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Updated: May 5, 2025
If it were not for the notion brought from England, that trades-unions are, in some mysterious way, beneficial to the workmen which notion has now become an article of faith it is very doubtful whether American workmen would find that the unions were of any use, unless they were converted into organizations for accomplishing the purposes enumerated in the last paragraph.
In the East trades-unions secured rank development, and the Knights of Labor, intended as a sort of Union of them all, attained in 1887 a membership of a million. The manufacturers' "black list," to prevent any "agitator" laborer from securing work, was answered by the "boycott," to keep the products of obnoxious establishments from finding sale.
The law makes the exception, nearly universal in the Southern and Western States, that this anti-trust legislation shall not apply to agricultural products, live stock in the hands of the producer, nor to the services of laborers or artisans who are formed into societies or trades-unions an exception which, of course, makes it class legislation, and has caused the whole law to be declared unconstitutional, so far as I know, by the highest court of every State where it has been drawn in question, and under the Fourteenth Amendment also by the Supreme Court of the United States; and in this spirit President Taft has just acted in preventing a joint resolution of Congress appropriating money to prosecute trusts from exempting labor unions.
Mapps explained the use of the square, and pointed out the ancient buildings with Flemish gables, which look like a flight of stairs on each slope, which surrounds it. "This was the grand meeting-place of the citizens of Ghent," he continued; "the counts of Flanders were inaugurated here with great ceremony and splendor. Here the trades-unions, or societies of weavers, used to meet.
Thus, the guild movement didn't amount to much in bringing about the modern trades-union or combinations of laboring men; it began before it occurred to these latter that they also could combine; just as, even now, it is more difficult among women to get them to join trades-unions, or for working women to combine; they have not apparently got into that stage of evolution; and so with the negroes in the South.
I recently spent four weeks among these trades-unions, numbering thirty-five distinct women's organizations, and I found, everywhere I went, the same enthusiasm for, and the same superior degree of intelligence regarding, the aim and object of the organization idea. As for the working women of New York, they have so far refused to countenance the trades-union. New York has no woman's trades-union.
One of the principal objects of trades-unions is to keep up wages at the expense of the lower paid and unassociated working people. They endeavour to prevent poorer men learning their trade, and thus keep the supply of labour below the demand. This system may last for a time, but it becomes ruinous in the end.
I do not know where one could find so much ignorance, contempt for established principles, and cold-blooded selfishness, as among the Trades-Unions and International Societies of the United States and Great Britain unless one should go to France.
In that June there were vexatious strikes in various parts of the country, formidable combinations of laboring-men, demonstrations of trades-unions, and the exhibition of a spirit that sharply called attention to the unequal distribution of wealth. The discontent was attributed in some quarters to the exhibition of extreme luxury and reckless living by those who had been fortunate.
He had heard for the past few months of the existence of secret organizations of working-men wholly outside of the trades-unions and unconnected with them and guessed at once that he had disturbed a lodge of one of these clubs.
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