# The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/The Tolerated Unions

The Tolerated Unions
WHEN Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., steps forward as a defender of his employees against the union of their trade, and at the same time begins investigations looking to the betterment of general labor conditions, we wonder if there is not danger that the much championed and much investigated wage-earner will not in the end be killed with kindness. The workingman is to be given, not what he wants, but what is good for him. In a period of swift industrial regeneration he himself is to remain inactive and unheard, a mere grateful beneficiary. We note a similar development elsewhere. Factory laws, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, workmen's compensation acts, are ​hastily inscribed upon the statute book, and philanthropists and politicians lie awake nights contriving new plans of industrial amelioration. But all this goes hand in hand with a more grudging attitude towards trade-unionism, and a keener impatience with what is called the blundering and obstinacy of labor's representatives. Many well-intentioned people come to regard the trade union as obstructive and reactionary, a rigid and therefore dead part of a plastic industrial organism. In short, the union is played out. The labor problem is the first concern of the whole people, but is none of the laborer's business.
The danger of this attitude lies in the tendency to shove the union to one side, to substitute industrial betterment for industrial democracy, and thus to make the good the enemy of the better. The issue is not one between progress and stagnation, for practically all groups desire progress. It is rather the issue of the choice of agents by whom progress is to be made. Behind the conflict of interests there emerges a no less embittered conflict of clashing temperaments. You need only look at the scientific manager and at the trade-union leader to see that these men will not easily mix. The one is objective, quantitative, unemotionally exact, analyzing, stop-watch in hand, the minutest motions of a "personally conducted" day-laborer, as an entomologist studies a bug; the other is laxer, more voluble, more open to emotions that escape stop watch and measuring rod, less logical, perhaps more real. These two men view the labor world from different vantage-grounds. It is not easy for them to establish a community of sentiment and outlook.
The social reformer frequently displays a similar antagonism to the union. It seems to him selfish, ignorant, inconsistent, harsh. The reformer may not understand the heavy emphasis lead by the union upon the closed shop, upon its own recognition, upon its right to boycott and to strike. He feels that shadowy abstractions are being opposed to solid advantages. He resents the suspicious attitude of labor organizations. Nor does he always understand the union philosophy. The trade unionist is not a college graduate. He does not explain clearly what he feels intensely. He speaks a language different from that of the social reformer. And yet in the course of the years it often happens that the wisdom of the reformer is turned into nonsense and the workman's obscure prejudice is vindicated. Why should a wage-earner object to receiving bonuses and premiums, which are a something added? Why should he oppose piece-rates, which reward each worker according to his ability? Yet decades of pace-setting and price-cutting have conclusively demonstrated the wisdom of trade-union opposition to all such devices. Similarly the trade-union attitude towards compulsory arbitration, the legal incorporation of trade unions, and other plans for industrial lubrication has not seldom been vindicated. What seemed a mere prejudice reveals itself later as a healthy instinct of self-preservation.
It is not that the unions are always right, still less always wise. These are trade union leaders who are only indifferently honest and others who, though incorruptible, are fanatical and formalistic, at once too inexperienced and too narrow-viewed to handle with tactful courage the delicate problems which arise daily. The trade union is a crude young democracy, with the failings and disappointments of a crude young democracy. It also suffers from the evils which inhere in all fighting organizations. It must constantly hold its own. It is, therefore, too slow to see good in the unaccustomed, too prone to view reforms as lures to the unwary. It suffers equally from the fact that it needs stability, and at the same time must adjust itself to an industrial environment constantly changing. It therefore shows strain and cleavage. Jurisdictional conflicts arise, and acrid disputes divide the movement into conservatives and radicals, into "pure and simple" trade unions asking only a fair day's wage, and flaming revolutionary organizations demanding the immediate abolition of the whole capitalist system.
But in truth, despite these internal conflicts, there is both unity and a principle in the movement. Whether the organization be a conservative railroad brotherhood, an industrial union like the coal miners, or a revolutionary industrial union like the Industrial Workers of the World, it is still a union. The varying philosophies are not so significant as the fact that wage-earners stand united for common purposes, for common defense, for common aggression. Whatever their philosophies, their principle is one. And that principle is intensely realistic. The union stands for power, for self-direction, for self-expression in industry, politics and affairs. No specific gain is nearly so important as the power that encompasses it. The unions are seeking to attain to this power through discipline and concert.
It is this very ambition of the union, half conscious and but half realized by its opponents, that gives rise to the opposition and ultimately renders it futile. It is easier to concede favors than to divest one's self of power, easier to increase wages than to surrender control of the shop. Yet in industry as in politics there must come such devolution of authority. Welfare work and all reform from above are valuable, but they are valuable only in so far as they aid and do not obstruct or divert the uneven progress of the wage-earner towards industrial democracy.