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.
In response to the call of the hour there appeared the American Federation of Labor, frequently called in these later days the labor trust.The Federation was first suggested at Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 2, 1881, at a convention called by the Knights of Industry and the Amalgamated Labor Union, two secret societies patterned after the model common at that period.The Amalgamated Union was composed largely of disaffected Knights of Labor, and the avowed purpose of the Convention was to organize a new secret society to supplant the Knights.But the trades union element predominated and held up the British Trades Union and its powerful annual congress as a model.At this meeting the needs of intensive local organization, of trades autonomy, and of comprehensive team work were foreseen, and from the discussion there grew a plan for a second convention.With this meeting, which was held at Pittsburgh in November, 1881, the actual work of the new association began under the name, "The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States of America and Canada."When this Federation learned that a convention representing independent trade unions was called to meet in Columbus, Ohio, in December, 1886, it promptly altered its arrangements for its own annual session so that it, too, met at the same time and place.
Thereupon the Federation effected a union with this independent body, which represented twenty-five organizations.The new organization was called the American Federation of Labor.Until 1889, this was considered as the first annual meeting of the new organization, but in that year the Federation resolved that its "continuity...be recognized and dated from the year 1881."For some years the membership increased slowly; but in 1889 over 70,000 new members were reported, in 1900 over 200,000, and from that time the Federation has given evidence of such growth and prosperity that it easily is the most powerful labor organization America has known, and it takes its place by the side of the British Trades Union Congress as "the sovereign organization in the trade union world." In 1917 its membership reached 91,371,434, with 110 affiliated national unions, representing virtually every element of American industry excepting the railway brotherhoods and a dissenting group of electrical workers.
The foundation of this vast organization was the interest of particular trades rather than the interests of labor in general.
Its membership is made up "of such Trade and Labor Unions as shall conform to its rules and regulations." The preamble of the Constitution states: "We therefore declare ourselves in favor of the formation of a thorough federation, embracing every trade and labor organization in America under the Trade Union System of organization." The Knights of Labor had endeavored to subordinate the parts to the whole; the American Federation is willing to bend the whole to the needs of the unit.It zealously sends out its organizers to form local unions and has made provision that "any seven wage workers of good character following any trade or calling" can establish a local union with federal affiliations.
This vast and potent organization is based upon the principle of trade homogeneity--namely, that each trade is primarily interested in its own particular affairs but that all trades are interested in those general matters which affect all laboring men as a class.To combine effectually these dual interests, the Federation espouses the principle of home rule in purely local matters and of federal supervision in all general matters.It combines, with a great singleness of purpose, so diverse a variety of details that it touches the minutiae of every trade and places at the disposal of the humblest craftsman or laborer the tremendous powers of its national influence.While highly centralized in organization, it is nevertheless democratic in operation, depending generally upon the referendum for its sanctions.It is flexible in its parts and can mobilize both its heavy artillery and its cavalry with equal readiness.It has from the first been managed with skill, energy, and great adroitness.
