a)  Tannenbaum's Account of the Origin and Nature of Trade Unions⤒🔗

In his important book, The True Society, A Philosophy of Labor, Frank Tannenbaum argues that trade unionism is the "counter-revolution" both to the Industrial Revolution and to the liberal and laissez faire philosophy of economic individualism and the right of each man to fend for himself. He begins his work with these striking words:

Trade-unionism is the conservative movement of our time. It is the counter-revolution. Unwittingly, it has turned its back upon most of the political and economic ideas that have nourished western Europe and the United States during the last two cen­turies. In practice, though not in words, it denies the heritage that stems from the French Revolution and from English liberalism. It is also a complete repudiation of Marxism … In tinkering with the little things – hours, wages, shop conditions and security in the job – the trade union is rebuilding our industrial society upon a different basis from that envisioned by the philosophers, econo­mists and social revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹

Briefly Tannenbaum's view is this: industrialization and the fac­tory system completed the destructive process that began with the enclosure acts in Britain and emigration to the United States from European peasant communities, by which everything that gave the mass of mankind a sense of belonging to a community was lost. In this intolerable situation the formation of trade unions was not a considered policy, but the inevitable outcome of man's need to belong to a group, and the only group to which he could belong was that related to his job. He writes:

Thus the social atomization resulting from the payment of an individual money wage was in time to be defeated by the fusing of men together functionally, and this functional coalescence became the firm foundation upon which the trade union grew, and which, in fact, made it inevitable.

The original organizer of the trade union movement is the shop, the factory, the mine and the industry … The union is the spontaneous grouping of individual workers thrown together functionally. It reflects the moral identity and psychological unity men always discover when working together, because they need it and could not survive without it … The theory which insisted that labor was a commodity like any other made collective action the only means of asserting the moral status of the individual. The trade union was the visible evidence that man is not a commodity, and that he is not sufficient unto himself … In terms of the indi­vidual, the union returns to the worker his "society." It gives him a fellowship … and life takes on meaning once again because he shares a value system common to others.²

As members of a local spinning or weaving association in a mill town, men recreated for themselves a "status" that they had once enjoyed in the old manorial village or town guild. Later, the power of organized labor was discovered, but this arose because trade unions existed.

At first trade unions were opposed by the vested interests of capitalism in Britain, Canada, and America. Associations of men were considered to be contrary to the "natural order" and so they were opposed with all the means at the disposal of those in authority. Unions were thus considered to be in "restraint of trade" and declared to be illegal in England by the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, and in America in 1867 a judge ruled that the actions of a labor union were "an unwarranted interference with the conduct of the employer's business … In the natural possession of things, each man acting as an individual, there would be no coercion. It is simply not the right of workingmen to control the business of another."³

Only gradually, after much strife, was the workers' right to form associations recognized in Britain and North America. In 1871 the British Parliament passed the Trade Unions Act, which gave the labor movement protection at common law and allowed registration with friendly societies. A further act passed in 1875 allowed "peaceful picketing and excluded from indictment as a conspiracy any agreement or combination to take any action in furtherance of a trade dispute unless such an action by an individual would have been punishable as a crime." This measure meant that, at long last, the unions had become recognized, if rather grudgingly, as an essential social institution. In 1906 the Trade Disputes Act was passed under which, among other things, the unions could not be sued for dam­ages arising out of an act committed by or for them. In 1913 they were allowed to devote funds to political purposes. In America full legal recognition of the labor movement did not come until July, 1935, with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, otherwise known as the Wagner Act. Its enactment marked a major change in governmental policy. Although there had been periods in the past when the Federal Government had revealed a favourable attitude toward labor, the passage of the Wagner Act revealed not only governmental favor but a willingness to form a partnership with labor.

The Wagner Act provided for the establishment of a new National Labor Relations Board of three experts empowered to supervise and enforce the principle that employees had the "right to self-organization, to form, join, or to assist labor organizations to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection." To carry out this principle, the act stipulated that representatives of the majority of workers in a bargaining unit should have the power to speak for the whole. The board was empowered to determine what was the appropriate bargaining unit through supervised elections. It was also given authority to prohibit "unfair" employer practices: interference with employees in the exercise of guaranteed rights; support of company unions; use of hiring and firing to encourage membership in a company union; refusal to bargain collectively with the representatives of the employees.⁴

According to Tannenbaum every trend of modern industry accentuates man's need to acquire status in his working group; it is intolerable to be one of 50,000 "workers" employed by some great corporation. But he does not think it is an individual status. The theory of human equality, which produced the French Revolution and inspired so much English liberal thought, became meaningless with the factory system. The trade unionist's status is not something personal to himself, but status conferred through membership in his union. Such a power to confer status is derived from the modern union's power of collective bargaining and legal right to enforce membership as a condition of employment. He writes:

As long as the union can limit the number of workers it will admit and insist upon membership as a condition of receiving or keeping a job, it can control the workers within the industry. The courts, under the common law, have upheld the right of the unions to exclude new members on the grounds that they are voluntary associations. But they are voluntary associations with compulsive powers over both the employer and the worker. They are, in fact, private lawmaking bodies whose rules affect the lives of millions of human beings and thousands of industrial plants. This is evidenced by the more than fifty thousand collective labor agreements existing in the country. The unions that sign these contracts acquire an influence over the activities of their members which in time circumscribes their daily lives and redefines the privileges of men who, under the law, are equal to each other. Without intent or plan, the trade union movement is integrating the workers into what in effect amounts to a series of separate social orders. It is re-creating a society based upon status and destroying the one we have known in our time – a society based upon contract.

If membership in a union is essential to an opportunity to work, and if every union has rules of admission, apprenticeship, dues, initiation fees, promotion, wages, retirement funds, and social benefits, then every union becomes in effect a differentiated order within the community endowing its own members with rights and immunities, shared only among themselves. Moreover, a member finds it increasingly difficult to leave his union, because the penalties for desertion are severe. These penalties include the loss of a job, the impossibility of securing other employment in the same industry, the loss of seniority and possible promotion, and the surrender of accumulated retirement, sickness, and old age benefits. A new body of rights and disciplines, which greatly change the substance of a free society, has come into being. A single bargaining agency collects dues (its own form of taxation) from the worker, without his consent, through the check off, and has enforceable union security provisions so that the worker must end by being a member of the union. In the spread of such industry-wide agreements we have the marking of a new social design in which status rather than contract is the governing rule.⁵

Civil courts in Britain, Canada, and the United States have been dealing with an increasing number of cases where the expulsion or exclusion of a worker by a trade union has indeed threatened his livelihood because of the practice known sometimes as the closed shop and sometimes as compulsory trade unionism. This was an important element in the case of Rookes v. Barnard. Rookes was a draftsman employed in the B.O.A.C. design office at London Airport. He had belonged to a trade union, but resigned because he was dissatisfied with its policies. The union was very anxious to preserve a closed shop in the design office and tried, without success, to persuade Rookes to re-join. So the union officials told B.O.A.C. that unless he was removed from his job the other men working in the design office would come out on strike.

