but if she is in lodgings I can't possibly ask to see her in her own
room. If I talk to her at all it will be out on the street, which is
not pleasant, especially if it is snowing or freezing or blowing a
gale. It is not under these conditions that a girl is likely to see
the use of an organization or be attracted by its happier and more
social side." Then he went on to say that he himself often did not
know what best to say to his girl when he had caught her. He was
ignorant, perhaps almost as ignorant as an outsider, of the conditions
under which she did her work. He might know or be able to find out her
wages and hours; he might guess that there was fining and speeding up,
but he would know nothing of the details, and on any sanitary question
or any moral question he would be utterly at sea. He could neither
put the questions nor get the answers, nor in any way win the
girl's confidence. Therefore, Mr. Rumsey concluded, if the American
Federation of Labor is going to acknowledge its responsibilities in
the great field of labor propaganda among women it must seriously take
up the question of organizing women by women.
On a similar basis of reasoning it is easy to see that in the great
majority of cases the successful organization of the women in any
particular trade can be best carried out by one of themselves, a
woman from their own trade. Not only do the girls believe that she
understands their difficulties better than anyone else, but in most
instances she does indeed bring to her work that exact knowledge of
details and processes which gives the girls confidence that she
can fairly state their case, that she will not, through technical
ignorance, ask for impossibilities, nor on the other hand permit
herself to be browbeaten by a foreman or superintendent because
she does not know anything about the quality of material used, the
peculiarities of a machine or the local or seasonal needs of the
trade. Employers and managers also quickly recognize when organizers
know whereof they talk. They, like the employés, realize that with
such competent and efficient organizers or business agents they, too,
are on firmer ground, even though they may not always acknowledge it.
To these sound general rules there are exceptions. There are cases
where a man organizer can be invaluable, especially in some great,
even if temporary, crisis. Also, there are in the American labor
movement a few women who possess a genius for organizing on the very
broadest lines. So profound is their sympathy with all their sisters,
so thorough their grasp of general principles, so quick their
perception of details, so intimate their knowledge of human nature and
so sound and cool their judgment that they can be sent far afield
into trades quite foreign to those of which they have had personal
experience, and make a success of it. But such as these are rare and,
when found, to be prized and cherished. The ordinary everyday way of
drawing the women workers into the union and into the labor movement
would be to have in every trade women from that trade at work all
the time organizing their fellow-workers and holding them in the
organization.
When the preliminary difficulties of organization have been met and
overcome, when the new union has been set on its feet or the old one
strengthened, there remains for the girl leader to keep her forces
together.
The commonest complaint of all is that women members of a trade union
do not attend their meetings. It is indeed a very serious difficulty
to cope with, and the reasons for this poor attendance and want of
interest in union affairs have to be fairly faced.
At first glance it seems curious that the meetings of a mixed local
composed of both men and girls, should have for the girls even less
attraction than meetings of their own sex only. But so it is. A
business meeting of a local affords none of the lively social
intercourse of a gathering for pleasure or even of a class for
instruction. The men, mostly the older men, run the meeting and often
are the meeting. Their influence may be out of all proportion to their
numbers. It is they who decide the place where the local shall meet
and the hour at which members shall assemble. The place is therefore
often over a saloon, to which many girls naturally and rightly object.
Sometimes it is even in a disreputable district. The girls may prefer
that the meeting should begin shortly after closing time so that they
do not need to go home and return, or have to loiter about for two or
three hours. They like meetings to be over early. The men mostly name
eight o'clock as the time of beginning, but business very often will
not start much before nine. Then, too, the men feel that they have
come together to talk, and talk they do while they allow the real
business to drag. Of course, the girls are not interested in long
discussions on matters they do not understand and in which they have
no part and naturally they stay away, and so make matters worse, for
the men feel they are doing their best for the interests of the union,
resent the women's indifference, and are more sure than ever that
women do not make good unionists.
Among the remedies proposed for this unsatisfactory state of affairs
is compulsory attendance at a certain number of meetings per year
under penalty of a fine or even losing of the card. (A very drastic
measure this last and risky, unless the trade has the closed shop.)
Where the conditions of the trade permit it by far the best plan is to
have the women organized in separate locals. The meetings of women and
girls only draw better attendances, give far more opportunity for all
the members to take part in the business, and beyond all question form
the finest training ground for the women leaders who inconsiderable
numbers are needed so badly in the woman's side of the trade-union
movement today.
