On the other hand, a sense of their power has sometimes given leaders of
labor unions a lack of discretion, a truculence and an unreasonable and
unjust attitude. Like the employers, they have been dependent upon
public opinion and after a time public opinion has controlled them.
Probably the greatest evil that stands out from all the good work unions
have done, is the dead level to which they seek to bring the wages of
skilled manual labor. Organized labor insists on making a class and then
having that class receive the same wages, and it does nothing to
encourage individual effort by consenting to the payment of higher wages
to the man of experience, industry and skill than to the mediocre and
lazy. It will in some way have to obviate that difficulty which works
against the cause of labor and the interest of society. Moreover, its
leaders do not discourage, as they should, lawlessness as a means of
achieving their industrial ends. The history of the dynamiters in
California and of the civil war in Colorado shows this.
On the other hand, we find many in the ranks of labor offering the most
effective opposition to the increase in socialism.
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