skilled artizans, it has little confidence that unskilled workers can weather the storms of organization.

Against these class divisions within the whole group, which stultify and pervert the idea of a labor democracy, there are leveling forces which are breaking down the lines of division. When a craft is reduced either by machinery or shop management to a lower level of skill or artizanship, the workers affected find that their position in the trade union world is weakened and their economic gains secured by organization are in peril. These men, for the first time possibly, realize the need of coöperation with other labor groups; they realize that labor unity must extend across trade lines as well as within them; that this unity, indeed, is as important as trade unity. Men reduced in their position are the best possible recruits to the movement for sympathetic action. It is a truism in labor union circles that men fight harder against reductions than for advance.

The metal workers at present are the most important acquisition to the democratic movement. They have by shop management and machinery been reduced in large numbers from artizans to the ranks of the semiskilled. Their recent change in policy, described in the preceding chapter, proposes to turn their losses into gains for the whole labor account and to endow that account with new strength and leadership. (See Chapter VI.)

While the lack of sympathy between the casual

laborer and the well established trade unionist is a constant reminder that the spirit of labor solidarity is lacking when a sympathetic movement, like the machinists, is started, or when a sympathetic strike occurs (an insufferable conspiracy in the eyes of employers), every union man is conscious, whether his judgment sanctions the action or not, that the act itself is the supreme expression of the union movement; that it is the final test of a worker's loyalty to his fellow workers.

There is a common impression among the radical labor people that the trade union men are wanting or quite lost where questions depending on class action arise. The Colorado miners' war against the attacks of a corporation-owned state militia and their efforts to break the miners' strike, brought out evidences of deep and substantial sympathy which trade union men were ready and eager to give. It was enough for many old-line trade unionists to know that their brothers of another union had taken up arms in selfdefense, for them to throw themselves into the fight. Such conservative unions as the Cigar Makers, the Typographical, and the Building Trades Council of Denver, voted money to purchase arms and ammunition for the miners' war. The Machinists and the Trades and Labor Assembly of Colorado recruited regiments from their memberships. The president of the State Federation of Labor transported arms from one miners' camp to another. Members of the Rail

road Brotherhood refused to carry the militia into the strike district.

The Colorado strike proved what all members of unions know, that labor men with a strong sense of their labor affiliations, whether they are conservative or radical in the every-day methods and aims of organization, will answer the call for solidarity when a rebellious union takes up arms against a state militia. Throughout the country there were hundreds of union men ready to fall in at the miners' call. They did not question whether the miners would win or lose, whether the strike was justified or judicious. Rash they might be, but the miners were desperate and fighting against entrenched interests and were risking their lives and all they valued. It was a signal which few labor union men failed to recognize and which many were ready to answer if called.

Sympathetic action is something apart from the form of organization. Industrial councils of trade unions and industrial unions are recognitions of the need of closer association and common action; they are steps toward sympathetic action but not substitutes for it. The realization of sympathetic action among all workers is dependent on spirit, experience and understanding as it grows out of experience. While the form of an organization may be an expression of its growth, it may perish under the one form as well as the other.

CHAPTER VIII

UNION RECOGNITION AND THE UNION

SHOP

Consistent with the partnership theory-" The free American workman" the anarchist in industry-The "scab" a grafter —An A. F. of L. weapon-Position of different internationals -Preferential shop.

A UNION shop, called outside of union circles a "closed shop," that is, a shop where the owner has agreed to employ only members of a union, and union recognition, or the agreement by the employer to deal with representatives of the union, instead of with his employees individually as to this or that condition of employment, are both demands that follow logically the program of the American Federation of Labor.

These demands are inherent parts of the theory of the partnership relation between capital and labor. They are usually considered strategic measures, but they are more than that. They are acknowledgments of the principle of a partnership relation between capital and labor, and they give all subsequent acts their sanction.

To a disciple of the partnership theory, it is as consistent to claim that a man enlisted in the service of a state is "free" in his American citizenship to

serve special interests, not sanctioned by the state, as it is to claim that an individual worker or individual employer, enlisted in the service of industry, is free either to accept conditions of employment, or to impose them before they are agreed to by the industry as a whole, or in the interests of all. A worker who insists on his personal rights, irrespective of the rights of others, to work for whom he pleases and on terms which please him, is the anarchist of industry, as are also those who praise and protect him in his assumed right. On grounds, then, of ethical implication, and in the interest of justice and industrial peace, the "free American workingman" and the non-union employer become fit subjects for coercion.

The demand for a union shop is closely associated with the attitude of unionists toward non-unionists. The non-unionist, or scab, is a grafter to all union men. He enjoys the rewards of improved conditions which have resulted from sacrifices of labor unionists without himself having shared or suffered in their sacrifices. In other words, all labor unionists recognize through their bitter experience that one of the results of the partial organization of the trade or industry, of a successful or partially successful strike, is the victimization of the men and women who have borne the brunt and burden of the strike; that the reaping of whatever rewards or benefits result from organized action are enjoyed by the strike-breaker as well as by the striker. They are enjoyed by the