The labor world. [volume] (Duluth, Minn.) 1896-current, 1905-08-19
OUR LABOR MOVEMENT
UPRISING OF MASSES
Trade Unions Are Not the
Whole of the Great Ameri-
can Labor Movement.
Professor John r. Commons of
Madison University Writes
Some Labor Doctrine.

MadlSOn university Wr1IeS
Some Labor Doctrine.
Madison, Wis, Aug. 17.-Profes-
sor John r. Commons of Madison
University, teacher of political econ-
| omy, and a member of the Typo
graphical union, contributes this
week the following logical article
on the American labor movement,
and its relation to trade unions:
Trade unions are not the whole of
the labor movement, but they are
the laborer's way of turning the la
Dor movement to immediate advant-
age. Their methods, their successes.
their failures, cannot be understood
except as they are seen to be a part
of the moral, industrial and polite
al history of the country. Some OF
their methods do not find favor with
moralists and political economists
who study them from the abstract
point of view. The problem is much
like that of the older botany and
zoology-with difference. The
zoologist collected his bugs and
birds, named their parts, arranged
them in families and genera, and
praised God or nature (according to
his bent) for their wonderful adap-
tations. But when the evolutionist
Il. e., the geological historian
came into the field, broader ex-
planation ensued. He saw the strug-
gle for existence, over-population
and under-consumption, maternal
love and mutual aid, and he ex-
planned the claws and teeth of the
tiger as we'll as the song of the bird.
He neither approved nor praised
he understood.
So with the older economist or
moralist He has seen the trade
union, with it's closed shops, it's ap-
prentice limitations, it's restrictions
on output and machinery, and it's
minimum wage, and he condemns it
as contrary to divine or natural law.
He may approve of the union, but
he condemns the methods that keep
1t alive.
Today nearly all the political &C.
onomists have become evolutionists.
They do not condemn or approve
they seek to understand. The trade
union has come up through strug-
gle and conflict. 1t carries the marks
of these conflicts. 1t is a survival
of the fittest and seems destined to
stay If its methods change, a.
they res.changins # 10 because dff
ferent methods enable 1t to live. It
has claws and teeth, but it has sum-
pathy and self-sacrifice. It's chang
ing methods depend on changing
methods of it's opponents and chang
ing attitude Of the general public.
Consider the change that has oc-
Cured in the matter of secrecy. The
Knights of Labor were secret Or
ganization for fifteen years. The
existing unions are secret only in
the sense that meetings of a corpor-
alton or board of directors are
| secret.
Secrecy is a weapon to resist wide
spread hostility. Popular support
and demand for fair play encourage
openness. But popular support is
itself a moral evolution. A revolu-
tion in mems ideas of human rights
and sympathy for the weak preceded
the present trade union movement.
If the general public that makes
the laws and backs the courts was
hostile to the aspirations of labor,
it could not openly organize upon
its present large and effective scale.
| The general public needed first a
humanitarian awakening, which
| showed itself in the second quarter
| of the nineteenth century, was for
time swallowed up in the anti
slavery movement, which was also
| labor movement, and then re-
awakened on a new and wider level
in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century.
How this sympathy originated, how
1T extended to the wage Garner, how
far it has gone, how it has affected
legislation and the courts, these are
the historical problems that reveal
the environments within which trade
unionism has struggled for existence.
! the social environment has changed
| and the methods of labor organiza-
tions have changed. The present
condition of both can be understood
only as we see out of what they have
| come.
In no country is the labor problem
more complex or varied than in the
| United States. Sectional divisions,
race divisions, protective tariffs, i'm
migration and the most extreme
vacillations of prosperity and depres-
sion have contributed to the result
as we find it, Serious minded people
of all classes are awakening to the
need of more light on every phase,
factor and detail of the movement.
The spectacular and personal ele-
ments have held the foreground, but
the labor movement is an uprising
| of the masses, and the leaders and
agitators are products as we'll as
causes. To what it is tending, what
the outcome shall be, is of living in
| terest to wOrkmen themselves. to