor.” Whatever works.
How Teamsters dealt with mediators
During the powerful 1934 Teamsters strike seeking union recognition and a contract for General Drivers Local 574 in Minneapolis, federal mediators intervened. But it turned out the savvy, class-conscious union leadership — leavened with members of the Socialist Workers Party — knew how to deal with them. This story is described in Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the strike who became a longtime leader of the SWP.
In the midst of this battle, E.H. Dunnigan, a “Commissioner of Conciliation” from the Department of Labor, came to Minneapolis, requesting to meet with the local union leadership.
“Dunnigan tried to create the impression that he was secretly on our side,” wrote Dobbs. “On that basis he asked us to authorize him to make ‘minor’ concessions to the bosses concerning the union demands, stressing that he needed such leeway for ‘bargaining purposes.’ We flatly rejected the request, pegging it for what it was, a con game calculated to make suckers of the workers. After informing him of what the workers wanted from the employers, we suggested that he go see what he could do about getting some action from them.”
As the union prepared to strike in July 1934, Gov. Floyd Olson, working behind the scenes with Dunnigan and another federal mediator, Rev. Francis Haas, tried to pressure the workers to accept a so-called fair settlement. Their con job failed.
On July 26 Olson switched tactics, imposing martial law — declaring that a “state of insurrection” existed in Minneapolis and calling out 4,000 National Guard. Six days later Olsen’s troops invaded Local 574’s strike headquarters.
In mid-July the union organized a highly effective monthlong strike, winning support from tens of thousands of workers throughout the area.
Haas and Dunnigan came back around, requesting the strike leaders allow them to speak directly to the union’s rank and file. Confident in the membership, the union leaders agreed. But when they gave their pitch to the meeting, the strikers let the two mediators know they were onto their game. Getting nowhere, the two government agents left the meeting. Soon after, they left town.
In a 1942 public talk on the Minneapolis strikes in The History of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, then national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, commented on the role of these mediators. “We despised them and all their wily artifices and tricks, and their hypocritical pretenses of good fellowship and friendship for the strikers,” he said. “They were nothing but the agents of the government in Washington, which in turn is the agent of the employing class as a whole.”