Women labor union members; Women labor union members -- United States
The course finally outlined included a knowledge of the principles
of trade unionism, and their practical application in field-work, a
knowledge of labor legislation, of parliamentary law, and practice in
writing and speaking.
In the following year, 1914, the League was able to give several
months of training to three trade-union girls. Cordial coöperation
was received from both the University of Chicago and North-western
University. For the present no further students have been received,
because of the need of larger financial resources to maintain classes
in session regularly.
The need for a training-school is attested by the constant demands
for women organizers received at the headquarters of the League from
central labor bodies and men's unions, and by the example of the
thorough training given to young women taking up work in other fields
somewhat analogous. Such a school for women might very well prove in
this country the nucleus of university extension work in the labor
movement for both men and women, similar to that which has been so
successfully inaugurated in Great Britain, and which is making headway
in Canada and in Australia.
At the Seattle Convention of the American Federation of Labor held in
November, 1914, a resolution was passed levying an assessment of one
cent upon the entire membership to organize women. Efforts were mainly
concentrated upon workers in the textile industry, to which special
organizers, both men and women, were assigned. There is no trade
which has worse conditions, and consequently wages and regularity
of employment are immediately affected adversely by any industrial
depression.
Women in the labor movement will have to make their own mistakes
and earn their own experience. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the many
advantages that accrue to women and girls from belonging to an
organization so vital and so bound up with some of our most
fundamental needs, as the trade union. On the very surface it
is evident that in such a body working-women learn to be more
business-like, to work together in harmony, to share loyally the
results of their united action, whether these spell defeat or success.
If they err, they promptly learn of their mistakes from their,
fellow-workers, men or women, from employers, and from their families.
Here, however, is perhaps the place to call attention to one markedly
feminine tendency, which should be discouraged in these early days
lest in process of time it might even gain the standing of a virtue,
and that is the inclination among the leaders to indulge in unlimited
overwork in all their labor activities. Labor men overwork too, but
not, as a rule, to the same degree, nor nearly so frequently as women.
Do not mistake. Women do not fall into this error because they are
trade unionists, or because they are inspired by the labor movement or
by the splendid ideals or by the aspiration after a free womanhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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