A strike would have been a breach of contract by each of the men who took part in it, since a special agreement existed by which the union had undertaken that no strikes would take place, and this undertaking had been made a condition of every employee's individual contract. Nevertheless the union officials threatened a strike, and in the face of the threat B.O.A.C. gave way. They gave Rookes notice, and for a long time afterwards he was out of work.

Rookes brought an action against the three union officials – including the local branch chairman, Mr. Barnard – who had been most prominent in securing his dismissal.

Sachs J. ruled for the plaintiff by ruling that the defendants had combined to threaten to break contracts, which he regarded as an unlawful act constituting the tort of intimidation. Since it was admitted that the acts complained of were done in furtherance of a trade dispute, it was also necessary to decide that they were unprotected by sections one and three of the 1906 Trade Disputes Act.

Section one protects acts done in furtherance of trade disputes unless they would be actionable if done by one person. Sachs J. ruled that the tort of intimidation was such an act. Section three says acts furthering a trade dispute are not actionable "only" on the grounds that they constitute an inducement to breach of contract, "or" because they are an interference with the trade, business, or employment of another person. Sachs J. decided that since the acts complained of were unlawful on the additional grounds that they amounted to intimidation, section three afforded no protection.

The Court of Appeal reversed this decision, and Rookes appealed to the House of Lords for redress. The House of Lords reversed the decision of the Court of Appeal and accepted the arguments of Sachs J. in the lower court, and decided that the union officials had used unlawful means and that Rookes was entitled to damages. Lord Reid, who gave the leading judgment, said:

Threatening a breach of contract may be a more coercive weapon than threatening a tort, particularly when the threat is directed against a company or corporation…⁶

In a more general way one might say that just as society cannot exist unless there are rules which forbid the use of violence, so it is also necessary that there should be rules to enforce the keeping of promises, and that breaches of contract should be regarded as wrongful. In principle, therefore, it does not seem unreasonable to say that people should not use threats to break their contracts as a means of causing loss.

At present it is impossible to estimate precisely how far this judgment may affect the right to use strike action to enforce the closed shop, but it depends largely on how far strikers avoid its effects by giving legal notice to terminate their contracts of employment. If – as has been thought up to now – the usual period of one week's notice will normally be sufficient, the effect will not be very drastic. If, however, some of the other obiter dicta were to be followed, all strikes in breach of procedure, and even some that were not, would be involved.

The trade unions in Britain are now demanding a revision of trade union law to protect their right to strike. It seems likely that legislation will in fact soon be passed by the new Labor Government to safeguard the position of the unions. But the importance of Rookes v. Barnard is that for all ordinary purposes the law will remain as the House of Lords has decided. Outside the field of industrial relations people will still not be able to use threats to break their contracts as a means of causing loss to others.

The restriction of a worker's freedom to choose whether or not he wishes to belong to a union, taken sometimes to the point of persecution as in the case Huntly v. Thornton, has aroused much public anxiety. Yet the British trade unions, like their American counterparts, are equally anxious to preserve the practice of the closed shop, claiming wherever they can claim that it is a legitimate and necessary device in their efforts to protect their members.

b)  The Arguments for and against the Closed Shop←⤒🔗

In his important work, The Closed Shop in Britain, W. E. J. McCarthy deals with the practice of the closed shop at length. He begins by dismissing some of the quibbling definitions which the unions themselves apply to the practice in its varying degrees, when they describe some of the milder applications, for example, as "100 percent trade unionism." His own all-embracing definition is:

a situation in which employees come to realize that a particular job is only to be obtained and retained if they become and remain members of one of a specified number of trade unions.⁷

Within this, he recognizes various types of situations, such as that where an employer is free to recruit workers provided that they subsequently join the union; that where the employer must choose among existing members; that where the worker must first join the union before he can obtain a job; and that where the union itself supplies the required workers … His statistics show that about 3,760,000 workers in Britain are subject to the closed shop in one or another of its forms – that is, about one in six. Most of them are in the manual occupations. So far from the closed shop being on the decline, as some students have supposed, it is in fact increasing:

The practice is not an historical relic, affecting a small minority of trade unionists; it is an increasingly common contemporary phenomenon. Yet the non-unionists' position is not equally intolerable throughout industry. The practice has not been pursued with similar vigor wherever the habit of organization has become settled and accepted.⁸

McCarthy then analyzes where and why the closed shop is likely to develop as a union practice, the most usual reasons being to protect craft status or to maintain wages and other conditions where a proportion of the labor employed is casual. Speaking of the functions of the closed shop he suggests that it is used (1) to increase and maintain the numerical strength of the union, (2) to enhance the union's internal strength by enabling it to exercise discipline over its members, by threatening exclusion of all members who do not obey the union's rules, customs, and leadership, and (3) to use the exclusion threat to force would-be entrants to obtain prior acceptance by the union. Summarizing his own argument regarding factors affecting demands for the closed shop, he writes:

The closed shop pattern cannot be explained simply by reference to its relative disadvantages to employers, or in terms of union solidarity. It should be viewed as a device which unions want to assist them in dealing with particular problems concerned with organizing, controlling or excluding different categories of workers. By helping to overcome such problems it adds to the effectiveness of the sanctions unions impose on employers and aids them in their task of job regulation. The determination and resolution behind most demands for the practice depends on the extent to which unions feel that they face problems that are insoluble without its aid … If there are no such problems or workers are unaware of them, closed shop demands are not likely to rise; unless of course, past problems have given rise to a closed shop tradition. But no matter how necessary the closed shop may be, the crucial factor which finally determines whether or not most groups obtain the practice is whether or not they can muster sufficient power, without its aid, to impose it unilaterally, or to make it worth the employers' while to concede it.

Similar considerations govern the maintenance of the practice. So long as unity and solidarity are preserved; so long as technological or market developments do not result in the erosion of the union's bargaining position it will endure and in time probably become part of the unquestioned assumptions of both sides of industry. But the development of such a situation, and in the last resort its continuance, depends on the fact that it is appreciated that, if challenged, the great majority of unionists would defend the closed shop. If they or their leaders allow membership to fall sufficiently, the closed shop concession may be withdrawn, or it may be impossible to impose it unilaterally any longer. If strikes are called too often, or last too long, members may return to work or drop out of the union, and the closed shop may be powerless to stop them, indeed it may collapse.⁹

According to McCarthy the closed shop in Britain is prevalent in the following groups:

1. Skilled "craftsmen," where the need has usually been for the craft qualification shop.
2. Lesser skilled trades where the labor pool closed shop operates, e.g., seamen, dockers, wholesale market workers, film and television technicians, semiskilled newsprint workers, fishermen, etc
3. The great majority of remaining trades affected by the closed shop in which the worker has to join the union after taking up the job, e.g., building workers, engineering workers, miners, etc.
4. Process workers employed in the iron and steel industry.
5. Workers in entertainment affected by the closed shop, e.g., musicians.
6. Workers covered by the employer-initiated closed shop, e.g., the employees of the Co-operative Shops and Societies.

