SOURCES OF MODERN INDUSTRIAL CONFLICTS :
earner’s existence, they still exert their strongest appeal.® Changing
with the business cycle, labor’s tactics have been variously defensive
or offensive, in the latter case acquiring momentum leading to de-
mands for a higher plane of living to include improved social as well
as economic advantages. The growing power of financial interests,
consolidation of independent concerns, and integration of once sepa-
rate industries through the “trust” movement, have necessitated a
multitude of forms of unions and interrelations among them not
seemingly predicated upon either sound or consistent principles.
Like business organizations, their behavior has been opportunistic;
and to a somewhat greater degree than most successful business en-
terprises, institutional inertia, resulting partly from their democratic
constitution, has hampered their efforts to effect prompt and adequate
adjustment to the rapidly altering industrial situation with which
it is their task to cope. Consequently their structural heritage and
resulting habits have made unions insitutions for conflict rather than
for production. They have been designed to fight often against
odds. This fact has determined their weapons and their tactics;
and it has also selected their leaders.”
Offsetting labor organizations there have arisen employers’ as-
sociations, likewise designed to defend their members against attacks
from unions likely to jeopardize the operation of their establish-
ments. Some of these organizations have become negotiatory or
mediatory, but most have remained, or have become belligerent.?
Each side in the numerous controversies between organized employers
and organized employees has had reason to regard its position as
defensive. Individual workers and individual employing concerns
unaffiliated with the organization of their class have been buffeted
8 Cf. Commons, J. R., “The Opportunity of Management,” in Commons,
Industrial Government, 267-8; also Tannenbaum, Frank, The Labor Movement,
Ch, 1.
7 Cf. Catchings, Waddill, “Our Common Enterprise,” Atlantic Monthly, 129:
218-229 (Feb., 1922), giving a characterization of contemporary American union-
ism as seen by an investment banker who is a member of the firm of Goldman,
Sachs & Company, a director of several large industrial corporations, and a lec-
turer on labor relations and industrial finance at the Harvard Graduate School
of Business Administration.
® Bonnett, C. E., Employers’ Associations in the United States, pp. 3-33.
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