Women labor union members; Women labor union members -- United States
The mixed local for all mixed trades is, I believe, the ultimate
goal which women trade unionists ought to keep in mind. But with the
average girl today the plan does not work. The mixed local does
not, as a general rule, offer the best training-class for new girl
recruits, in which they may obtain their training in collective
bargaining or coöperative effort. To begin with, they are often so
absurdly young that they stand in the position of children put into
a class at school two or three grades ahead of their capacity and
expected to do work for which they have had no preparation through the
earlier grades. Many of the discussions that go on are quite above
the girls' heads. And even when a young girl has something to say and
wishes to say it, want of practice and timidity often keep her silent.
It is to be regretted, too, that some trade-union men are far from
realizing either the girls' needs in their daily work or their
difficulties in meetings, and lecture, reprove or bully, where they
ought to listen and persuade.
The girls, as a rule, are not only happier in their own women's local,
but they have the interest of running the meetings themselves. They
choose their own hall and fix their own time of meeting. Their
officers are of their own selecting and taken from among themselves.
The rank and, file, too, get the splendid training that is conferred
when persons actually and not merely nominally work together for a
common end. Their introduction to the great problems of labor is
through their practical understanding and handling of those problems
as they encounter them in the everyday difficulties of the shop and
the factory and as dealt with when they come up before the union
meeting or have to be settled in bargaining with an employer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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