McCarthy has found that the closed shop is not prevalent in the following groups: (1) non-industrial civil servants, (2) teachers, sections of the industrial Civil Service, (4) firemen, (5) footplate workers on the railways, (6) clerical and administrative workers in nationalized industries, (7) electrical workers in nationalized undertakings, and (8) boot and shoe operatives.

Although McCarthy is inclined to set aside the usual trade unionist's justification for the closed shop – that union members resent non-members' sharing protection and wage benefits for which they do not work – he nevertheless concludes that it is a justifiable device in the unions' fight to protect their members against employers. Without it, he implies, the scales would be weighted too heavily against the worker; with it, unions can insist on their voice being heard and industrial democracy thereby flourishes. But he admits that some changes in the law would be desirable to control the unions' power to expel members in such a way as to deprive them of their livelihood. Thus he says:

I would argue that while the closed shop should continue to be recognized as a lawful and "legitimate" trade union objective, the actual imposition of the exclusion sanction requires some degree of justification in each specific case. In short, I think it ought to be plausible to argue that it was functionally necessary. This implies:

1.  that the enforcement of the closed shop results in certain benefits to those who combine to impose it;
2.  that its enforcement was necessary in order to secure this result;
3.  that the benefits resulting outweigh the losses suffered by those who are damaged as a result of its enforcement.¹⁰

McCarthy then discusses various proposals for reforming current malpractices connected with the closed shop in terms of his pragmatic criterion of functional necessity. Among these he includes restrictions on the right to exclude non-members as well as restrictions on the right to exclude ex-members; certain changes in the procedural rules and constitutions as well as in the substantive rules of unions; and reforms in the admission rules and electoral rules. Apparently, as a typical modern pragmatist, the thought never enters his head that to reform something which is in principle false and evil is merely to add insult to the injury already suffered by the victims of such falsehood and evil. No Christian would deny that "workers still need to combine to match the power of employers."¹¹ The fundamental issue is not whether the state should or should not recognize unions but whether the state should give to one union the exclusive right to bargain on behalf of all employees of a given firm. McCarthy seems to think the state can and should, provided each closed shop can justify its monopoly control of the bargaining rights of the workers in terms of functional necessity. But this is to beg the fundamental issues at stake. In advocating such a criterion for deciding such a problem McCarthy has revealed himself as a typical Anglo-Saxon pragmatist. Whatever seems to work must be good, and whatever is useful must be true. Whether deliberately or through ignorance McCarthy makes no mention in any part of his book of the pluralistic structure of the Dutch trade unions. He takes it simply for granted that in Britain all the workers should, and ought to be made to join, the one existing trade union in any given plant or shop. For McCarthy as well as for Tannenbaum the modern trade union is religiously neutral and therefore non-discriminatory.

In fact, trade union leaders never tire of pointing out that their organizations are open to everyone, regardless of his religious convictions. The diversity of their members' religious commitments is said to be possible because unions do not concern themselves with religious beliefs. The unions are based upon the humanistic premise that religious values and principles need play no part in the aims and actions of the labor organization. This does not mean that the individual trade unionist may not hold private religious beliefs. It simply means that the unions, as organizations, are supposedly neutral with respect to the various religious beliefs of their members. The unions, like the modern American and British political parties, seek to establish organizational unity above religious diversity.

The modern unions jealously guard their claim about their unity based upon this religious neutrality. They are aware that their so-called non-discriminatory character is based upon this neutral unity. On the basis of this neutrality, trade union leaders, in league with many legislators, have decided that objections to the closed shop and compulsory membership in a labor union are invalid. Against this background it can be understood that the Ontario Labor Relations Board, in stating its reasons for refusing to certify a local affiliated with the Christian Labor Association of Canada, compared workers who object to membership in a "neutral union" with persons "who because of their faith, object to receiving blood transfusions or joining the armed services."¹²

This demand that every worker in one plant or shop must have his rights defended before management by one union is an expression of the modern Anglo-Saxon humanist view that in public matters there must be no division in the community. Ever since the defeat of the Puritan attempt to establish a society based upon the Word of God as the ordering principle of human life, Anglo-Saxon humanists have tried to order public affairs according to a principle common to all "rational creatures." This principle is man's free sovereign reason. Society should be guided in its actions only by those moral laws accessible to the reason and conscience of unregenerate men rather than by the Word of God. As Martineau, writing of the Cambridge platonist Ralph Cudworth, puts it, "All men have the same fundamental ideas, to form the common ground of intellectual communion and of moral co-operation."¹³ This rationalistic belief in the commonness of reason laid the foundations for the modern secular humanist belief in the possibility of community apart from a common allegiance to Almighty God. Henceforth society shall be based upon a common reason rather than upon a common faith.

As a result of this belief in reason as the new oracle of man, human life in Anglo-Saxon civilization has become split into two realms, the private or personal and the public or common. The individual is granted a great measure of religious freedom, but this must be limited to personal concerns of home and church. On no account must religion be allowed to enter the "market place," where men deal with the real issues of life such as education, government, labor and industry, recreation, and press. These activities must be withdrawn from so-called "sectarian" influences so that the "common spirit" of the community may prevail. This is the spirit of reason, of common sense and pragmatism.

In his home and church the Anglo-Saxon may rightly differ on specifically religious matters. He may thus subscribe to Roman Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, or atheistic doctrines and views. But outside his home, church, or club he must abide by the "public philosophy" of the community. As Walter Lippmann neatly puts it:

The toleration of differences is possible only on the assumption that there is no vital threat to the community. Toleration is not, therefore, a sufficient principle for dealing with the diversity of opinions and beliefs. It is itself dependent upon the positive principle of accommodation. The principle calls for the effort to find agreement beneath the differences.¹⁴

In the realm of public life it is presumed that men can meet and work together upon a common neutral ground. Neutralism is the view that men can live wholly or partly without taking God's Word and Law into account. Those who pay homage to the fiction of neutrality maintain that many segments of society are merely technical. It is then taken for granted that a business corporation, a labor union, a school, or a government can be run by making exclusively factual, technical decisions which have no relation to one's private religious opinions. It is in terms of this neutralism that trade union leaders justify their demands for the closed shop. They argue that a trade union's activities are in fact limited strictly to the regulation of the technical, factual, and organizational aspects of employer-employee relationships. Writing in the Canadian Church man for April, 1965, union leader William Reader clearly states this view:

In religion, the unions are necessarily neutral. If religion were to be the basis for organization, in view of the diversity of religious beliefs among workers, the result would inevitably be a multiplicity of unions. This does not mean that a neutral trade union ought, by definition, to be irreligious, or unreligious. A trade union is neutral from the religious point of view, if, as such, it professes and adheres to no single religious group in preference to all others.

