Arbitral tribunals
are created to decide points in dispute, not philosophies of
human action. The businesslike organization of the new trade
union could as readily adapt itself to arbitration as it had
already adapted itself, in isolated instances, to collective
bargaining. A new stage had therefore been reached in the labor
movement.
CHAPTER V. FEDERATION
Experience and events had now paved the way for that vast
centralization of industry which characterizes the business world
of the present era. The terms sugar, coffee, steel, tobacco, oil,
acquire on the stock exchange a new and precise meaning.
Seventy-five per cent of steel, eighty-three per cent of
petroleum, ninety per cent of sugar production are brought under
the control of industrial combinations. Nearly one-fourth of the
wage-earners of America are employed by great corporations. But
while financiers are talking only in terms of millions, while
super-organization is reaching its eager fingers into every
industry, and while the units of business are becoming national
in scope, the workingman himself is being taught at last to rely
more and more upon group action in his endeavor to obtain better
wages and working conditions. He is taught also to widen the area
of his organization and to intensify its efforts. So, while the
public reads in the daily and periodical press about the oil
trust and the coffee trust, it is also being admonished against a
labor trust and against two personages, both symbols of colossal
economic unrest--the promoter, or the stalking horse of financial
enterprise, and the walking delegate, or the labor union
representative and only too frequently the advance agent of
bitterness and revenge.
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