Those trade-union women who advocate mixed locals for every trade
which embraces both men and women are of two types. Some are mature,
perhaps elderly women, who have been trade unionists all their lives,
who have grown up in the same locals with men, who have in the long
years passed through and left behind their period of probation and
training, and to whose presence and active coöperation the men have
become accustomed. These women are able to express their views in
public, can put or discuss a motion or take the chair as readily as
their brothers. The other type is represented by those individual
women or girls in whom exceptional ability takes the place of
experience, and who appreciate the educational advantages of working
along with experienced trade-union leaders. I have in my mind at this
moment one girl over whose face comes all the rapture of the keen
student as she explains how much she has learnt from working with men
in their meetings. She ardently advocates mixed locals for all. For
the born captain the plea is sound. Always she is quick enough to
profit by the men's experience, by their ways of managing conferences
and balancing advantages and losses in presenting a wage-scale or
accepting an agreement. At the same time she is not so overwhelmed by
their superiority, born of long practice in handling such situations,
but that she retains her own independence of judgment and clearness
of vision, and at the fitting moment will rise and place the woman's
point of view before her male co-workers. Oh yes, for herself she is
right, and for the coming woman she is right, too. But the risk is
rather that she and such as she pressing on in their individual
advancement will outstep the rank and file of their sisters at the
present stage while trade unionism among women is still so young a
movement, and one which under the most hopeful circumstances will
have to fulfill for many years the task of receiving, teaching and
assimilating vast numbers of young and quite untrained, in many cases
non-English-speaking girls.
The mixed local for all mixed trades is, I believe, the ultimate
goal which women trade unionists ought to keep in mind. But with the
average girl today the plan does not work. The mixed local does
not, as a general rule, offer the best training-class for new girl
recruits, in which they may obtain their training in collective
bargaining or coöperative effort. To begin with, they are often so
absurdly young that they stand in the position of children put into
a class at school two or three grades ahead of their capacity and
expected to do work for which they have had no preparation through the
earlier grades. Many of the discussions that go on are quite above
the girls' heads. And even when a young girl has something to say and
wishes to say it, want of practice and timidity often keep her silent.
It is to be regretted, too, that some trade-union men are far from
realizing either the girls' needs in their daily work or their
difficulties in meetings, and lecture, reprove or bully, where they
ought to listen and persuade.
The girls, as a rule, are not only happier in their own women's local,
but they have the interest of running the meetings themselves. They
choose their own hall and fix their own time of meeting. Their
officers are of their own selecting and taken from among themselves.
The rank and, file, too, get the splendid training that is conferred
when persons actually and not merely nominally work together for a
common end. Their introduction to the great problems of labor is
through their practical understanding and handling of those problems
as they encounter them in the everyday difficulties of the shop and
the factory and as dealt with when they come up before the union
meeting or have to be settled in bargaining with an employer.
But there are other and broader reasons still why it is women who
should in the main be the leaders and teachers of women in the trade
union, that newest and best school for the working-women. Women have
always been the teachers of the race. It was in the far-back ages with
motherhood as their normal school that primitive women learnt their
profession and handed on to their daughters their slowly acquired
skill. Whenever woman has been left to self-development on her own
lines her achievements have always been in the constructive direction.
Always she has been busy helping to make some young thing grow,
whether the object of her solicitous attention were a wild grass, a
baby, or an art. What does education mean but the drawing forth of
latent qualities? Is not the best teacher the one who calls these
forth? Are not women teachers, trained, wise, and patient, urgently
needed in the labor movement of our day? Just now, when the number of
young girls in industry is so great, the girls need them, we know.
Possibly the men also would be the gainers through their influence.
The labor movement is a constant fight, it is true, but it is also a
school of development. In the near future we hope it will mean to
all workers even more than a discipline, a storehouse of culture, a
provider of joy and of pleasure, of care in sickness, of support in
adversity, and best of all, a preparation for and a hastener on of
that coöperative commonwealth for which more and more of us ever watch
and pray.
The need for the woman organizer admitted, the demand for women
organizers becomes pressing. And where are they to be found? The reply
is that they are not to be found, not yet. If the organizers were
to be obtained such requests would be increased fourfold. But the
material is ready to hand. The born organizer, with initiative,
resource, courage and patience exists in every trade, in every city,
and she comes of every race. But on the one hand she is untrained, and
on the other cannot stop to receive training unless for a little while
she is relieved from the pressing necessity of earning her living.
The problem of how to provide women organizers in response to the
demand for such workers, with its solution, was admirably put by Mrs.
