to develop their unions into job trusts. They concentrate in certain industries easy to organize, such as the Electrical Workers' Union, confining itself principally to the building trades; the Metal Trades Unions, specializing on the railroads, while they neglect other industries "hard" to organize.
Even when driven into organizing campaigns by pressure, the right wing bureaucrats refuse to lend them real support. At best they then only trail along. Their policy is one of sabotage. They are affected by a hundred petty craft considerations, and they raise innumerable technical and other objections in order to hinder the organizing work. Often they co-operate with the employers to prevent organization. They usually will accept mass organization if it is "handed to them on a silver platter" by the left wing organizers, but they will not go out and fight for it. They are lazy, unimaginative, corrupt and petty bourgeois. The left wing must consider and deal with them as a major obstacle in the work of organizing the unorganized.
Stimulating the Trade Unions Into Action.
It would be a grievous error, however, to conclude from the foregoing that the right wing can block the organization of the unorganized by the trade unions and that nothing can be done in these bodies. A whole series of organization campaigns by the trade unions belie this pessimism. The impulse of the labor movement to expand into a real mass and class organization is very powerful. Where there is an insistent and intelligent demand from the combined left wing and progressives, the right wing can literally be driven into organizing campaigns. This is what was done to Gompers and the presidents of the various internationals in the steel and packing industry campaigns. And on the railroads the more progressive elements were responsible for the organization of hundreds of thousands of the unorganized during the war period.
The right wing bureaucrats find it exceedingly difficult to fight directly against the demand for organization. Their method is mostly indirect. They commonly adopt organization resolutions, presented by the more progressive elements, and then sabotage them to death. They do lip service to the organization of the unorganized and then prevent it in practice. The American
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