American Labor Unions Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from Here Comes Labor There are about fifty million men and women in this country who work - or would like to work - for wages. They do not employ others; they are not mem bers of the professions. No doubt they are workers, but one cannot say what the whole mass of them wants, or where they are going, or what they are try ing to do. They have never gotten together and de cided on these things. They have no one to speak for them, or to lead them; they have no way of planning and acting together as a whole group to help make the life of each individual better. So it is only the workers organized in labor unions who can be counted as a force in this country. Theyhave spokesmen who let their wishes and opinions be known. Acting together, they have developed great power over their own lives, and they deeply affect the life of the country as a whole. When you speak of American Labor, then, you mean organized working men and women. You mean the unions. Unions are not made up of any one particular sort of person; almost every type of American is repre sented in their ranks. There are college graduates and people who have never learned to read. There are Negroes and Chinese. There are members of the country's proudest families, and people whose parents never took a bath in winter. There are also men of sound judgment, and fools. There are savage fighters and smooth diplomats. There are those who will gladly lay down their lives for a cause and those who will betray any party or any person for power or money. There are those who see ahead with clear eyes and those who follow blindly after the man of the hour. In the conventions that order Labor's affairs, the man who digs ditches sits down between the clerk who spends his days juggling columns of figures and the skilled machinist to whom a hair's thickness is greater than the difference between a good job and a bad one. And as these men are different in their work, they are different in their lives and in the problems they have to face. So you cannot say that Labor is this kind of person, or that kind. Labor is Americans, organized to act and think together. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.