The
interference of the union is an attempt to bridge the gulf between
the routine of service and the administration, and direction of the
service which the worker gives.
I do not intend to imply that the labor movement is a conscious
attempt at such cooerdination. It is not. The conscious purpose is the
direct and simple desire to resist specific acts of domination and
to increase labor's economic returns. But any one who follows the
sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal
gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows
that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest,
not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker's
participation in the administration of affairs connected with life in
the shop. The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain
the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as
men unequipped with the administrative power--as men without will.
There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements
purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in
the United States. The German workers depended on their political
representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards. Their
organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck
set up. They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when
their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.
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