Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/101

Rh pipe and steam fitters were members of another 'National Union.' The sausage makers, the packers, the canning department workers, the beef butchers, the cattle butchers, the hog butchers, the bone shavers, etc., each craft group had a separate union. Each union had different rules, all of them not permitting any infringements on them by others. Many of the unions had contracts with the employers. These contracts expired at different dates. Most of the contracts contained the clause of "no support to others when engaged in a controversy with the stockyard companies.

The directory of unions of Chicago shows in 1903, a total of fifty-six different unions in the packing houses, divided up still more in fourteen different national trades unions of the American Federation of Labor.

To relieve this source of trouble, the I. W. W. ask that this collective labor in the meat industry band together into one common union that may act as a unit against employers and "labor fakirs" alike.

In this history of disrupting antagonisms, we watch again the fall of the Knights of Labor. Even the Western Federation of Miners soon refused to pay dues and dropped out to set up again their own local autonomy, thus telling their young offspring that the miners' interests are at least for the present by no means identical with the new and loosely affiliated mass called I. W. W.

Of no less significance is the appearance of another schism, already wider and deeper in Europe, "The True I. W. W." This is the "reformist," "