Women labor union members; Women labor union members -- United States
Against such a narrow conservatism, however, there are other forces at
work, both within and without the regularly organized labor movement,
one of them aiming at such reorganization of the present unions as
shall gradually merge the many craft unions into fewer and larger
bodies.[A] This process is evolutionary, and constructive, but slow,
and meanwhile the exploited workers cry in their many tongues, "O
Lord, how long!" or else submit in voiceless despair.
[Footnote A: The United Mine Workers are essentially on an industrial
basis; they take in all men and boys working in and about the mine.]
Is it any wonder that under these conditions of industrial anarchy
and imperfect organization of labor power a new voice is heard in the
land, a voice which will not be stilled, revolutionary, imperious,
aiming frankly at the speedy abolition of organized governments, and
of the present industrial system? This is the movement known in Europe
as syndicalism, and on this continent represented by the Industrial
Workers of the World, usually termed the I.W.W.
Their program stands for the one big union of all the workers, the
general strike and the gaining possession and the conducting of the
industries by the workers engaged in them. They deprecate the making
of agreements with employers, and acknowledge no duty in the keeping
of agreements.
The year 1911 will be remembered among word-historians as the year
when the word "syndicalism" became an everyday English word. It had
its origin in the French word "syndicalisme," which is French
for trade unionism, just as French and Belgian trade unions are
"syndicats." But because for reasons that cannot be gone into here
so many of the French trade unionists profess this peculiarly
revolutionary philosophy, there has grown up out of and around the
word "syndicalisme" a whole literature with writers like George Sorel
and Gustave Hervé as the prophets and exponents of the new movement.
So the word "syndicalism," thus anglicized, has come to signify this
latest form of trade-union organization and action.
Although sabotage, interfering with output, clogging machinery,
blocking transportation and so forth have been advocated and practiced
by extreme syndicalists, such do not seem to me to form an essential
and lasting element in syndicalist activity, any more than we find the
wholesale destruction of machinery as carried on by displaced workmen
a hundred years ago, has remained an accepted method of trade-union
action, although such acts may easily form incidents in the progress
of the industrial warfare to which syndicalists are pledged. Neither
at Lawrence, Massachusetts, nor later at Paterson, New Jersey, did the
Industrial Workers of the World, or the large bodies of strikers whom
they led set any of these destructive practices in operation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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