WHY TRADE UNIONISTS ARE DISQUIETED.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1012, 30 December 1910, Page 5

WHY TRADE UNIONISTS ARE DISQUIETED.

The "Nation," seeking .to, account for the uiirest among British trade unionists, says that "real wages have'not increased at all in ten ye.irs.' Meanwhile the workmen havo been educated.,- Their standard of life has golie up. They are hot satisfied with things as tliey are, but they look ahead .and see no future for their Class. /,. '' "Then they turn to their unions and their/leaders, and they find their leaders far away, and.sitting in comfortable rooms_ in Manchester or in London, negotiating with-employers on a business basis, converted externally, aiid perhaps in their mental make-up, into middleclass men, remote and Olympian, it may be, in their attitude to the petty troubles in the workshop by Toes or Tyne. For good and for evil, the trade union official, is no longer the workman clad in fustian, \vi?i hands grimy from tho day's work. _ He has become a man of figures and pigeonholes and typewriters, remote, half-estranged from his constituents. This at the best. "How can the organisations that have become national in extent be made e}as-. tio and human enough to keep in touch with the living interest of tho individual member who is smarting under the tyranny of a foreman; or who resents the new rules of his own jw.rticulnr shop? How can trade unionism be saved from its own success? -How can it win back its vital touch with the man in the forge and the factory? That is the problem which the labour troubles of this year have sprung .upon an'unsuspecting world and until it is solved we must look for a Pjji'iod of tho recrudescence of an order of dispute which we had nil hoped to have left behind."