THE TRUST EVIL | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 23, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 51.

THE TRUST EVIL.

THE enormous greed of the capital trusts, and their tendency toward oppression of the people, are so generally recognized that the people’s representatives in Congress and in some States have enacted laws to restrain their operations. But, being a wealthy class, the trusts are able, to some extent, to withstand the execution of the law. The force to which the people look for practical restraint of these capital trusts are the independent producers. But the trusts undertake to destroy the business of these independent manufacturers by temporarily cutting prices or boycotting their customers. The independent establishments that have not the capital to withstand this opposition, must necessarily curtail expenses or fail.

Now come the labor unions with demands for higher wages, and an additional boycott on the hard-pressed establishments if they do not yield, or if they employ other laborers who are willing to work for what the independent manufacturers can afford to pay. The capital trusts that make fortunes oftentimes out of the sale of "watered stock," can afford to pay the union demands. They expect, when the independent operators are compelled to give up business or join them, that they will make up their temporary loss in a rise of prices. Thus it is that the union’s labor trust practically helps the capital trusts to crush their opposition. The trusts all logically help one another in the end.

A practical application of this principle was worked out in Chicago recently when there was an agreement between union teamsters and employers to carry out a reign of extortion on all who must needs have their services. This illustrates a fact which will become patent ere long, that no trust can be depended upon to counteract the trust principle. In the near future the labor trust will be hand-in-glove with the capital trust, and the masses of the people will be the sufferers. In the near future the people will find that, in being cajoled into boycotting non-union institutions and non-union men and women, they will have been riveting their own fetters.

Union labor is, in principle, a labor trust, and must inevitably go the way of all trusts, altho, unwittingly to most of its members, it is being gradually drawn under the control of capital, and is fast becoming a factor of capital’s oppression of labor. Instead of being the benefactor of the laboring class, as it assumes to be now, it will soon bloom out as an auxiliary of capital’s autocratic reign. It is fast becoming capital’s chief executioner in the destruction of small competitive producers, which are the real protection of the people against the extortions of capitalists greed. Let the people take note of this, and be on their guard against plausible deception.