Page:Program of the Trade Union Educational League (1927).djvu/9

 Rh labor banks, investment companies, insurance corporations, land speculations, etc. ("trade union capitalism"), has been a source of corruption and degeneration of the trade unions. Very often these schemes turn out to be the purest swindle and robbery, despoiling the workers of their hard-earned savings (as in the Engineers' Bank, "open shop" coal mine, and Florida land swindle); and in all cases they tend to degenerate the unions into business institutions, union officials are transformed into contented bankers and business magnates; the unions are entangled into joint operations with capitalist enemies, and thoroughly corrupted. The T. U. E. L. exposes these frauds; fights for either their liquidation completely, or their separation from the trade unions and reorganization upon genuine workers' cooperative lines. True workers' cooperatives must be carefully distinguished from "trade union capitalism"; cooperatives must be supported and developed, but trade union capitalism must be combatted energetically.

(d) The so-called "New Wage Policy" of the A. F. of L. is a theoretical justification for the surrender-policy and class collaboration of the officialdom, and the best example of the anti-labor theoretical foundation of reactionary leadership, maintaining that the interests of workers and employers are identical, and that wage increases are to be secured through increasing productivity, obtained through cooperation with the unions in production. How false and destructive is this theory, may be readily seen by examination of the mining industry, where productivity has been raised to four times that of Europe, and where, instead of being able to secure wage increases the union is fighting to retain the Jacksonville scale. Partly as a result of this fact, the miners' union is in immediate danger of destruction. This increased productivity has. rendered "superfluous" 300,000 miners who would otherwise find steady employment; this condition, accepted by the union officialdom in a most cowardly and treacherous manner, has given the coal operators the weapons they required for a successful "open shop" drive. The same process goes on in other industries. The theory of class collaboration, such as expressed in the "new wage policy," must be exposed and combatted as abandonment of effective struggle for better conditions, and as treachery to the labor movement.

(a) This is the principal task of the labor movement at the present time. Less than 3½ million workers,