Such a concept of religious neutrality is based upon the humanist assumption that man is independent and autonomous. Believers in neutrality deny God's authority over all or a part of life. For such neutralists a labor union need not be subject to the Word of God. It is assumed that union affairs are outside the "religious" realm. No consistent Christian could accept this neutrality concept since if he accepted it, he would be conceding to the apostate humanist that God's authority and ordinances for human work are irrelevant. The Lord God demands to be honored just as much at the bargaining table and the work bench as He does at the altar and the pulpit. By insisting that Christians refrain from applying their Christian principles in the daily concrete situations of their lives at work, the union leaders are in reality interfering with the Christian worker's freedom to make their work an offering and a prayer to God. Under such specious claims to neutrality, the big international unions in North America and the big unions in Britain are in effect demanding of their Christian members that they forget about God as soon as they punch in for work. As a member of such a neutral union the Christian worker must put aside any idea that his faith in Christ as Lord and Savior of the whole of his life should make any difference to the choices with which he is confronted at work, e.g., to go or not to go on strike. On the contrary he is to allow his conduct at work to be guided by no other consideration than that of the selfish interests set by the majority of the non-Christian members of his union. In short, the Christian is forced by the governments of America, Britain, and Canada to place the desires of his or her union leaders above the declared law of God. The voice of the union "boss" is to become for him or for her as well as for the "unbelieving believ­ers" the voice of God himself.

As an example of what such "neutrality" and its attendant compulsory unionism involves in practice for Christian workers, let us consider what happened to Mrs. Mary Ellen Benson, a member of Local 35 of the United Papermakers and Paper workers Union. Mrs. Benson was fined five dollars for being absent from a union meeting held on Sunday. Mrs. Benson would not pay the fine because she was attending divine worship at her local church, and she believed she had the right to choose how she would spend her leisure time. The union sued Mrs. Benson in court when she refused to pay the fine. The judge ruled that the union had indeed the right and power to assess the fine and ordered her to pay five dollars to the union and five dollars in court costs. "I thought the Constitution gave us the right to freedom of worship," she said afterwards. When asked why she did not leave the union Mrs. Benson pointed out, "I cannot quit because then I'd be out of a job. I think I know something about right and wrong, and I think this is all wrong."¹⁵

This gross infringement of the liberties of the individual won at such great cost by our Puritan ancestors from tyrannical governments and classes is certainly wrong, but it is imperative that every­one understands exactly where the wrong lies. For it was not the enforcement of the union's membership rule that Mrs. Benson attend a union meeting on a Sunday morning that was wrong. Without such attendance at meetings no union could properly function and flourish. The real wrong in the Benson case does not lie with the union to which she belonged. Although private associations such as labor unions are committing a grave sin when they refuse to obey the Lord's law for rest on the seventh day, this does not mean that they have no civil right to do so. In a free and pluralistic democratic society such as ours has today become, such organizations have a perfect right to hold their meetings on Sunday, and they may insist on faithful attendance at these meetings by union members. The real wrong in the Benson case, as in the Rookes case, is the fact that she, as a member of a private association, had been robbed of her freedom to leave that organization upon penalty of starvation. And it is the Federal Government which deprived Mrs. Benson and many thousands of other Christian workers of this right to work and to join the union of their own free choice by allowing organized labor and management to include clauses in collective bargaining agreements which require workers to join or support by their dues a certain union as a condition of employment, even though the union may not be the organization of these workers' own free choice.

In Ontario in 1962 two Christian workers lost their jobs because they refused to support the National Union of Public Employees. Mr. Bonvanie and Mr. Dehaan were not allowed to refrain from supporting by their dues this particular union without losing their employment by the Ontario Government. Even though they favored Christian principles of work and had good Christian reasons for not supporting the socialistically inclined N.U.P.E., they were "fired." Of course, Christian workers are free. But the exercise of this freedom always has as its bitter result that they become unemployed. A worker today in America, Britain, and Canada is free to join the union which enjoys exclusive bargaining rights at the shop where he works. But he is not free to work there unless he joins the union and pays union dues. He is free either to join and work or not to join and starve. The exercise of his human right of freedom of association leaves him without job or income. The fringe freedom he enjoys to resign his job only underscores the injustice of present arrangements. The closed shop and compulsory unionism and the compulsory deduction of union fees from the worker's wage mean an abridgement of the civil rights of those citizens who cannot with a clear conscience join what is legally supposed to be a neutral union, but is in fact an essentially non-Christian secular humanist union, and often even a socialist one. This is a curtailment of the worker's right to work. Under present Anglo-American labor legislation the worker is free to work only if he sheds himself of his Christian convictions and abides by the decisions of the unbelieving majority. But that is precisely the injustice of the present arrangement, for his fellow non-Christian worker, although he is no better as a citizen, no more law abiding, no more loyal to his country, no more industrious at work, does not have to leave his humanistic religious convictions at the door of the closed shop.

It is the American, British, and Canadian governments' failure to protect their Christian citizens from being coerced into supporting so-called neutral unions which give rise to such abuses of power as these have been experienced by Mrs. Benson, Mrs. Bonvanie, and De Haan in Canada, and Rooke in England. Such compulsory union membership as a condition of employment in the modern factory or workshop and such compulsory financial support of the neutral union are evils that threaten all our most cherished civil liberties. Let no one in England think that what happened to Mrs. Benson in America cannot happen in England, for the same situation still exists here in spite of the recent decision in the Rookes v. Barnard case. A number of members of the Plymouth Brethren have already lost their employment in England because they refused to support the secular trade union. In thousands of firms on both sides of the Atlantic the decision over hiring and firing has passed out of the hands of the managers, to whom it rightfully belongs, into the hands of union bosses.

Such compulsory trade unionism has inevitably led to abuses and corruption amongst the unions' leadership. In his important book, Power Unlimited – The Corruption of Union Leadership, Sylvester Petro deals with the corruption of some of the great American trade unions. The immediate occasion of his book was the information and evidence provided by the McClellan Committee appointed by the Congress to examine "improper activities in the labor relations management field," and which held hearings from 1957 until 1959.

The main theme of Petro's book is that power unlimited has led to corruption unlimited. Big labor has been granted special privileges by the Wagner Act, which has given it virtual control over America's economy. He describes in detail how unwilling employees were organized from the top by stranger picketing and secondary boycotts and compulsory unionism. Stranger picketing is used to gain control over employees by putting pressure, through picketing, upon the employer and results in forced union membership. The secondary boycott is used to make customers and suppliers quit deal­ing with the employer upon whom the union is making demands. Through the use of these coercive weapons the big unions have been able to establish monopoly control over their members and industry. Petro further shows how terrorism, especially during the Kohler strike, and physical force were used to intimidate workers and in organizing recruiting campaigns; and how violence and mass picketing have made a complete mockery of the process of collective bargaining.

