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Updated: May 5, 2025
When the workers, by their trades-unions, demanded a share of the luck in the form of advanced wages, it paid better to give them the little they dared to ask than to stop gold-gathering to fight and crush them.
I declare you're getting positively spiteful. I think we'd better change the subject. How did you leave our dear friends the Johnsons? And what are they doing in the north about the `strikes' and `trades-unions'?" "Really," he replied wearily, "I must leave the `strikes' and such things to take care of themselves just now. The Johnsons send their love.
The great undercurrent which is sweeping us all toward some form of associated life is as obvious in this new improvement in housekeeping, as in coöperative stores or trades-unions; but it will nevertheless be long before the "women of society" in America can be anything but a hard-working class. The question is not whether such a life as I have described is the ideal life.
Hence it is not upon the masters nor upon the public that trades-unions exert the pressure by which they raise wages; it is upon other persons of the labor class who want to get into the trades, but, not being able to do so, are pushed down into the unskilled labor class. These persons, however, are passed by entirely without notice in all the discussions about trades-unions.
The Trades-Unions and International Clubs have become a formidable power in the United States and Great Britain, but so far it is a power almost entirely for evil. They have been able to disorganize labor, and to alarm capital.
Again: The vast organizations of the Knights of Labor and the trades-unions in the American Federation of Labor are evidence of the willingness and ability of wage-earners to cope practically with national problems. And at this point is to be observed a fact of capital significance to advocates of pure democracy.
Whatever the sentiments toward the new law on the part of the employers, there was no doubt of its enthusiastic reception by the trades-unions, as the securing of the law had already come from them, and through the years which have elapsed since, the experience of the Hull-House residents would coincide with that of an English statesman who said that "a common rule for the standard of life and the condition of labor may be secured by legislation, but it must be maintained by trades unionism."
Then the questions of fisheries, maritime traffic, coast and harbor defences, light-houses, the ship-building interests, life-saving associations, and railway systems, pressed for investigation, to say nothing of the mills and manufactories, wages of operatives, trades-unions, trade problems, and all the pros and cons of free trade versus protective tariff.
While professing to demand more liberty and equality, they are often really insisting on greater restraint and inequality. The successful insistence of the trades-unions of England in securing from Parliament a statute exempting their funds from answering in damages for injuries caused by them is a conspicuous instance.
Further than that, the wage-earners have shown a willingness to respond to Trades-Union methods; they are forming industrial associations and have engaged in strikes; some of the social reform movements conducted by Indian intellectuals definitely try to establish Trades-Unions and preach ideas familiar to us in connection with Trades-Union propaganda.
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