Some Aspects of the Labor Question
By L. A. S.
Union labor monopoly in one of its worst aspects was exhibited in the city of Chicago in connection with the recent strike of Chicago livery drivers. The livery drivers’ union, says a press description, “not only prevented livery stable teams and private ambulances from going out, but declined to permit hearses. They tried to assault an undertaker at a funeral and on his way from a funeral. They rioted in the shadow of a church. Policemen with clubs acted as pallbearers. The sick could not be moved to the hospitals. The dead were carried to their graves amid hoots and groans. One man sat, armed, by the driver’s side on the seat of an undertaker’s wagon, and so took his wife’s body to the cemetery. A child’s body was taken to the burying ground in a street car. The pickets of the union were stationed at the house while the funeral was in progress.” It is known also that in many cases relatives of deceased persons took care to prevent notice of the death from becoming public, because the strikers read the death notices printed in the daily papers, and immediately posted pickets about the premises where dead persons were known to be. Thus by one act after another these labor trusts are making plain the fact that no respect for grief, no regard for any circumstances which may entitle one to consideration from his fellow beings, or for any rights, however sacred, is to be allowed to stand before the assumed right of these organizations to dictate to all laboring men in all matters pertaining to the right to work, and to deprive the public at any time of services upon which they depend for the comforts and necessities of life. As the New York Sun observes: “The open grave is as forbidden as the open shop, and the indignation which seems to seethe in some illogical persons, probably with ‘capitalistic’ sympathies, at the thoroughness of the Chicago proceedings, is out of place. Those drivers have the courage of their convictions under any circumstances, and at every cost to the inferior, unorganized, and outlawed part of the community.” While this strike was in progress in Chicago, there was given in New York City a dinner at which prominent representatives of capital and labor were present, in honor of the executive committee of the National Civic Federation. The president of the New York Building Trades Employers’ Association made a speech in which, says the Sun, he created a serious disturbance among the labor leaders present by declaring: “I don’t believe we have any more right to ask a man if he is a member of No. 18,000, A. F. of L., before we give him a job than we have to inquire whether he is a Catholic or a Protestant, a Mason, or a Knight of Columbus.” And when tests are imposed on individuals, as they now are, which are as contrary to right and justice as it would be to impose religious tests, will it be at all strange if the time soon comes when religious tests are imposed, and individuals are asked whether they are Protestants or Catholics, or whether they are Seventh-day Adventists or not? All these things point to the coming of that final test which will distinguish between the worshipers of the true God and those who worship the “beast” and receive his “mark.” That time can not now be far away.