Another effect of the growing size of business units is to give the workers less personal acquaintance with each other.  When they are unorganized they have less unity, common opinion, and power than the workers in the old-fashioned shop with its close personal acquaintance and ready interchange of views.  In the wilderness of a great modern factory a worker may be unknown in name and interests to the man touching elbows with him.  Moreover, in America, differences in nationality and in speech among immigrant workers often effectively prevent a common feeling of their interests and assertion of them.  There is an analogy between these conditions and the political conditions that early led simple democracies to give way to representative governments.  So long as a community is small and men know each other personally, popular government may exist without complex machinery, but when numbers become larger, public opinion can be concentrated and made effective only by delegating the functions to elected representatives.

Sec. 3. #Functions of labor organizations.# Out of these conditions have grown the various kinds of labor organizations.  Their first object is to maintain and increase wages.  Closely connected with this is the remedying of various abuses in respect to methods of payment, measurement of the output, and conditions of work.  Almost cooerdinate with the aim of higher wages of recent years has been that of the shorter work day.  Labor leaders have frequently asserted when the two demands have been made together, that a reduction of hours is the more desirable.  Better conditions of safety and sanitation in their work were not the first thought of laborers when they organized.  As a result of habit and ignorance (widely prevalent at that time) they were remarkably unconcerned about this matter.  Reforms in this direction at the outset had to come largely from sympathetic observers, the “philanthropists,” often described as sentimentalists.  But the modern, more enlightened, labor movement has better ideals and policies in respect to the safety, sanitation, and decency of the working places.

Labor organizations have also secondary objects of very great importance.  They are nearly always in some measure mutual-benefit associations, and provide in varying degrees insurance against accident, sickness, death, or lack of employment.  All unions in a measure serve their members as employment bureaus, and some make this am important feature.  Through trade-papers, correspondence, traveling members, and in meetings, information is exchanged regarding conditions of employment in various parts of the country.  Labor organizations by means of their discussions and through their special periodicals are a strong educational force in matters political and economic.  The local labor organizations often come to be the center of the social activities and interests of many of their members, and even of all the members of their families.  The organizations thus serve the functions of social clubs, of literary societies, and of civic centers for their members.