Wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized
representatives of producers' interests entitled to participate in the
direct management of industry. An ideal of copartnership and
self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of
self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties.
But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism.
The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the _sine qua non_ of the American
labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the
principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of
1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was
reelected and again reelected. And in obeying instructions to cooperate
with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune
to press Plumb Plan legislation actively. So far as the railway men
themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under
the Esch-Cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting
wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided.
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