Page:William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon and Earl Browder - Trade Unions in America.djvu/3



HE trade union movement of the United States and Canada contains many well-defined species of unionism. These may be classified as follows: Petty bourgeois liberal, socialist, Communist, syndicalist, nationalist, and Catholic.

The petty-bourgeois liberal are the most typically American in character. They comprise the vast bulk of the whole movement, including almost all of the unions affiliated to the American Federation of Labor, as well as such important independent organizations as the four railroad brotherhoods. These unions have very little social outlook. They are engaged in a day-by-day struggle to improve conditions under the capitalist system. They not only have no new social system in mind, but they strongly repel all revolutionary ideas. When charged with actually aiming to perpetuate wage slavery, they reply hypocritically, in the words of Samuel Gompers that they seek the maximum improvement of the conditions of the workers, and that "there is nothing so lofty that the workers may not aspire to it," which means in practice the support of capitalism. Their inbred policy is the collaboration of classes, except that they refuse even to recognize that any real classes exist.

The socialist unions are located mostly in the needle trades. The five principal unions in that industry number about 300,000 members. They are made up overwhelmingly of foreign-born workers. They are officially dominated by the socialist party, and especially by the