As a result of such union practices, it has become almost impossible for the Christian worker in North American industry to practice his religion at work. Worse still, by joining such unions as the Teamsters and International Seafarer's Unions, the Christian worker is forced to indulge in such disgraceful and wicked practices as having to intimidate his fellow workers by the use of violence in mass picketing. Petro lists the causes of corruption in the big unions as follows:

The causes of corruption in the badly run unions are (1) the dragooning of vast numbers of workers into trade unions by violence and coercion; (2) the use of further violence and coercion in the form of job control to silence their complaints; (3) the con­sequent domination of national conventions by local henchmen of the top union dictators; and (4) the rubber-stamping, always pursuant to democratic forms of the manipulations of the mighty. Attendance at local union meetings is as small as it is in many unions because dragooned workers have no real interest in at­tending in the first place, and because it is safer to stay away … Those members who insist upon "putting in their two cents" soon learn better.

Statutory insistence upon democratic forms will not correct these conditions. Only excision of the special privileges which draw the looters and their bullies to trade unions will do the job.

Unions can become genuinely voluntary associations if the law will but withdraw the special privileges of compulsion which they have enjoyed.¹⁶

Yes indeed! The time has most surely come for a complete overhaul of our Anglo-Saxon labor legislation. The time has indeed come to withdraw the special privileges given to union leaders of compelling workers to join unions in which they do not believe. The natural and proper function of a trade union is to represent those workers who want collective representation in bargaining with their employers over terms of employment. This function is perverted the moment a union claims the right to represent employees who do not want representation or conduct political activities which have nothing to do with the terms of employment. To force Christian workers into socialistically inclined trade unions makes complete nonsense of their claim to be "neutral." The fact that so large a segment of our labor organizations have now identified themselves with the aims of socialism and openly or covertly support political parties which proclaim socialism as the answer to all human ills is indisputable proof of the presence in their midst of a basic philosophical and religious outlook and commitment upon life.

The time has come to restore our historic freedom for workers to associate, or not to associate, with men of a similar persuasion, as each man's conscience dictates. As we have seen, millions of workers in America and in Britain and Canada are today required by law as a condition of employment to join the union that is the legally recognized bargaining agent at the place where they work. Such labor agreements deny to these workers the right to decide for themselves what union they will join, or indeed whether they will join at all. The exercise of their freedom not to join involves, as we have already seen, the loss of their livelihood. Our governments allow these dictatorial practices to continue and they have even enacted laws permitting this tyranny.

Union leaders often advance the so-called "free rider" argument in defence of compulsory payment of union dues. The contention is that a man ought not to enjoy the benefits of a union's activities unless he contributes his fair share of their costs. We are unaware, however, of any other organization or institution in the English-speaking world that seeks to enforce this theory by compulsion. The Red Cross benefits us all, directly or indirectly. Would the union leaders of America, Britain, and Canada make donations to the Red Cross compulsory? Certain unions and their apologists would be well advised to keep quiet about the free rider argument, for some of the big unions today have become the real "free riders."

It is one thing to say that a man should contribute to an association that is supposedly acting in his best interests; it is quite another matter to say that he must do so. No doubt a man ought to join a union if it is a good union that is serving the best interests not only of all its members but of society as well. Most men will give support to a union provided that it is deserving of such support. There will always be some men, of course, who will try to sponge off other people, but let us not express our contempt for some men by denying freedom of association to all our citizens.

The question boils down to this: not the fact that workers refuse to share in their financial responsibilities as union members, but why they refuse to carry their fair share. In the case of Christian trade unionists in Canada and America the answer is because many do not look upon the labor movement as a kind of business institution, but they view it as a result of one's life-and-world view. It is not that they object to paying their union dues. It is their objection to the secular humanist basis of the so-called neutral labor union. For such Christian workers to support the neutral labor union would be like betraying one's own country in war to the enemy. It is treason to the Lord Jesus Christ to join any organization which deliberately excludes the Savior of the world from its activities.

To ask the Christian worker to join the humanist union is like asking the atheist to go to church. How can anyone support something that is contrary to his deepest convictions and loyalties? For this reason the writer believes that the arbitrary ruling which forces Christian workers to support neutral trade unions as a condition of employment and which thus takes no notice of their conscientious objections, violates the most sacred of all freedoms, i.e., freedom of conscience.

The only satisfactory answer to the "free rider" problem lies in the introduction into the Anglo-Saxon labor relations field of the Western European system of proportional representation, under which it would be possible for workers to join the union of their own choice. The worker would then be made aware of his duty with regard to that freedom, and this would result in a stronger and really free labor movement.

Unions will become genuinely free associations only when the governments of America, Britain, and Canada withdraw the special privileges of compulsion and the closed shop which many unions presently enjoy. That is one way in which unions now guilty of socially destructive abuses may become and stay clean. Union members would then have the opportunity to become their own guardians. By such free unionism the workers themselves would be enabled to put a stop to the corruption and graft going on in industry. As long as the union bosses can force workers to join their organizations they will have no incentive to act responsibly. Once the workers can choose to belong or not to belong to a union, depending upon how the union leaders behave, then the pressure to stamp out malpractice and corruption would become irresistible. Only then will the workers have an effective shield with which to defend themselves against exploitation – they can refuse to pay union dues to those who abuse their position as union leaders.

c)  The Humanist-Pragmatic Basis of the Secular Labor Union←⤒🔗

In the opinion of the writer the big so-called neutral unions have broken away from faith in God's Word as the ordering principle of their union activities, and as a direct result they have been reduced to pursuing purely man-centered materialistic objectives based upon a functional doctrine of work. The struggle for power and status has today replaced the struggle for justice and social righteousness based upon obedience to the Lord's ordinances for man in society as the dominating motive in the big unions' struggle with the big companies. By rejecting God's law for human work revealed in Holy Scriptures, many secular unions have become just as materialistic and spiritually decadent as many big business corporations.

While the trade unions of the English-speaking world were struggling for recognition, and as long as they were obviously the representatives of the "under-dog" and the "have-nots," many union leaders were inspired with a high moral purpose derived from their Puritan and evangelical reformed background, which guided their union activities. According to R. T. Wear mouth in his study of Methodism and the Working Class Movements of England, 1800-1850,

From the very beginning of the trade union movement among all sections of wage earners, of the formation of Friendly Societies, and of the later attempts at adult education, it is men who are Methodists, and in Durham County especially, local preachers of the Primitive Methodists, whom we find taking the lead and filling the posts of influence. From their ranks have come an astonishingly large proportion of trade union officials, from checkweighers and lodge chairmen up to county officials and committee men.¹⁷

In many other cases union activity was motivated by conscious Christian convictions, and many American, British, and Canadian unions obtained their initial moral impetus and dynamic from Christian laymen who sought to stem the worst consequences of the industrial and financial exploitation of the working classes set in motion by the attempt to apply principles of technical and economic rationality to the processes of industrial production. Union leaders of the last century rightly refused to accept the attempt of the new breed of capitalists to treat the workers as mere "hands" or func­tions of the machines they were expected to operate.¹⁸

Today, however, the big neutral unions would seem to have shifted their ground. Instead of battling for social justice and the dignity of the worker as created in God's image, they themselves have become a privileged group in modern society. Today it has become unmistakably clear that the two divisions of society into employers and employed and into the well-to-do and the poor do not coincide; and that it is with the claims of the employed workers of the big unions, not with those of the poor, that the bigger unions in Britain and North America are most concerned. The original moral dynamic which inspired many trade union leaders of the previous century has now directed its energies elsewhere. The urge to reduce social inequality and achieve social justice for all members of society no longer counts as a practical force in wage and salary claims; and with this lack of concern for social righteousness, the chief justification of the labor movement in the English-speaking world has disappeared.

