The labor standard., 1910-01-01
Fair Weather Unionists Retard
 LabOr'S Advance.
MENDICANTS OF INDUSTRY.
Workers Who Are Willing to Accept Benefits From Trades Organizations Without Aiding In Their Support. Loyal to No Principle.

In recent strike by women, the pur- pose being to secure an increase of wages from $S to $1O per week, several of the young women involved were conversing upon the subject in a street car, says a writer in Shoe Workers Journal.
 The main idea of this group was how best to secure the raise in wages and at the same time avoid paying dues to the union.
 To secure raise in wages through union and then refuse to support the union that secured the raise is not new, but this is the first time the writer ever knew of a plan being con- cocted to avoid all obligations to the union which was to secure the raise even before the raise had been secured
 It did not seem to occur to these young women that the two dollar weekly increase was worth having or that, inasmuch as it required a union to obtain it, it might also require a un- ion to protect or retain it.
 Nor is this idea peculiar only to these young women. |
 Working people have always been too prone to avail themselves of the strength of labor unions temporarily for the purpose of redressing the more pressing grievances of the immediate present and, having accomplished this much. then abandon the union until menaced by some new oppression.
 In the meantime it often suits their fancy to speak disparagingly of the union as being "Weak" or mo gOod," when, as a matter of fact, if the union is weak it is simply and solely because those who are under obligations to it and who are morally bound to support it have refused to give it any support.
 A beggar is one who solicits aims while offering nothing in return and is sometimes styled mendicant.
 A wage earner who tries through union to get advanced wages and who avoids giving anything to the union in return may properly be termed an fn- dustrial mendicant.
 These industrial mendicants are very largely responsible for the fluctuations in the membership of trades unions. They flock in temporarily when there is melon to be cut ill the shape of a raise in wages, and as soon as the raise is secured they flock out again.
 If all the wage earners who ever joined the unions remained true mem bers labor would be nearly completely organized or perhaps wholly.
 The precentage organized would be so very large that to be nonunionist would be unfashionable and perhaps uncomfortable, and all remaining out side the union would join.
 The industrial mendicants are quite numerous in the shoe trade They have made an unenyiable record of being in and out of all unions many times, but loyal to none
 They have retarded organization to a remarkable degree, for the reason that whenever business conditions make for extension of the union membership the first work to be done is to gather in the industrial mendicants once more, and in doing this much valuable time is consumed.
 If the trades unions were able to hold their gains in membership from season to season, so that the gains made in the new season would be net gains, progress would be much faster and op- portunities to improve wages and con- ditions would be vastly more numerous.