Page:George Henry Soule - Recent Developments in Trade Unionism (1921).pdf/6

 gressed far enough so that automatic processes had replaced the skilled mechanic with workers who are sometimes called "semi-skilled," due to the fact that they do not require a long period of apprenticeship to learn their trade.

Perhaps the greatest outstanding fact in the history of British labor during the last thirty years has been the organization of the great masses of the unskilled and semi-skilled. The dock workers, general laborers, transport workers of all sorts (including truckmen, street railway and busmen, expressmen, longshoremen, etc.) gas workers, track laborers on the railroads, the lower grades of miners, all these and others have become union members during the past generation, to say nothing of the great majority of semi-skilled in manufacturing industries. Their coming into the ranks of organized labor has led to many other changes. First and foremost, it has made the unions representative not merely of a small privileged class of workmen, but of the great majority of all workers in the nation.

A much more recent tendency, coming to the fore during and after the war, has been the organization of clerical, office and professional workers of all sorts. Bookkeepers and stenographers, bank clerks, salespeople, teachers, newspaper men, employees of the government—such "black-coated"