The Public and Labor Unions
By Editor
Labor Unions.—One does not need to question far or wide to learn the sentiment of the general public regarding labor unions. In conversing with ordinary commonfolk of all sorts on a train the last few days, we were struck with the universal condemnation visited upon the unions in Chicago, over the teamsters' strike. A writer in the Denver News, of May 5, thus expresses it: Why have the people come to despise the very term "labor union?" The feeling seems universal, and is held by the great general public and by probably more than half of the unwilling members of the unions. Statistics show about ten "union" members to every 500 citizens, and this small minority undertakes to rule the rest of us, and if we don't obey exactly and quickly, they slug, throw bricks, shoot, cut, dynamite, boycott, and murder. And yet the general public are not unfriendly to workingmen, nor to the members of the union as men. What they do not like is the trust; and between the trust which robs subtly, gently, by higher prices for beef or Standard oil, and the trust which creates enmity between classes, which mobs, slugs, clubs, stones, brickbats, shoots, and stabs men, because the men do not think that way, the general public prefers the former, and it is not to be wondered at. If all labor unions conducted themselves with the same dignity and honor manifested in that of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, there would be no objection to the union. It is the operation of that principle which demands all, as truly as any trust ever did, which recognizes that non-union workingmen have no rights that union men—or others—are bound to respect, that has turned the general public against labor unions, and for this, labor unions are alone responsible.