And so it is that the big international and national unions now fight for such things as better wage differentials and fringe benefits for their own membership. The important aspect of any wage is now considered to be not so much its absolute level, but how much it differs from the wage paid to someone else; that is to say, the emphasis is today more upon achieving inequality of remuneration than equality. The vital questions for the modern trade union leader are not as they once used to be, "Will this give my members a butter or a margarine standard of living?" but "Are my members keeping their distance above their inferiors in this and other industries?" In short, the emphasis upon wage differentials symbolizes the great fact that the Anglo-Saxon humanist labor movement has sold itself out to the prevailing pagan, pragmatic, and acquisitive social philosophy of post-Christian humanist society. The unions have joined the humanist bandwagon! Deplorable though it may be to have to admit, it is clear that most unions today are being motivated either by individualistic or collectivistic values, capitalist or socialist, the principles of which may, superficially considered, appear different, but which in reality are both founded on the same apostate humanistic presuppositions about the nature of man in society.

Pragmatic humanism takes for granted that human reason, not God's Word, is the source of all truth; man is considered to be the measure of all things. For the pragmatic humanist such as William James and John Dewey this world is all there is to reality and thus it follows that there can be no valid standards of thought, conduct or reality other than those which are the products of the human mind, which change as the human mind changes. For both men absolute, truth is a figment of the logicians, and it is of no importance in practice. Every belief is simply a truth claim. By acting upon this, belief we test it, and if the consequences which follow from adopting it are good, if they promote the purpose in hand and so have a valuable effect upon life, the truth of the claim is validated. Hence, man makes his own truth just as he makes his own reality, and the truth of the beliefs he holds and the reality of the objects he perceives being equally relative to his purposes. As William James puts it:

The "truth," to put it very briefly, is only the expedient way of thinking, just as the "right" is only the expedient way of behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and, on the whole, of course.¹⁹

Given this operational or instrumentalist theory of truth the task, of science is not to discover truth or to read the Creator's thoughts after him as these have been expressed in the Book of Nature. Science is simply an instrument which man uses to maintain social practices and to help realize his practical goals. The question of whether science is true or not is completely unimportant, unless it somehow affects the question of whether it is useful. That is the decisive factor for the pragmatist, and if anyone still wants to use the term "truth" he can say that whatever is useful or works is true.

By the same token pragmatism denies the existence of any objective absolute values such as goodness or beauty. According to Dewey moral standards are like language in that both are the result of custom. Values can only be described, claims Dewey, in the context of ends to be attained and means to be obtained for the realization of the envisioned ends. He writes in his work, Theory of Valuation: "The measure of the value a person attaches to a given end is not what he says about its preciousness but the care he devotes to obtaining and using the means without which it cannot be attained." ²⁰ Thus he wants to make values empirical facts, to be measured by the intensity of the desire, the degree of activity caused by the end in view.

If pragmatism is a philosophy of expediency, it is no less a philosophy of adaptation. By aid of his science, man must adjust himself not only to his natural but also to his social environment.

The Christian philosopher, S. U. Zuidema of the Free University, Amsterdam, in a penetrating lecture on "Pragmatism" delivered at Unionville, Ontario, in 1960, said of this pragmatist emphasis on adaptation:

It strikes me that "adaptation" is a key word of all pragmatists. Strikes out how free man in his contingent environment can prevent being trampled upon and may attain an ever "smoother" relation which is profitable for himself and his needs. But no less striking is the fact that this word "adaptation" has a twofold usage and is used for two different ways of human conduct. It refers one time to the conduct which accommodates itself to circumstances and another time to the conduct which accommodates circumstances to it. The pragmatist uses both meanings indiscriminately and does so rightly in so far as both point to a conduct which directs itself according to the economic norm of "efficiency." Pragmatism is therefore also a form of economism, a universalization of the economic norm to a basic law of man's being.²¹

In terms of this perspective we can now understand the real significance of Tannenbaum's definition of the trade union as "the spontaneous grouping of individual workers thrown together functionally," and we can also understand why McCarthy was forced by his unstated pragmatist presuppositions about human life to justify the practice of compulsory trade unionism precisely in the economic terms of "functional necessity." Several dominant traits of the secular trade unions can be traced directly to their humanist and pragmatic presuppositions about man's nature and destiny.

In the first place there is the primacy ascribed by the secular labor union leaders to human needs. Two leading trade union leaders explain that men have certain economic, psychological, and social needs which must be satisfied. According to Clinton Golden and Harold Ruttenburg in their book, The Dynamics of Industrial Democracy,

Labor unions are indispensable in the fulfilment of these needs because they can be satisfied only through group relations. Unions are peculiarly adapted toward this end, since they serve workers as a means of self-expression, as a socially integrating force, as a provider for economic benefits, and as an instrument for participation in the productive process. Management by itself, through individual relations with workers, cannot satisfy all three needs, nor can unions alone. The joint efforts of both are required to provide workers with a well-rounded environment, a happy, prosperous, and secure life.²²

Walter Reuther spoke in a similar vein when he described the trade union movement as follows:

This is a crusade, a crusade to gear economic abundance to human needs. We plan to take management upon the mountain top and we would like to give them a little more of the vision we have. We would like to show them the great new world that can be built if free labor and free management and free government and free people can cooperate together in harnessing the power of America and gearing it to the basic needs of the people.²³

The spirit pervading the American labor movement can perhaps best be seen at work in the views advocated by Samuel Gompers, who has been called, "the chief architect of the modern American trade union movement." He was born in London, England, but emigrated, at the age of 13, to New York City, where he obtained work as a cigar maker. He became active in the local Cigarmaker's Union, where he came under the influence of socialism as taught by the refugees from Europe. The constitution of Gomper's Cigar-makers Local stated that "we recognize the solidarity of the whole working class to work harmoniously against their common enemy – the capitalist."²⁴ Gradually Gompers came to change his mind about socialism, deciding that the most effective way for the American working classes to obtain what they wanted was through economic methods in the "existing order" by working through the trade unions, which could solve problems, rather than through the government, which could not. On this issue he came into conflict with Daniel De Leon. To Gompers the trade union movement was an institution in its own right; to De Leon, as to all other socialist radicals, it was either an instrument of the class war or it was nothing. As another socialist, Karl Kautsky, put it, trade unions are important only as they lead to social revolution. They are important "as militant organizations, not as organizations for social peace." This is due to the fact that up to the present they have proved "at most only a nuisance to the employers."²⁵ Another socialist declared that "the only difference between the socialists and the trade unionists … is that … the former clearly realize this ultimate goal (the end of capitalism) … the latter do not."²⁶ For the socialist doctrine of class warfare Gompers substituted a natural class feeling, "a group feeling, one of the strongest cohesive forces in the labor movement."

