LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 159
above their allegiance to fellow unionists or to labor. They consider that their contract to stand by labor comes first and takes precedence over all contracts made with capital/^^ Allegiance to the union is placed on a par with national patriotism. No contract obligation is allowed to stand in opposition to group welfare and group requirements. This reYolutionary attitude is assumed not only by industrial unions but by organizations of the familiar type of trade unions. The viewpoint of ^ese unionists is similar to that of a nation which is ready to tear up a treaty when confronted by what is considered to be national neces- sity. Class lines are often drawn as taut as are national lines in times of stress and strain.
On the other hand, conservative railway brotherhoods are ready in case of a strike to counsel a policy of non-interference. But the mem- bers of the railway brotherhoods who are conservative and who are very explicit in stating that they do not intend to disturb the present industrial order, are in spite of external characteristics not very dis- similar from the members of radical unions who are extremely bitter in their denunciations of existing conditions, and who are revolu- tionary." The difiEerence between the viewpoints of these two classes of unions is not to be explained by resorting to some more or less occult statement of group or social psychology. But it is to be found by analyzing the different economic environments in which the groups work and live, and the different kinds of economic and social pressure to which the groups are subjected. The members of a railway brother- hood occupy a strategic position. It is very difficult to obtain reason- ably efficient substitutes in case of a strike. But a union of unskilled men would perforce be obliged to take another stand or suffer their places to be filled by strikebreakers. Put the railway brotherhoods face to face with the menace of the green hand, or with a hostile em- ployer who is nibbling at wages and who refuses to consider granting a standard wage, eliminate their systems of insurance, put the members of these brotherhoods in the position of many another group of wage- earners, and the present much-approved set of ideals will rapidly be re- placed by others not so conservative.
Subject the railway brotherhood to the dangers which are and have been for several years confronting certain radical old-line trade unions, and their conservatism and the emphasis now placed upon the sacred- ness of contract vrill disappear with celerity. The early history of that much maligned organization, the Western Federation of Miners, furnishes a fine illustration of social transformation. The metal miners of the far west were
confronted hj a quickly developed and aggressive class of wealthy mine owners. Control of the mines was suddenly centralized; individual bargaining became futile; the separate and disunited units of labor were sweated. The miners felt
^Marot, American Labor Unions, p. 14.
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