Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/30



The labor movement of the country has recently given increasing attention to the health of its members. A significant development in this field has been the organization of the Workers' Health Bureau on July 1, 1921, to serve organized labor in the field of Health, formed in the belief that trade unions should assume a new function, namely the protection of workers' bodies against the ravages of occupational diseases.

The Bureau acts as an engineering body, studies health destroying processes in the various sections of a trade, analyzes harmful materials, works out a program of health education and builds up on this information a health plan suited to the needs of the particular group of local unions uniting for the work.

The program is to be carried out in each trade union through the establishment of a Health Department, financed and controlled by the union: membership. In other words, this is the application of the cooperative principle to medical science.

The Bureau, with headquarters at Broadway and Eleventh Street, New York City, is supported by yearly affiliation fees from locals joining the Bureau.

A labor union is a business organization, engaged in selling the services of its members for the best price it can get. In the course of that business from time to time it has legal work to be done. Such legal work may be of various sorts, such as advising as to employment contracts, appearing at wage arbitrations, contesting the claim so often made that the unions are conspiracies either in restraint of trade or to serve some other unlawful purpose. Members of labor organizations accused of unlawful acts are entitled to legal defence.

The conscientious lawyer in active practice should be ready to accept retainers from labor organizations for such work and he should be ready to accept them irrespective of what his other clients may think of it. He is a technician and he should be ready to put his technical skill at the service of the unions when called upon. And, moreover, the lawyer who is ready and willing to undertake work of that sort should fit himself for it by learning something about the present condition of the unions and their history and background. Those are subjects which are only just beginning to be taught at a few law schools, yet the lawyer who intends to number labor unions among his clients must know them if he is to do good work.

The law of industrial disputes is at the present time in the process of rapid growth. It is fast being molded by judicial decisions and is becoming a branch of the law more and more important to the community as a whole. Its growth along