Whatever may have been Gompers' attitude as to ultimate ends, he refused to allow any socialist dreams of a coming millennium to stand in the way of fighting for what small gains could be attained at the moment. This pragmatism is well expressed in the words of one of Gompers' contemporary unionists, Adolph Strasser, president of the Cigarmakers Union, spoken before a Senate committee in 1883:

We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting only for immediate objects – objects that can be realized in a few years.²⁷

Samuel Gompers' insistence upon rather strict adherence to a policy of organization based on national craft or trade unions, upon frugality in money matters, and upon avoidance of radical economic theories, enabled him with considerable success to bring the pressure of organized labor to bear on such practical demands as the eight-hour day, the Saturday half-holiday, federal child labor legislation, the restriction of immigration and alien contract labor, and working men's compensation. Under his leadership the American labor movement reverted to the type of old-line pragmatic unionism followed in Great Britain for many decades after the collapse of Chartism.

Gompers summed up the goal of this pragmatic unionism as "more," or "more, more, more, more, now." That it is – the unlimited "improvement of the existing order." According to his interpreter, Louis Reed, "The question of the day after tomorrow, of the trade union of the future he never asked nor answered."²⁸ Speculating as to what might have been Gompers' ideal society, Reed suggests:

Industry must become a coordinating and self-governing whole. In this self-government labor must share. Then this democratic industry must become conscious of itself and its real purpose, and produce for use, not solely for profits."²⁹ "Industrial democracy or economic democracy, means the development of a government in industry, in which the workers shall participate through their union."³⁰

This objective became the long-term goal of the labor movement. The exercise of rights, of the inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution, now became enlarged to include the right to a job and the right "to have a voice in determining the conditions of employment." So "in American society, where status depends so clearly upon ownership of property, an improvement in social position is most readily achieved when the right to property is expanded to include the right to a job."³¹ Gompers wrote that "whatever or whoever controls the economic power directs and shapes the development for the group and the nation."³² Thus the labor union for Gompers existed to improve the situation of the working man, and to raise him to a position of equality with the managerial class, to a position of sharing the economic power, a position of self-government in industry.

The labor historian John R. Commons gives us this interpretation of the meaning of the American labor movement:

As long as the wage-earning class accepts the existing order and merely attempts to secure better wage bargains, its goal must eventually be some form of the trade agreement, which recognizes the equal bargaining rights of the organized employees. Its union is not "class-conscious" in the revolutionary sense of Socialism, but "wage-conscious" in the sense of separate from, but partners with the employing class.³³

The Constitution of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. will tell us even more:

We seek the fulfillment of the hopes and aspirations of the working people of America through democratic processes within the framework of our constitutional government and consistent with our institutions and traditions…

We pledge ourselves to the more effective organization of working men and women; to the securing to them of full recognition and enjoyments of the rights to which they are justly entitled; to the achievement of ever higher standards of living and working conditions.³⁴

These various rights are construed as natural rights. Thus the beginning of the preamble to the constitution of the United Auto Workers Union of 1955 asserted:

We hold these truths to be self-evident … that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

For the labor movement, man is by nature, by mere virtue of being a man, entitled to certain "natural rights." A man has the right to live; to live the worker depends on wages; for wages he has to work; therefore he has a right to work and to earn wages. Thus, wage-earning becomes the main interest of the labor movement. Workers combine in a trade union to assert their natural rights. They unite to get "more and more here and now," more wages for less work. Work has thus become an economic matter, a means of satisfying the economic needs of the workers.

d)  A Christian Critique of Secular Trade Unions←⤒🔗

It is thus abundantly clear that the leaders of the North American labor movement consider the fulfilment of man's needs on a purely horizontal level. Man's desires and goals are directed to this life exclusively. His destiny is within himself and within this world. Life and work are completely secularized, and God and His service are considered to be irrelevant. The majority of North American trade unionists do not recognize that man's real purpose and true fulfilment consists in the obedient service of his Creator. They have no eye for the biblical doctrine that man is created in God's image and that as such he is an office bearer of Jehovah in the creation and responsible to God. As we have seen, man does not work merely to obtain a living, but in order to carry out the great cultural mandate to have dominion over the earth and to subdue it for God's greater glory. Work is the service and worship of either the one true God of the Scriptures, or it becomes inevitably the worship and service of mammon. Man is called to serve God in his work as he is called to serve Him in all other areas of life. Economic work is one kind of work, but it too is service of the one true God. In his economic activities man is not just a wage-earner and a consumer, but a servant. Whether an employer or an employee, his primary purpose is still service.

For these reasons the writer finds it hard to understand Tannenbaum's claim that whereas "the Socialists and the Communists operate with general ideas, and are given over to large plans for the establishment of social 'harmony' the trade union movement seems to have no rational basis. It lacks a doctrinal foundation. It has no theory, and it offers no explanation of the beginning and the end of things."³⁵ So far from this in fact being the case, it is clear that the trade union movement in Great Britain and North America has succumbed to the prevailing naturalistic ethic of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism and humanism which is strictly confined by the limits of the natural. Since this materialistic ethic has no transcendent values to attach itself to, it focuses the maximum of significance upon tem­poral prosperity and temporal adversity. There is no escape from an ethic grounded in worldly well-being except by means of the biblical ethic, which reaches out to the supernatural.

The false ethic of the pragmatist attempts to disguise its materialistic criteria by masquerading as a mental reality superior to life at the physical level. Thus pragmatic psychologists speak of the well-organized or completely integrated personality, and posit ideals of behaviour to which such personalities will conform. It is tempting to believe that the concept of the harmonious personality well-adjusted to its environment gives us an ideal superior to the temporal and the physical. But the theorizing of the pragmatic philosophers and psychologists, if pressed to its logical conclusions, invariably proves that this is not the case. Their idea turns out to be the glorification of the natural and the physical. Thus the concept of the harmonious personality compels us to ask with what the personality is in harmony. We shall be told that it is in harmony with its environment. But this is a deterministic and natural ideal. We demand the right to judge our environment.

