Page:Program of the Trade Union Educational League (1927).djvu/4

4

In the attack against Labor, the employers are using not only their special and private weapons (labor spies, company unions, thugs, blacklist, lockout, "welfare" schemes, stock-ownership plans, etc.), but also they control and use the machinery of the Government. This is glaringly illustrated in the use of injunctions, court orders which replace even the ordinary laws which themselves are written in the interests of the employing class, and substitute the arbitrary rule of appointed judges, tools of the employers, in a naked dictatorship of the employing class over the working class. Injunction Law has been buttressed by a system of anti-labor legislation (anti-picketing laws, criminal-syndicalism laws), and special anti-labor institutions (State Cossacks, militia, "industrial" police, industrial courts and commission, etc.), which immediately deprive workers of all civil rights and liberties whenever a dispute with the employing class occurs. Political oppression grows more intense each day. The Government in all its branches acts as the executive arm of the bosses.

For more than five years the unions, instead of making progress, have been losing ground. For the first time in American labor history, a period of high industrial production has been accompanied, not by a strengthening of the labor unions, but by retreat, defeat, loss of membership and militancy. Now with the beginning of industrial depression and renewed assaults by the employers, this threatens to become a disaster and to jeopardize the whole trade union movement.

One of the principal contributing causes for this crisis is the surrender of the official leadership of the trade unions to the employers, and their rejection of a policy of militant struggle. To further their own individual and group interests, they sacrifice the interests of the workers and become tools of the bosses.

The employers have united themselves into ever greater trusts and anti-labor associations; the union officials have divided even more than before the fighting forces of labor (refusal of amalgamation, conducting partial strikes with some unions officially scabbing on the others, as in the 1922 railroad strike, etc.)

The employers have launched company unions, the union officials have replied by making trade union policies similar to company unionism, by adopt-