INTRODUCTION
xvii
guishes five types of unionism (not to mention sub-vari
ants) which differ among themselves in aims, methods, and
attitude toward existing institutions. Business unionism,
accepting the wage system as it is, seeks the best obtain
able terms of employment for its own membership. Its
method is collective bargaining supplemented by mutual in
surance and occasional resort to strikes ; its outlook is that
of the craft or trade, its aims are somewhat narrowly
economic. The railway brotherhoods furnish the stock il
lustration, though the type is dominant in the American
Federation of Labor as well. Uplift unionism accepts,
along with the wage system, the whole existing social
order. Its mission is the diffusion of leisure-class culture
and bourgeois virtues among the workers. Mutual insur
ance is its main function and homiletics its preoccupation.
There is no representative of the pure type—unless the
Woman’s Trade Union League be accepted as such—but
there is a strong infusion of uplift idealism in most unions
that are dominated by the business animus. Revolutionary
unionism avowedly aims at the overthrow of the extant
socio-economic order by and for the working class. Its
two variants—socialistic and quasi-anarchistic—are suffi
ciently represented by the Detroit and Chicago organiza
tions of the I. W. W. 1 Predatory unionism practices se
cret, rather than open, violence. It is lawless, and in so far
anarchistic, but it professes no far-reaching philosophy, nor
does it aim at anything beyond the immediate economic ad
vantage of its own membership. When this ruthless policy
is a counsel of despair, the continuation of a bitter struggle
which has gone against the union and the practical answer
to a policy of extermination on the part of employers,
1 Professor Hoxie cites the Western Federation of Miners as
a socialistic union. But though the official program of this
union is a synopsis of the Communist Manifesto, its actual
methods in later years are more nearly of the ordinary business
type.
