LABOR UNIONS

BY A MEMBER

HELEN MAROT

!、

Member of Local 12646 A. F. of L.; Executive Secretary of the Women's
Trade Union League of New York 1905-1913; Author of "The
Handbook of Labor Literature"

COPYRIGHT, 1914.

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published August, 1914

3318
M35

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.

PREFACE

FOR several years economists, social workers, and magazine writers have done their part to bring the labor problem, in many of its aspects, before the public for impartial consideration.

I find that the cumulative force of recent labor events has influenced some of these people to discourage the presentation of a point of view which is characterized as distinctly labor. It is not that they fail to recognize that there is a labor point of view, but that militant tendencies within the labor movement have alarmed them.

A one time friend of the labor unions, whose good services had been frequently invoked when an intermediary was needed for the settlement of a dispute between capital and labor, told me it was his opinion that the time had gone by for setting forth the labor point of view. As a friend of labor he intended, he said, to exert his energies in putting a stop to the warfare which had developed. It was not, he said, an understanding of the warfare that was needed, but a suppression.

About the same time I learned from an economist, ....who had given much time to the study of labor conditions, and had formerly welcomed a full presenta