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Updated: May 27, 2025
198. =The Organization of Labor.= These measures of protection and relief have been due in part to the disinterested activity of philanthropists, and in part to the efforts of organized labor, backed up by public opinion; occasionally capitalists have voluntarily improved conditions or increased wages. The greatest agitation and pressure has come from the labor-unions.
In order to give these organizations some semblance to real labor-unions, and thereby the better to deceive the workers, strikes were actually inspired by agents of the government from time to time. On more than one occasion strikes thus instigated by the government spread beyond control and caused great alarm. The Czar and his agents were playing with fire.
According to the latter, the labor-unions, organized on industrial lines and federated through a central council, will take the place of parliamentary government elected on territorial lines.
They not only fear the corporation cormorants whom they can never reach so long as the Board of Supervisors is controlled by the Boss the Boss himself and all his devouring horde, but the greatest menace of all: that San Francisco will in time, and before very long, be owned body and soul by the labor-unions.
A high mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral was followed by a day of explanations, anathemas upon the owners of the Saint Michel, and the striking labor-unions, and of music, dancing, and toasts. New Year's eve, two picture shows, hulas, and the festivities of the wedding of Cowan, the prize-fighter, brought in a throng from the districts to add to the Papeete population and the voyagers.
He showed how one man, in coalition with the labor-unions, had succeeded in carrying the State against the big copper company; how he had elected senators and governors, and legislators and judges. If one man could so cripple the octopus, what could the best blood of the State, standing together, not accomplish?
Motived by the same desire, our American labor-unions are demanding, and steadily gaining, an increasing share in the actual direction of industry.
We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong. Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour.
The officials of the labor-unions who were co-operating with employers in substituting arbitration in place of strikes, establishing soup-kitchens and relief funds, and doing other similar work to keep the nation alive, were singled out for arrest and imprisonment. The Black Hundreds were perniciously active in all this oppression and in the treacherous advocacy of a separate peace with Germany.
If it were not for its bay and the tremendous significance of its position opposite the Orient, California would be what it ought to be, the pleasure gardens of the world. No politics, no labor-unions, merely a succession of estates, big and little, where a man could live a happy animal existence for one-third of the year, after working the other two-thirds that is a sane division.
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