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Strikes simply defer the production from one season to another.
Production in the aggregate of an entire year has never yet been diminished by a strike.
Organized workers seek to reduce strikes by being the better prepared for them.
Strikes of unorganized or newly organized workers always arouse the greatest bitterness on both sides.
The employer who has been master of all he surveys looks upon his employes as servile servants, from whom the slightest request or protest is taken to be an attack upon his prerogative and privilege. To him it is dictation, which he resents in the most autocratic fashion.
The unorganized or newly organized workers have always looked upon themselves as entirely impotent, and therefore unable to secure redress for any wrongs which may have been inflicted upon them. Their comparatively low condition and sufferings have made them desperate; and when in their unity a new found power dawns upon them, the situation is completely changed, and they regard their employers as powerless to resist any demand, and themselves as almighty.
After the first contest, both have learned a lesson; and if the workers maintain their organization, they find that neither side possesses all the power nor all the responsibility. They have mutual respect for each other, and enter into mutual agreements.
The best organized workers, those who are better prepared to enter into strikes or to resist lockouts, are those who have least occasion to engage in them, and yet are the greater beneficiaries from modern civilization in the form of higher wages, shorter hours of daily labor, and Sunday rest. They attain a higher plane of morality, economic, political and social independence.
Thousands of agreements reached, the many more thousands of strikes averted through organization, are lost sight of by the sophists and superficial observers, and strikes regarded as the sum total, the Alpha and Omega of the labor movement, when, as a matter of fact, as already indicated, strikes are a few of the failures to agree on terms upon which industry shall be continued.
While some may assert that the strike is a relic of barbarism,
