A CRITICAL VIEW OF AMERICAN LABOR Shari Lee Bunoh "Our task, as Americans, is to strive for social and industrial justice achieved through genuine rule of the people. This is our end purpose." Theodore Roosevelt in his Free Citizen asserted this idea. From infancy to maturity, our nation has nutured this basic concept of justice through the actions its citizens have taken against legislative reforms. Even before the Declaration of Independence skilled artisans joined together in benevolent societies to consider problems of mutual concern and to devise ways and means for their solution. Thus unionism had its beginning in America. However, it was not until the 1850's that the modern union came into being. From crude beginnings the division between the worker and the employer and between labor and management began to take place, and a tendency emerged to build up in skilled trades a distinct and separate laboring class. Thus the basis for a distinct laboring class was laid. Neither labor nor management has become a homogeneous group. More varieties have developed within each group than there are differences between the two. Management has-aa much trouble within its own household as it has with labor and the dissensions in the house of labor are too well advertised to require proof. 16 One of the big problems of business is that the business man is alive and dynamic on matters concerning business interests but static on the matter of labor relations. His complacent view is that, what was good enough twenty years ago is good enough today. There is no sense in trying to circumvent history. Management must realize that labor is no longer the underdog. It is recognized, enjoys legal protection, and swings immense weight on our national life. Unionism must measure up to the challenge of its new power. What applies to business organizations applies to labor organizations: to survive and prosper, they must become more free, more democratic, and more socially minded. They must cease to regard themselves as embattled armies and learn to think of themselves as vital, co-ordinated elements in a complex economic machine. One element cannot survive without the other. The faults of organized labor in America parallel the faults of business. The tendency is to reach out for power, to forget public interest, to overlook the long view in favor of immediate profit. Neither labor nor management has any excuse for looking down on the other from a perch of moral superiority. Both have erred recently, and usually in the same respect. Both have been prone to judge events and policies solely by the test of self-interest. Society as a whole has suffered in consequence and the economic system within which both labor and management have their being is endangered. Organized labor must realize that it is an integral part of the larger whole American capitalism. It has a stake in the policies and practices of management, business has a stake in the policies and practices of labor. One cannot prosper while the other is in distress. Their destinies are intertwined, for labor's interests are management's interests, and management's interests are labor's interests. In the past management has concentrated its attention on products and markets. It gave little time to the human side of business. When that situation was recognized, it was treated in a haughty, patronizing spirit. This attitude 17