Raymond Robins, in her presidential address before the Fourth Biennial
Convention of the National Women's Trade Union League in St. Louis, in
June, 1913, when she said:
The best organizers without question are the trade-union girls. Many
a girl capable of leadership and service is held within the ranks
because neither she as an individual nor her organization has money
enough to set her free for service. Will it be possible for the
National Women's Trade Union League to establish a training-school
for women organizers, even though in the beginning it may be only a
training-class, offering every trade-union girl a scholarship for a
year?
The course finally outlined included a knowledge of the principles
of trade unionism, and their practical application in field-work, a
knowledge of labor legislation, of parliamentary law, and practice in
writing and speaking.
In the following year, 1914, the League was able to give several
months of training to three trade-union girls. Cordial coöperation
was received from both the University of Chicago and North-western
University. For the present no further students have been received,
because of the need of larger financial resources to maintain classes
in session regularly.
The need for a training-school is attested by the constant demands
for women organizers received at the headquarters of the League from
central labor bodies and men's unions, and by the example of the
thorough training given to young women taking up work in other fields
somewhat analogous. Such a school for women might very well prove in
this country the nucleus of university extension work in the labor
movement for both men and women, similar to that which has been so
successfully inaugurated in Great Britain, and which is making headway
in Canada and in Australia.
At the Seattle Convention of the American Federation of Labor held in
November, 1914, a resolution was passed levying an assessment of one
cent upon the entire membership to organize women. Efforts were mainly
concentrated upon workers in the textile industry, to which special
organizers, both men and women, were assigned. There is no trade
which has worse conditions, and consequently wages and regularity
of employment are immediately affected adversely by any industrial
depression.
Women in the labor movement will have to make their own mistakes
and earn their own experience. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the many
advantages that accrue to women and girls from belonging to an
organization so vital and so bound up with some of our most
fundamental needs, as the trade union. On the very surface it
is evident that in such a body working-women learn to be more
business-like, to work together in harmony, to share loyally the
results of their united action, whether these spell defeat or success.
If they err, they promptly learn of their mistakes from their,
fellow-workers, men or women, from employers, and from their families.
Here, however, is perhaps the place to call attention to one markedly
feminine tendency, which should be discouraged in these early days
lest in process of time it might even gain the standing of a virtue,
and that is the inclination among the leaders to indulge in unlimited
overwork in all their labor activities. Labor men overwork too, but
not, as a rule, to the same degree, nor nearly so frequently as women.
Do not mistake. Women do not fall into this error because they are
trade unionists, or because they are inspired by the labor movement or
by the splendid ideals or by the aspiration after a free womanhood.
No! Trade-union and socialist and suffrage women overwork because they
are women, because through long ages the altruistic side has been
overdeveloped. They have brought along with them into their public
work the habit of self-sacrifice, and that overconscientiousness
in detail which their foremothers acquired during the countless
generations when obedience, self-immolation and self-obliteration were
considered women's chief duties. Personally these good sisters are
blameless. But that does not in the least alter the hard fact that
such overdevotion is an uneconomical expenditure of nervous energy.
When a wiser onlooker, wise with the onlooker's wisdom, urges
moderation even in overwork, there is put forward the pathetic plea,
variously worded:
"So much to do, so little time to do it."
I have never heard that hard-to-be-met argument so well answered as by
a woman physician, who gave these reasons to her patient, one of the
overdevoted ilk.
"Agreed," she said, "there is so much to do that you cannot possibly
do it all, nor the half, nor the tenth, nor the fiftieth part of it.
Furthermore, the struggle is going on for a long, long time, and there
are occasions ahead when your aid will be needed as badly or more
badly than today. And when that hour comes, if you do not take care
of yourself now, you will not be there to furnish the help others
require. Not that I think you are dangerously ill, but I'm reminding
you that, at the rate you are going, your working years, the years
during which your energy and your initiative will last, are going to
be few, so pull up and go slow!
"You are a leader, and you are so, partly at least, because you are a
highly trained person. It has taken many years to train you up to this
pitch of efficiency. You can handle agreements, at a pinch you can
draft a bill. You are a favorite and influential speaker. You are
invaluable in a strike, and you have often prevented strikes. We all
want you to go on doing all these things. Now, tell me, which is
the most valuable to the whole labor movement, a few years of your
activity, or many years?"
That puts the matter in a nutshell.
I do not wish to overlook the fact that there are exceptional
occasions when overwork to the extent of breakdown or even death is
justified, or to have it supposed that I think mere life our most
valuable possession, or that there may not be many a time when truly
to save your life is to lose it. But I repeat that habitual, everyday
overwork, is uneconomical, injurious to the cause we serve, and likely
to lessen rather than heighten the efficiency of the indispensable
leaders when the supreme test comes.
