The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
History
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
World history
Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple
and very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are
not intimate associates now, as they used to be in time past. Most of
our laws were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each
other, knew each other's characters, were associates with each other,
dealt with each other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You
not only do not come into personal contact with the men who have the
supreme command in those corporations, but it would be out of the
question for you to do it. Our modern corporations employ thousands,
and in some instances hundreds of thousands, of men. The only persons
whom you see or deal with are local superintendents or local
representatives of a vast organization, which is not like anything that
the working men of the time in which our laws were framed knew anything
about. A little group of working men, seeing their employer every day,
dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and the modern body
of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that spread all
over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no personal
conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never saw a
corporation, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a working
man to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the industry in
which he is employed. And they never saw him. What they know about him
is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the correspondence of
the office, in the reports of the superintendents. He is a long way off
from them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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