Coal miner industrial mediator
John Elias Williams was born on October 28, 1853 in Merthyr-Tydfil, Wales. His parents, John Elias and Elizabeth (Bowen) Williams, brought him to America in 1864 and settled in Streator, Illinois, where his father, a coal miner, was killed by a rock fall.
He had had some public-school training, but his education came chiefly from his daily experiences, study clubs which he organized among his fellow workers, debates with miners in the pits, and considerable reading.
Young Williams entered the mines at thirteen and during the next fifteen years became a highly skilled pick miner. He was elected the first secretary and first check weighman of the local miners' union.
Seizing an opportunity to enter journalism, he was gradually drawn into industrial mediation, helping to settle local disputes between the miners and their bosses.
In 1910 he became the official arbitrator for the United Mine Workers of Illinois and the Illinois Coal Operators Association. Two years later his great opportunity came. After the strike of 1910-11 in the Chicago men's clothing industry, Hart, Schaffner & Marx, employing 10, 000 workers, signed an agreement with the United Garment Workers of America which provided for an arbitration board for final action on controversies arising under the agreement.
Williams was chosen impartial chairman of this board in 1912 and continued as such until his death.
Considering it his task to help the employer and the union see each other's point of view, then help them find a line of common interest, and finally, through suggestion and invention, assist them in coming to an agreement, he measured his success by the infrequency with which he had to render decisions. He thought that his type of arbitration, which was primarily mediation, could succeed only if it was a continuing procedure and believed that his philosophy of continuous collective bargaining could have meaning only if the workers were represented by a strong, independent, and responsible union. Holding that the men's clothing workers union was of this type, he called it a "school in co-operative management" in which the union had been educated in the rights of both business and labor, and through which the employers had also been educated.
By way of contrast he criticized the Rockefeller Industrial Relations Plan of 1914, foreseeing that a union instituted by an employer would be " a feeble and spineless thing". He looked for industrial democracy to come, not through revolution but through trades organization, collective bargaining, and industrial partnership between capital and labor.
Williams was largely instrumental in introducing several new devices, including a compromise between the closed and open shop called the preferential shop, which provided that the company should prefer union men in hiring new employees, and, subject to reasonable preference for old employees, dismiss non-union men first when laying off workers. He proposed that his industrial mediation procedure be extended to settling the World War, believing that a common ground for settlement could be found.
He was a leading spirit in the Illinois Unitarian Conference and became its first president.
In 1917 he was appointed Federal Fuel Administrator for Illinois and administrator for the packing industry.
He died in his sixty-sixth year.
He developed a procedure and philosophy of mediation which created a precedent for later impartial chairmen throughout the country and also profoundly influenced the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and other so-called progressive unions which followed their lead. He became one of the first advocates of union-management cooperation.
Most of his theories took a puritanical-ethical turn. He constantly spoke of restraint, responsibility, and the constructive spirit. He saw "the present day labor struggle" as "a struggle for power" in which power was being transferred from the employer to the laborer, and believed trade unions inevitable and indispensable because of the "tyrannous pressure" of employers; but he sought "the salvation of society" through a renaissance in religion and he called upon his Church to find something beyond the individual good that is worthy of devotion.
He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Williams was a kindly, genial man who was widely respected for his fair-mindedness.
In 1877 he married Isabella Dickinson of Morpeth, Northumberland, England.
