Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt:...We have analytical historical books only on English trade unions, and have even been taught that to know anything of their development historically we must look to foreign soil, as they are of-foreign origin, and strictly an un-American institution. Exactly the opposite is true. To understand English trade unions, study them; to comprehend German labor organizations, study them in Germany under strictly German conditions. The Australian unions and those of New Zealand can only be comprehended where they have grown. No human institution is so distinctively the product of its immediate environment as the trade unions. It meets the conditions as it finds them. "What we do depends on what the boss does," said a leading trade unionist to me when I asked him what the policy of the union was in certain matters. We should look for the history and development of American trade unions in America, and let me impress upon you now that American trade unionism is American, as old as the flag, and older, and as different from English, German, French, or New Zealand unionism as our industrial conditions and methods differ from those of the countries named, and different in precisely the same manner and to the same degree, for trade unionism is an institution of extreme adaptability, flexibility, and expediency. It is the chameleon of human institutions; absolutely the creature of its habitat, and must be studied where we find it. It is never a foreign institution. Transplant it, and it changes so quickly and materially that you can only know it even then by studying it where it is; not where it came from. In no field of sociology is the professional "strawman" architect so out of place, so sure to miss in his guessing, so much of a nuisance, as in attem...