Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/15

 man to be employed on a job in that trade or craft. To a limited extent he follows the same policy with regard to professional men. He visits a doctor when he is sick; he does not argue that the art of doctoring is the perquisite of a manual worker. When unions become involved in litigation, they naturally employ lawyers. But only recently has it occurred to union officials that when they are faced by difficult economic or industrial problems—as they are constantly, owing to the very nature of a union's activity—, when they have controversies with employers in arbitration proceedings or in the open arena, they might go to an economist or an engineer for technical counsel or representation.

The fact that they have not done so before is not the fault of the unions, but of the social scientists and technicians. Economics in the past has not been so much a science derived inductively from observed facts, developing principles on which an art of effective action may be based, as it has been a body of dogmatic doctrine serving the prejudices of one group or another in society. Engineers have usually been merely the instruments of employers in getting more work for less wages out of their employees. But unions have an opportunity to demand a useful science of economics, and a socially-minded and serviceable group of engineers. There are numerous other professions, the members of which are now chiefly employed by corporation and business executives, but which might be equally useful to labor. There are, of course, the newspaper and magazine writers and editors. There are the accountants, who can audit union books and set union records straight to much better effect than volunteer committees. There are the experts in preventive medicine and industrial hygiene, the architects, town planners who might design cooperative housing developments, the psychologists and the students of social and political science who might, if they had explored their own subjects sufficiently, give much aid in the development of social and political strategy. In fact, there is hardly a branch of science or technology which might not in the long run be made useful to any movement of such inclusive nature and large aims as the labor movement.

In the fields of trained technical assistance labor ought to expect much of the intellectual, and by expecting much it will help the sympathetic intellectual to educate himself