The Union consisted of twenty members, all of whom, except one, were
officials of the organization. The officials numbered a president, two
vice presidents, a recording secretary and a financial secretary, a
treasurer, three controllers, a house committee of five, an organizer
and three trustees. The total income of the Union from dues never
amounted to more than three dollars a week, but this was supplemented by
the income from the yearly Pretzel-Painters' concert and ball every
winter, and from the picnic every summer.
After the strike was won the members felt the necessity of solidarity
more than ever. This feeling brought them together twice every week to
discuss Union matters and matters of private concern. But after a while,
when they had exhausted all possible subjects and the Union was running
smoothly, the organizer had difficulty getting even the legal quorum
together once every second week. The organizer knew from experience what
such negligence caused.
The collection of dues had already diminished perceptibly. Some of the
members were in arrears with five and six weeks. Fifteen cents a week
is comparatively easy to pay, but when the sum is over a dollar and the
pay is twelve dollars a week--it's a different story! The
Pretzel-Painters' Local was in great danger.
The organizer began to feel that non-union pretzel-painters were shining
the beer drinkers' delicacy. He called meeting after meeting and
described passionately to the four or five old men present the great
fight between Labor and Capital in general and the battle their own
Union had won; the high price paid for what they already had gained
through solid organization, but it was all in vain; the others did not
come. They owed too much for dues and fines.
Finally the organizer hit upon a great idea. "The Pretzel-Painters'
Union has to be reorganized," he wrote to all the members.
It was a new thing, that word "reorganized." It was something worth
while finding out about. "We must reorganize or our organization goes to
pieces," he wrote to them. That Wednesday evening was a gala evening.
The financial secretary had never taken in so much money at once;
twenty-six dollars in one evening! They all paid up to the minute;
because it was explained in the letter that only members with paid-up
dues had a vote in the reorganization of the mighty Pretzel-Painters'
Union.
The Pretzel-Painters' Union was not without its inner dissensions. There
was a group of Galician Jews and a group of Russian Jews always fighting
one another; and both groups fought whatever the group of Roumanian Jews
proposed. There were also two old Portuguese Jews; and whatever they
wanted carried through was sure to be defeated by the above-mentioned
three groups.
But the Russian group was always the deciding factor. By themselves
alone they were the majority of the organization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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