Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Railroaders' Next Step, Amalgamation (1922).djvu/60

Rh that a modern business concern would not tolerate for a second.

A general amalgamation woujld speedily straighten all that out. The work of administration would be unified and systematized throughout. With the departmental system in effect, vice-presidents, chairman and organizers would look after several (as many as circumstances permitted) categories of workers—for everyone who has had contact with industrial unions such as the United Mine Workers knows how ridiculous is the current craft union notion that an official can represent and attend to only one trade, his own, efficiently. The saving in energy and money from this one item would be great. Moreover, the railroaders' affairs would be much better taken care of, and many organizers would be rendered available to unionize the vast armies of non-union workers employed in the independent railroad equipment plants and on the industrial railroads.

Additional financial economies would result from the new convention system. The present order of things is ruinously extravagant. Each of the sixteen organizations holds its own convention at enormous expense. With often as high as two or three thousand local union delegates in attendance (most of whom look upon such affairs as mere vacation trips) the cost runs from $100,000 to $500,000 apiece. The natural result of such absurdities is that conventions are becoming fewer and fewer. But with a general industrial union, basing its convention representation upon the system amalgamation instead of the local union, there would be only a few hundred delegates in attendance, and they would be there for business. National assemblies could be held annually for a fraction of what it now costs for the mass craft gatherings, misnamed conventions.

From the standpoint of the workers' interests there are no valid objections to the amalgamation we propose. The bewhiskered contention that the various crafts of skilled