to young men and women. In
that year a national conference of employment managers was held at
Rochester, New York. The discussion revealed a wide range of duties
assigned to managers, including questions of wages, hours, sanitation,
rest rooms, recreational facilities, and welfare work of every kind
designed to make the conditions in mills and factories safer and more
humane. Thus it was evident that hundreds of employers had abandoned the
old idea that they were dealing merely with individual employees and
that their obligations ended with the payment of any wages they saw fit
to fix. In short, they were seeking to develop a spirit of cooeperation
to take the place of competition and enmity; and to increase the
production of commodities by promoting the efficiency and happiness of
the producers.

THE RISE AND GROWTH OF ORGANIZED LABOR

=The American Federation of Labor.=--Meanwhile a powerful association of
workers representing all the leading trades and crafts, organized into
unions of their own, had been built up outside the control of employers.
This was the American Federation of Labor, a nation-wide union of
unions, founded in 1886 on the basis of beginnings made five years
before. At the time of its establishment it had approximately 150,000
members. Its growth up to the end of the century was slow, for the total
enrollment in 1900 was only 300,000. At that point the increase became
marked. The membership reached 1,650,000 in 1904 and more than 3,000,000
in 1919. To be counted in the ranks of organized labor were several
strong unions, friendly to the Federation, though not affiliated with
it. Such, for example, were the Railway Brotherhoods with more than half
a million members. By the opening of 1920 the total strength of
organized labor was put at about 4,000,000 members, meaning, if we
include their families, that nearly one-fifth of the people of the
United States were in some positive way dependent upon the operations of
trade unions.

=Historical Background.=--This was the culmination of a long and
significant history. Before the end of the eighteenth century, the
skilled workmen--printers, shoemakers, tailors, and carpenters--had, as
we have seen, formed local unions in the large cities. Between 1830 and
1860, several aggressive steps were taken in the American labor
movement. For one thing, the number of local unions increased by leaps
and bounds in all the industrial towns. For another, there was