Labor movement

“ Always the struggle for existence itself has been uppermost. No wonder the conclusion can justly be drawn that the American labor movement has not always played a highly productive role in American industry. ”

“ Cedric Long, graduate of Union Theological Seminary, a former organizer for the Amalgamated Textile Workers says:
"Many young men and women have thrown themselves directly into the labor movement. Some of these have been animated chiefly by the scientific spirit; they have hoboed through the harvest fields and mining districts, worked in the ranks of unskilled labor in factory and mill,—trying to get the 'feel' of life and toil and union activities as the workers at the bottom find them. ”

“ The point is, looked at without the tinted glasses of either capital or labor, that the psychology of the American employer for the past, assuredly the present, and at least the near future, has been, and is, and will be, so inimical to organized labor that the movement would not be allowed to function as a constructive industrial force. Too much of its energies must go to fighting. ”

“ The labor union movement, unlike the political socialist revolutionary movement, undertakes in its operation to supply labor with a certain working content, which the administrative scheme of industry has excluded from the experience of its workers. ”

“ It is natural that these basic lines drawn by us could be fully understood only by better acquaintance with more material which depicts the situation of the labor movement in every country. Only by studying the particular forms of the labor movement of our epoch can we form an opinion not only about the causes which brought about new forms of the labor movement but also to understand the organizational and other forms which were taken by the newly-formed national and international organizations. ”

“ In these two years you will happen on your quota of labor stories to cover. The machinists, the railroaders, the miners, the printers, or some one piece of the trade union movement gets more and more of your interest. Put on overalls, break a bone or two, live lean and fight around inside your fellows' union. Beside observing what they don't read, you will learn what men live for and what little they work for. ”

“ From the great central rallying places of industry the Labor Movement has proceeded, which within a few decades has spread from England over France, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, and has attained power and definite form in the foundation of the International Workingmen's Association. ”

“ Could not the workers see that their greatest reliance was in their economic organizations? Why, they do not see that yet. The arguments that won the workers of 1828, and the following years, are as potent to win them today as they were then. There were many things in the infancy of the labor movement that appeared to be essentially political in their origin, and it was deemed that these would respond to political treatment. ”

“ It undertakes to emphasize the nature and significance of the labor movement and the rise of trade unions. There follows a discussion of the old tactics of labor, its first political experience, and its final return to direct industrial action. Some attention is given to the industrial panics, political utopias, trade unionism, politics, schemes, and plans, which have engaged the attention of the labor element during and since the Civil War. ”

“ With eyes that have been opened, Labor abroad is conscious of its revolutionary mission, and it is striving constantly, despite a thousand timidities and mistakes, towards the only way to solve the labor problem, towards the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of a proletarian regime. ”

“ Finally, that all so-called "immediate demands" of the workers, such as the eight hour work day, employers' liability, limitation of child labor, protection of machinery, etc., can be obtained and made effective only through the action of a united and powerful movement of the working class on the industrial field. ”

“ The hours of labor are too long, and should be shortened. I recommend a universal movement to cease work at five o'clock Saturday afternoon, as a beginning. There should be a greater participation in the profits of labor by the industrious and intelligent laborer. In the present arrangements of labor and capital, the condition of the employee is simply that of wage slavery—capital dictating, labor submitting; capital superior, labor inferior. ”

“ It is, in fact, the recognition that the class struggle of the workers inevitably leads to a higher social order that furnishes common ground for the intellectual idealists and practical trade unionists in the political and economic struggles of organized labor. ”

“ RUFUS CHOATE AND DANIEL WEBSTER labor, say the critics. But every man who reads of the labor question knows that it means the movement of the men that earn their living with their hands; THAT ARE EMPLOYED, AND PAID WAGES: are gathered under roofs of factories, sent out on farms, sent out on ships, gathered on the walls. In popular acceptation, the working class means the men that work with their hands, for wages, so many hours a day, employed by great capitalists; that work for everybody else. Why do we move for this class? "Why," asks a critic, "don't you move FOR ALL WORKINGMEN?" ”

“ Consider, for example, the Industrial Workers of the World: The amount of energy and unselfish devotion lavished upon that organization would have wrought miracles in developing and extending the trade unions ”

“ Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and 240fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; ”

“ Compare this situation with that prevailing in Europe, for instance, where the workers have understood to build themselves class political organizations. There Organized Labor is a great political power, and one which must be reckoned with on all vital issues. ”

“ Help forward the cause of Amalgamation
and Labor's progress generally.
This pamphlet should be in the hands of
every worker.
Every local union should order copies for its
entire membership. See that this is done. ”

“ Come into our ranks, ye shirkers, for we now rule this land.
Work or starve, the workers said, for you must earn your bread.
Then into their ranks came the masters and joined the workers' song;
Then into their ranks came the masters and joined the workers' song.
All workers, "The Army of Production," in One Big Union, regardless of age, creed, color or sex, is invincible.
Labor is entitled to all it produces. An injury to one is an injury to all. ”

“ But America's strongest element is the wage-working class. Scientifically organized labor is the efficient and bloodless weapon of the proletariat in its accomplishment of industrial revolution; and, at the same time, it is "the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." ”

“ Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century, labor has been working its way out of slavery into freedom.
As a result laborers have better wages, better conditions of life, more of material comforts, and a higher degree of intelligence than ever before. ”

