When a salary earner finds out that, as an entity, he is at a drawback in advertising his manual labor; and that this difficulty is the result of his individual rivalry with member employees for the identical work, the finding chairs him in control of the cure, which is mixture. The kind of mixture, which rationally pursues his finding, is not mixture with all salary earners, but with those who are behind the similar jobs. Such mixtures are the labor unions, and such unions are effortless selling proposals, especially for those employees who follow trades or crafts, which necessitate some degree of knowledge and guidance.
It was in the character of the state of affairs that the workers who ensued a deal, which obligated ability and guidance, would be involved in proposals for the protection of deal values, and that workers devoid of particular ability would demonstrate fewer apprehension. As accomplished workers know how to earn extra at their individual deal than at some other type of labor, the maintenance of the wage level is to them a substance of life significance. It is factual, as a broad-spectrum proposal that association by trade, and everlasting association of any sort, has pleaded to workers according as they have little or much to gain in the trade they follow.
Labor union grouping is so clearly better to the rivalry of individuals looking for work that workers, in strain of strong competition, would have joint roughly impulsively if their arrangement had not encountered the radical conflict of those who restricted the allocation of the jobs. The trade form of association not merely goes after the urge for grouping under pressure of contest, but it goes after individual favorites in the involvement of men of comparable gear and societal status. All other things being equivalent, machinists as a group would be more pleasant-sounding than a diverse group of machinists and shoe operators: or carpenters would be grateful for involvement with other carpenters more than relationship with the different kinds of workers in a department store. The labor union is in this wisdom an automatic appearance of association, and, as it follows individual favorites, it is the primal shape of the existing labor groupings. In this lie the power and the fault of "pure and simple" labor unionism.
The industrial union is bottomed on the labor groupings which capital creates for the production and delivery of a product or of merchandise of a parallel nature in rivalry or exercise. The industrial unionists not only ignore the individual favorites for involvement, but they set themselves the job of conquering those favorites and making in their place novel requirements for involvement footed on class welfare which build up in the resistance for power of industry; for industrial liberty. In this logic the industrial union is the complicated shape of association.
The industrial union might give for the supplementary association of craft workers, who are in straight contest, but these trade groups are secondary and minor to the industrial group of which the trade is a fraction. While the trade unionist conceives of a job as an obsession in itself, the industrial unionist understands that it is a fraction of a procedure. In other words, the unit of organization for labor, as it is for capital, is the industry in which workers, representing possibly several trades, are associated for the manufacture of a product. Some industries are comparatively simple in their processes, and the membership of an industrial union is therefore not necessarily complex or inclusive of several trades.
Whether an industry is multifaceted or uncomplicated in its operational force, whatever might be the separation of the procedures, it is capital and not labor which determines and directs it. Capital decides what kind of workers are to be employed and employs them. As capital sees fit it discharges them. It changes the processes and the kinds of workers. As capital regards the whole group with a single eye so would the industrial unionist regard capital? From an organization point of view, labor is weak or strong, in agreement with capital, or in rebellion against it, as it includes every worker which capital has considered of sufficient importance to employ.
The industrial unionist lays pressure on the significance of alteration in the form of organization so that it will communicates to the changes in modern industry. He is apt to assume that an age has arrived in which all industrial processes have reached a maximum state of concentration and simplicity. While this is far from the truth, concentration is a characteristic of modern industry. It is of the first importance to labor organization that new methods of management, no less than new machinery, are creating new trades, and that they are re-creating and destroying old ones. The creation of a new trade or the destruction of an old trade was at one time an event of historic importance; today it receives not much more than passing comment in newspaper notice. The industrial unionist charges that the trade form of organization is as ill equipped to fight present-day battles, as were the guilds to represent the interests of the journeymen a hundred and fifty years ago. The industrial unionist thus challenges the trade unionist, placing him on the defensive.
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