The labor journal. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1909-1976, 1915-08-13
ORIGIN OF LABOR UNIONS


origin in human conquest.
ORIGIN OF LABOR UNIONS
Labor unions in the Middle Ages
were called guilds and combined both
master and man as members, wherein
artistic and skilled workmanship
brought greatest honor, and but little
thought was given to profit or increase
of wealth. In the days of Rome, with
her awful cruelties, the workers were
compelled to serve the patricians and
the populace was compelled to be sat
isfied with bread and the circus The
arena swan with the blood of gladia.
in war. Adherents to the religion of
the Carpenter of Galilee were thrown
to lions and tigers to make a Roman
holiday. Man, made in the image of
his Maker, endowed with the knowI-
edge of good and evil, a creature lit
tie lower than the angels, has op-
pressed his fellows since time began.
He fought his neighbor when time was
young, and he kills his brother in
wholesale murder, miscalled war, in
these the modern days. Man was and
lis still brute, and all our boasted
modern civilization seemingly only
the veneer that surfaces a savage,
Trades unions in America have
been co-existent with the nation it.
self, but have reached their greatest
development within the last half CEN
tury. Not only do the workers in
shop, mill and mine and factory pro-
.tect themselves by organization, but
the agricultural laborer, the farmer.
has his union, or grange, for like pur-
poses. Railway transportation includes
.three-quarters of a million wage-earn-
ers of skill, while the workshops of
the nation have been organized, at
least partially, into a great group of
over two millions of toilers in me-
chanical pursuits, divided into trades
and occupations
PURPOSES OF TRADES UNIONS
Primarily in modern times wage
earners first sought through organiza-
ton higher wages, then shorter hours.
then improved working conditions,
then humane legislation, protection to
health, limb and life in industry. con
seryation of strength and skill, pro-
lection to womanhood and childhood
among the workers, universal free edu-
cation, political liberty and every
good thing to which men may aspire
One of the greatest abuses still too
little in check is that of child labor.
Nearly two million children are in
American industry who should be at
school, in the home and on the play
ground. Labor unions demand for the
child fair chance to reach maturity
unstunted, either physically or men
tally In the cotton mills of the South
children are exploited without mercy
boys and girls OF tender years kept at
machinery twelve or fourteen hours
a day, seven days a week, for a beg
carly pay of a few cents day. In
the sweatshops of New England and
the Middle States, notably in New
York and Brooklyn, children of for
elgn parents are employed in four
tenement workrooms with all the old
er members of their families, working
and living conditions being combined
amid squalor. poverty, ignorance, dis
ease and filth. Nor are these isolated
cases, but thousands are thus engaged
and the birth-rate is so far exceeded
by the death-rate OF the childhood in
these slum workshops and homes as
to be a veritabe slaughter of the in
nocents to crafty the greed of selfish
commercialism. Breaker boys in
mines, to the number of thousands.
have no chance for education, never
heard of a Sunday school, but can
swear in several languages.
BRUTALITIES OF CHILD LA
ROP WORSE THAN WAP