VIII
THE TRADE UNION IN OTHER FIELDS
When we begin! to survey the vast field of industry covered by
different occupations we get the same sense of confusion that comes
to us when we look at an ant-heap. The workers are going hither and
thither, with apparently no ordered plan, with no unity or community
of purpose that we can discover. But those who have given time and
patience to the task have been able to read order even in the chaos of
the ant-hill. And so may we, with our far more complex human ant-hill,
if we will set to work. The material for such a study lies ready to
our hand in bewildering abundance; but to make any practical studies
which shall aid the workers and the thinking public to follow the line
of least resistance in raising standards of wages and of status as
well will be the work of many years and of many minds. Even today
there are some general indications of how the workers are going to
settle their own problems.
Some foreign critics and some critics at home are very severe upon the
backwardness of the labor movement in the United States, and in
these criticisms there is a large element of truth. Yet there is one
difficulty under which we labor on this continent, which these critics
do not take into consideration. That is the primal one of the immense
size of the country, along with all the secondary difficulties
involved in this first one. There has never been any other country
even attempting a task so stupendous as ours--to organize, to make
one, to obtain good conditions for today, to insure as good and better
conditions for tomorrow, for the wage-earning ones out of a population
of over ninety millions spread over three million square miles. And
with these millions of human beings of so many different races, with
no common history and often no common language, this particular task
has fallen to the lot of no other nation on the face of this earth.
Efforts at organization of the people and by the people, are
perpetually being undermined. Capitalism is nationally fairly well
organized, so that there has been all the time more and more agreement
among the great lords of finance, not to trespass on one another's
preserves. But it is not so with the workers. Even in trades where
there exists a formal national organization, there will be towns and
states where it will either be non-existent or extremely weak, so that
workers, especially the unskilled, as they drift from town to town in
search of work, tend to pass out of, rather than into, the union of
their trade. And thus members of every trade organization live in
dread of the inroad into their city or their state of crowds of
unorganized competitors for their particular kind of employment. Why,
if it were Great Britain or Germany, by the time we had organized one
state, we should have organized a whole country.
But the big country is ours, and the big task must be shouldered.
It is only natural that trade-union organization should have
progressed furthest in those occupations which, as industries, are the
most highly developed. The handicrafts of old, the weaving and the
carving and the pottery, have through a thousand inventions become
specialized, and the work of the single operative has been divided
up into a hundred processes. These are the conditions, and this the
environment under which the workers most frequently organize. The
operations have become more or less defined and standardized, and the
operatives are more readily grouped and classified. Also, even amid
all the noise and clatter of the factory, they have opportunity for
becoming acquainted, sometimes while working together, or at the noon
hour, or when going to or coming from work. There are still few enough
women engaged in factory work who have come into trade unions, but the
path has at least been cleared, both by the numbers of men who have
shown the way, and by the increasing independence of women themselves.
Similar reasoning applies to the workers in the culinary trades. These
also are the modern, specialized forms of the old domestic arts of
cooking and otherwise preparing and serving food. The workers, the
cooks and the waitresses, have their separate, allotted tasks; they
also have opportunities of even closer association than the factory
operatives. These opportunities, which may be used among the young
folks to exchange views on the latest nickel show, to compare the
last boss with the present one, may also, among the older ones, mean
talking over better wages and hours and how to get them, and here may
spring up the beginnings of organization.
The number of women organized into trade unions is still
insignificant, compared with those unreached by even a glimmering of
knowledge as to what trade unionism means. The movement will not only
have to become stronger numerically in the trades it already includes.
It must extend in other directions, taking in the huge army of the
unskilled and the semi-skilled, outside of those trades, so as
to cover the fruit-pickers in the fields and the packers in the
canneries, the paper-box-makers, the sorters of nuts and the knotters
of feathers, those who pick the cotton from the plant, as well as
those who make the cotten into cloth. Another group yet to be enrolled
are the hundreds of thousands of girls in stores, engaged in selling
what the girls in factories have made, and still other large groups
of girls in mercantile offices who are indirectly helping on the same
business of exchange of goods for cash, and cash for goods, and who
are just as truly part of the industrial world and of commercial life.
But the pity is that the girl serving at the counter and the girl
operating the typewriter do not know this.
Take two other great classes of women, who have to be considered and
reckoned with in any wide view of the wage-earning woman. These are
nurses and teachers. The product of their toil is nothing that can be
seen or handled, nothing that can be readily estimated in dollars and
cents. But it must none the less be counted to their credit in any
estimate of the national wealth, for it is to be read in terms of
sound bodies and alert minds.