Women labor union members; Women labor union members -- United States
It has been pointed out many times that the rich are rich, not so much
in virtue of what they possess, but in virtue of what others do not
possess. The ratio of the difference between the full pocket and many
empty pockets represents the degree in which the one rich man or woman
is able to command the services of many poor men and women. We all
recognize these crude differences and regret the results to society.
But after all is the case so very much bettered when for rich and
poor, we read skilled and unskilled, when we have on the one hand a
trade whose members have attained their high standing through the
benefits of years of training, a strong union, high initiation
fees, perhaps limitation of apprentices? I am neither praising nor
criticizing any methods of trade protection. All of them are probably
highly beneficial to those within the charmed circle of the highly
organized trades. But if, in the very midst of the general state of
industrial anarchy and oppression which the unskilled workers have to
accept, it is possible to find trades in which organization has been
so successful in maintaining good conditions, this is partly because
the number of such artisans, so skilled and so protected, has always
been limited. And let us ask ourselves what are the effects of these
limitations upon those outside the circle, whether those excluded from
the trade or from the organization because of the demands exacted, or
those debarred by poverty or other circumstances from learning any
skilled trade at all. Unquestionably the advantages of the highly
protected ones are not won solely from the employers. Some part of
their industrial wealth is contributed by the despised and ignored
outsiders. Some proportion of their high wages is snatched from
the poor recompense of the unskilled. Women are doubly sufferers,
underpaid both as women and as unskilled workers. It is not necessary
to subscribe to the old discredited wage-fund theory, in order to
agree with this.
Just here lies the chief danger of the craft form of organization as
a final objective. If the trade-union movement is ever to be wholly
effective and adequate to fulfill its lofty aims, it must cease to
look upon craft organization as a final aim. The present forms of
craft organization are useful, only so long as they are thought of as
a step to something higher, only in so far as the craft is regarded as
a part of the whole. Were this end ever borne in mind, we should hear
less of jurisdictional fights, and there would be more of sincere
endeavor and more of active effort among the better organized workers
to share the benefits of organization with all of the laboring world.
The more helpless and exploited the group, the keener would be the
campaign, the more unsparing the effort on the part of the more
fortunate sons of toil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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