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During the past twenty-five or thirty years, this economic error has been steadily diminishing in American trade unions and while it may be adhered to by some isolated cases today it is not the economic conception of large parts of that body.
The State Federation of Labor granted the vice-president time for an address at its convention in Troy as early as 1908 and thereafter endorsed the suffrage bills and sent speakers to the hearings on them. Women from labor unions spoke at conventions of the State Suffrage Association, which had a Committee on Industrial Work.
Knowing this, and knowing also the man he had become, she would in secret sometimes liken him to one of those rare unions of delicacy and hardihood which in the world of wild flowers Nature refuses to bring forth except from the cranny of a cold rock.
If the trade unions show none of these qualities, the common sense of the community will resist them in the name of traditional equality and democracy. Popular movements such as trade unionism must make mistakes constantly, but because of the spirit behind them, they have great powers of recovery.
He had never known anything of a real self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as he and his kind had made was never the result of their citizenship, of their powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged upheavals, of their own half-organized societies and unions. It was against the "black people" he said, that he was first on strike back in the early nineties.
And Bordat, the anarchist, was the slave of a mania when he declared: "To send workingmen to a parliament is to act like a mother who would take her daughter to a brothel." Parliaments are perhaps more corrupt than trade unions, but that is simply because they have greater power. To no small degree bribery and campaign funds are the tribute that capitalism pays to the power of the State.
At the same time, certain tendencies to Syndicalism were still in existence, tendencies which might well lead to conflict between different unions, so that, for example, the match makers or the metal worker, might wish to strike a bargain with the State, as of one country with another, and this might easily lead to a complete collapse of the socialist system.
Whatever its effect on wages and hours, the law has the tendency to weaken the unions, which hitherto have been the only reliable means by which employees were able to advance their condition. Not only does it make organization seem less necessary, but it takes the most powerful weapon of the union, the ability to call a sudden strike.
"In the writer's judgment the system of treating with labor unions would seem to occupy a middle position among the various methods of adjusting the relations between employers and men.
It was evidently the intention of the employers to drive the workers to extremes, and thereby to force them to break the peace. "They want to destroy the trades unions, so that they can scrape the butter off our bread again," said the workers. "They think it'll be easier now that the winter has made us thankful for a dry crust! But that's an infernal lie!"
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