leaders, and a telling effect on the situation was produced by an
announcement by the newly constituted Railroad Labor Board that no
"outlaw" organization would have standing before it. The Board issued an
award on July 20, retroactive to May 1, increasing the total annual wage
bill of the railways by $600,000,000. The award failed to satisfy the
union, but they acquiesced.

When the increase in wages was granted to the railway employes, industry
in general and the railways in particular were already entering a period
of slump. With the depression the open-shop movement took on a greater
vigor. With unemployment rapidly increasing employers saw their chance
to regain freedom from union control. A few months later the tide also
turned in the movement of wages. Inside of a year the steel industry
reduced wages thirty percent, in three like installments; and the
twelve-hour day and the seven-day week, which had figured among the
chief causes of the strike of 1919 and for which the United States Steel
Corporation was severely condemned by a report of a Committee of the
Interchurch World Movement,[93] has largely continued as before. In the
New York "market" of the men's clothing industry, where the union faces
the most complex and least stable condition mainly owing to the
heterogeneous character of the employing group, the latter grasped the
opportunity to break with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union. By
the end of the spring of 1921 the clothing workers won their struggle,
showing that a union built along new lines was at least as efficient a
fighting machine as any of the older unions. It was this union also and
several local branches of the related union in the ladies' garment
industry, which realized the need of assuring to the employer at least a
minimum of labor efficiency if the newly established level of wages was
not to be materially lowered. Hence the acceptance of the principle of
"standards of production" fixed with the aid of scientific managers
employed jointly by the employers and the union.

The spring and summer of 1921 were a time of widespread "readjustment"
strikes, or strikes against cuts in wages, especially in the building
trades. The building industry went through in 1921 and 1922 one of its
periodic upheavals against the tyranny of the "walking delegates" and
against the state of moral corruption for which some of the latter
shared responsibility together with an unscrupulous element among th