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But the union secretary, after thinking the matter over, decided that the provision against black-listing applied only to men who had been out on the last strike, not to the strikers of a couple of years before. "There was no use going out of one's way to look for trouble," said this secretary. Jimmie went away jeering at the union, and damning the war as heartily as ever.
He might find many instances of an unwarranted cutting of wages, of flagrant violations of factory laws and tenement house laws, of the deliberate and systematic cheating of employees by means of truck stores, of the speeding up of work to a point which is fatal to the health of the workman, of the sweating of foreign-born workers, of the drafting of feeble little children into dusty workshops, of black-listing, of putting spies into union meetings and of the employment in strike times of vicious and desperate ruffians, who are neither better nor worse than are the thugs who are occasionally employed by unions under the sinister name, "entertainment committees."
The intimidation exercised by the AntiSaloon League was potent in a degree far beyond the numerical strength of the League and its adherents, not only because of the effective and systematic use of its black-listing methods, but also for another reason. Weak-kneed Congressmen and Legislaturemen succumbed not only to fear of the ballots which the League controlled but also to fear of another kind.
The strike ended as most such strikes of the unorganized, unprepared for, and unfinanced sort, must end, in failure, in the return to work on no better terms of the rank and file, and in the black-listing of the leaders. But the idea of organization had taken root, and this group of Irish girls still clung together. "We can't have a union," said one, "but we must have something.
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