“ Then the workers will be the sovereign-citizens, the rulers of this earth. They will build houses and live therein; they will plant vineyards and eat the fruit thereof. The labor question will have been settled, and the working class, emancipated from the fetters of wage-slavery, will begin the real work of civilizing and humanizing the human race. ”

“ As I hinted before, in the new order of things all branches of labor will be organized, similar to the arrangements we see to day in large factories, large estates, or institutions of the government. Unnecessary work will be avoided and the reward for work done will be greater. ”

“ Moreover, it concentrated the laboring population in great centres of industry, thus creating a class consciousness which demanded that attention should be given to the rights of labor, created a new ideal of the dignity of toil and gave to the world that vision of the inclusive cause of labor which was destined to advance in a marvelous way to the social progress of mankind. ”

“ With the extension of trade and the wider use of machinery the number and power of the adult employed workmen increased, and with their increase of power came a jealousy, on the one hand, toward the masters; on the other, toward the apprentices, who were regarded as cheapening labor when employed in too great numbers. The conflict which arose between employer and employed gradually merged into one between capital and labor. ”

“ There are thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, domestic servants, mechanics, sewing women, clerks, apprentices, and such like, whose cry for justice against oppression goes up to heaven by day and by night. ”

“ The emancipation of labor demands the promotion of the instruments of labor to the common property of society and the co-operative regulation of the total labor, with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labor. ”

“ Many workers objected to what was called the waste of labor. It was pointed out that under the Socialistic rule, the product of labor had to go to labor, and as the building of the flying machine factory was not producing food or clothing, and the workers on it had to be supported by the labor of the whole community, it was making a distinct class of them, which was illegal. ”

“ Factory hands and mine workers fit in more or less, but farm hands, small farmers, peddlers, little shop keepers, clerks, servants, soldiers, policemen, firemen slip out of the net. The tendency, when you are appealing to the "working class," is to fix your attention on two or three million more or less confirmed trade unionists, and treat them as Labor; the other seventeen or eighteen million, who might qualify statistically, are tacitly endowed with the point of view ascribed to the organized nucleus. ”

“ Never before did labor do these things. After the Great Plague in England, labor, finding itself in demand and innocently obeying the economic law, asked higher wages. But the masters set a maximum wage, restrained workingmen from moving about from place to place, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous legal methods punished those who disobeyed. But labor is accorded greater respect today. ”

“ Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which looks after the general affairs of society; the direction of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc. ”

“ At the present time the policies of American labor both political and industrial, are a generation out of date; our workingmen are like the Moros in the Philippines, fighting machine-guns with bows and arrows. ”

“ Even now, when everybody is complaining of the dearness of labour, and the insufferable independence of the working class, a piece of fine lace, we are told, consumes the labour of seven persons, each employed on a distinct portion of the work; and the thread, of exquisite fineness, is spun in dark rooms underground, not without injury, we may suppose, to the eyesight or health of those employed. So that the labour movement does not seem to have yet trenched materially even on the elegancies of life. ”

“ Labor has organized and it has made a manful fight, and all down the pages of history you will find that labor, thru its organization and thru its lawful methods pursued under its organization, has gradually bettered its condition. ”

“ The Industrial Workers of the World is a Labor organization composed of sober, honest, industrious men and women. Its chief purposes are to abolish the system of wage slavery and to improve the conditions of those who toil. ”

“ Labor is here honored and respected, and great examples incite us to action. All around us in the professions, in the marts of commerce, on the exchange, where merchant-princes and capitalists do congregate; in these manufactories and workshops, where the products of every clime are fashioned into a thousand forms of utility and beauty; on these smiling farms, fertilized by the sweat of free labor; in every position of private and of public life, are our associates, who were but yesterday "hireling laborers," "mud-sills," "slaves." ”

“ But the organized workers, caring nothing for the interests of any particular employer, demand improved conditions of labor, though the inefficient employer be eliminated and all production be carried on by a few capable employers doing business on a large scale and able to pay the highest wages. ”

“ It is a fundamental fallacy of Socialism that all gain is the result of Labor and that therefore all gain belongs to Labor—the term "Labor" in practice meaning the great majority of laborers who are manual workers1.
Of course Labor is essential to production—so is Capital, which we shall come to later—and as between two things, both essential, it is perhaps impossible to conceive of one or the other as superior. ”

“ We now approach a yet more thorny subject than the organisation of the workers. What should be the remuneration of labor—what the share of the product taken respectively by the individual, the municipality, and the State?
The answer depends on the answer to a previous question. Is the organisation of the unemployed to be undertaken in order to transform them into self-supporting, self-respecting citizens; or is it to be carried on as a form of exploitation, utilising pauper labor for the production of profit for non-paupers? ”

“ When we come to questions between labor and its employers, more than this is true. The employers of labor as a class are closely in sympathy with the honest desire of their men to better themselves, and the constant increase in the employment of arbitration to settle difficulties, the experiments in co-operation and profit-sharing, and the furnishing of cheap and good houses to the workers are all evidences of this fact. ”

“ The effect of the vocations and the division of labor is to produce, in the first instance, not social groups, but vocational types, the actor, the plumber, and the lumber-jack. The organizations, like the trade and labor unions, which men of the same trade or profession form are based on common interests. ”