Chapter 25 in Social Organization . That the dominant power of wealth has an oppressive action for the most part involuntary, upon the people below, will hardly be denied by any competent student. The industrial progress of our time is accompanied by sufferings that are involved with the progress.
Labor unions are a simpler matter.
They have arisen out of the urgent need of selfdefence not so much against deliberate aggression as against brutal confusion and neglect. The industrial population has been tossed about on the swirl of economic change like so much sawdust on a river, sometimes prosperous, sometimes miserable, never secure, and living largely under degrading, inhuman conditions. Besides their primary function of group-bargaining, which has come to be generally recognized as essential, unions are performing a variety of services hardly less important to their members, and serviceable to society at large. Their function as spheres of fellowship and self-development is equally vital and less understood. Usually without pecuniary resource and insecure of his job and his home, he is, in isolation, miserably weak and in a way to be cowed and unmanned by misfortune or mere apprehension.