TRADE UNIONS PLAY SMALL PART IN U.S.A.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 136, 30 August 1927, Page 16

TRADE UNIONS PLAY SMALL PART IN U.S.A.

AN OPPORTUNISTS’ LAND Organised labour plays a very small part in the industrial and political life of America. To-day out of a total population of 120,000,000, less than 4,000,000 belong to labour unions. At the last elections Labour failed to carry a single State. SJPEAKING on the question of Labour in U.S.A., at a public lecture in the Auckland University last evening, Ur. Carter Goodrich, of Michigan University. gave two principal reasons for the failure of organised labour to assume the proportions it had reached in many other lands—the large influx of immigration, and, in the earlier times, outlet for the people on the frontier with its free land and opportunities for the independence of the Individual. "lie end of the frontier days had been reached, and immigration was now controlled, but other factors have now arisen to check the advancement of Unionism. The present Federation of American Labour was formed in 1885 with the object of replacing many small organisation by one powerful whole. Yet. to-day, for the first time in its history during a period of prosperity, it has failed to show any appreciable increase in numbers. The I.W.W. movement represents only about one per cent of American labour. The country districts even now contain about half of the electors. Scientific management is now one of the great factors standing in the way of Unionism. Mass production has gone a long way to eliminate the craftsman by depriving certain sections of something in common to strive for. Many devices have been evolved to give the men incentive for increased effort. Workers are also encouraged to become stock-holders in the factories. To-day over 500,000 workers in U.S.A. have become shareholders in the businesses to which they are attached. Various schemes which aim to give the worker some say in the management of the factory and of his own affairs are also operated with a certain amount of success. Opportunism rather than Socialism is the policy of the American worker to-day, said Dr. Goodrich. The workers are not so much class-conscious as wage-conscious. To-day the States are as far away from trades unionism as ever they have been. Whether the workers are prepared to give way indefinitely to the most paternal of employers remains to be seen/