labor, if it have a gleam of intelligence, will look elsewhere for succor. It will say, "The capitalist refuses to play fair with us. Real power in the business world has become organic. Its great achievements now come through organization. Knowing this and glorying in it, capital either fights us or palavers. It fights or it seeks diverting substitutes,—anything to prevent that collective efficiency among us which it finds indispensable for itself."
My appeal is not, however, to theory, but to such fact and open illustration as appear in pages that follow.
Before the sullen reactions of the Homestead Strike in Pittsburg had ceased, I asked a man of real power in those great industries, if it were true that he and his friends had determined to wipe out trade union organization. "Yes," he said, "that is our purpose. They seem to exist only to make trouble and we are done with them." Without excitement or braggadocio, he explained to me how this could be done and would be done. "They bother the life out of us," he added. "They keep men at work we do not want; prevent or try to prevent our turning off those for whom we have no further use. They level things toward the meanest worker. We have got on with them only because we were forced to it. They everywhere check product. We are now going to control our own business, and we are going to do it entirely."[1]
- ↑ This employer, like others, did not of course object to a "good trade union"—one that would in no way interfere. But the employer cannot be allowed to define "goodness" in a trade union any more than we can allow labor to define it. The definition above them both is that which public welfare finds workably just and fair for social security.