But by what standards does the personality which is wholly in harmony with its environment judge that environment? Plainly, the pragmatist idea of a self-adjusted to its environment is not an ideal at all. If the environment is bad, the Christian personality will surely be at war with it. Some of the 15 greatest saints and heroes of the Church of God were utterly at loggerheads with the various social environments in which they lived. We can scarcely claim that our Lord Jesus Christ himself achieved that specious kind of mental health which is defined in terms of a harmonious relationship between the self and its environment. Had that wonderful Christian misfit, Florence Nightingale, been born in our generation, a child guidance clinic no doubt would soon have put an early stop to all her nonsense.

The modern jargon of the pragmatic sociologists and psychologists devoted to the humanistic cult of adjustment to one's environment can be reduced in every case to complete nonsense. The truth is that all the terms in which the pragmatists today define mental health and social well-being – harmonious, integrated, fulfilled, organized, fruitful, and adjusted – are relative and therefore inadequate. They all demand some objective point of repose. The self must be in harmony with something organized and integrated to some end, fulfilled to some purpose, and fruitful of some definite fruit.

The self, in short, must be good in relation to some overriding purpose which is served by man during his life on earth. And this purpose will either reckon with man as created in God's image and subject to God's law revealed in His Word, or it will ignore his eternal destiny and define man in purely physico-economic, psychological terms. If this purpose takes no account of man's supernatural vocation and responsibility to Almighty God, then it can only provide standards of judgment upon human actions and human character which are ultimately materialistic and naturalistic.

The good personality is good because it brings good to others or to itself. Strictly within the limits of the natural and the phenome­nal world open to scientific investigation and inquiry, this good can be defined only in terms of material prosperity, animal sexuality, and physical well-being. If we press far enough the relative jargon of the pragmatists, we shall in fact arrive at these ultimates as the root ideal for human life in the twentieth century – physical health, comfort, material prosperity, and adjustment to one's social and economic environment. All the talk about integration, inner harmony, fulfilment, and adjustment turns out on closer analysis to be merely an elaborate disguise for a purely pagan, pragmatist, and humanistic ethic devoted to physical health, material comfort, and the worship of the Almighty Dollar. And then we have the audacity to blame the Russians for adapting themselves to their communistic environment!

This is not to deny that working conditions and just wages are important. They concern God's requirements for justice and righteousness in human interrelationships. However, they must always be seen within the framework of the biblical view of man. The union's secular view of man's needs thus narrows and confines his real perspective on human life, and the modern humanist trade union move­ment must be held partly responsible for the secularization of our Atlantic society. In seeking to improve men's working conditions, the secular unions have forgotten that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from God. For the men of the Bible, as we have seen, the first concern is not the wages or the profits one receives or makes, but the quality of the work rendered to God. Whenever the vision of man as God's steward, prophet, priest, and king is lost, then there appears upon the scene of human history the autonomous sovereign individual with rights. Then there is every good reason for demanding more and more wages ad infinitum, and there is no other purpose to work than to make a mere living. According to the Christian view the criterion for im­provements in man's working conditions is that they shall always increase his ability and capacity to serve God and his neighbor. Work is a form of worship of, and prayer and service to, Jehovah God, and without this ideal, work loses its true meaning and proper purpose. Man's first need in life is not to fill his empty belly, but his empty heart and to be redeemed from the power and guilt of sin through Christ's redeeming grace, love, and power. Without such a redemption of the whole man in all his activities, life remains limited to this world and cannot really flourish. As the Lord said, "I am come that men may have life and have it in all its fullness" (John 10:10, NEB). H. Van Riessen puts it very well in these words:

…where God is denied and materialistically man's perspectives are limited to the earth … man's horizon grows narrower, doubt and disillusionment appear when in actual practice reality turns out to be the very opposite of his ideals. The earthly perspectives are incapable of rousing his enthusiasm, because they are not genuine perspectives. Then everything is meaningless, for man can only await death. Man is abandoned to himself. He experiences the loneliness of being forsaken by God, and is now also lonely among men. He has no standards and can follow no meaningful course of action. In other words he is confronted with nihilism, and his agony and anxiety drive him to the masses … Within the crowd of the masses man seeks his lost security. He desires collectivity and equality, for freedom is an intolerable burden and the transfer of responsibility is a relief.³⁶

e)  The Unions' Faith in the Abilities of the Natural Man←⤒🔗

The belief in man's inherent goodness and innate ability is a second trait of the unions' pragmatic humanist basis. This belief is more often assumed than stated openly, but it is set forth by Walter Reuther in a discussion about democracy. He says that "the intrinsic soundness and rightness of the ordinary person is the firm base of confidence."

Tommy Douglas, leader of the Canadian socialist New Democratic Party, wrote about the basic philosophy of the N.D.P., and stated that the N.D.P. is grounded upon faith in "(a) the essential moral nature of man, (b) the equality of all men, and (c) the power of human reason and common sense."³⁷

In view of the close relationship existing between the N.D.P. and the secular trade union movement in Canada, it may be assumed that this statement of belief is endorsed by the trade unions. Douglas' clear-cut statement does not reflect the teachings of the Word of God. If man is essentially good, then the Genesis account of man's fall into sin is not true, and Paul is not proclaiming the truth when he declares that "there is no difference; for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23).

Socialists would have men put their faith and trust in their own reason, planning, and scientific method applied to man's social life instead of in God's own appointed method of salvation through the person, life, and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Such socialists as Tommy Douglas in Canada, Harold Wilson in Britain, and Walter Reuther in the United States would have men look to the power of human government rather than to the power of God's Word and sacraments to provide men with security, peace, and plenty. For the biblically motivated Christian, at any rate, the state, so far from being the supreme instrument of human emancipation and of human perfectibility, is a strait jacket to be justified at best as God's appointed instrument of common grace. Its function is to restrain the worst consequences of human sinfulness by upholding justice and maintaining law and order while the Church of Christ gets on with the business of proclaiming the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.

To preach as the socialists do that man is essentially good at heart and that human nature does not need cleansing by the blood of Christ is to imply that Christ's atoning death was unnecessary. No Christian could thus dare to dishonor the Lord Jesus by thus esteeming His work of reconciliation to be of no importance. Human nature can be restored to its original state of righteousness only by being first cleansed in the blood of the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. Those who prate of human goodness outside of Christ are blind to the fact that human goodness can be restored only in Christ. His words "Without me ye can do nothing" are in striking contrast with the belief in man's inherent goodness and power.

The humanist belief in man's goodness fosters a spirit of pride and self-sufficiency. And this pride rings through union leaders' boastful claims about the accomplishments of their organizations. Thus Walter Reuther waxes very eloquent when speaking about what the trade unions have done. In a speech recalling the achievements of Phil Murray and the labor movement, he stated that Phil Murray, "that great man … brought sunshine, and into their old age a sense of security and dignity."³⁸ In describing the task of the labor movement he said:

We can stand with them and work with them. We can march with them in building that brave new world that we dream of, that world in which men can live in peace as neighbors, that world where people everywhere can enjoy a fuller measure of social and economic justice, a world that you and I and men of good will everywhere can shape in the image of freedom and in the image of justice and in the image of brotherhood.³⁹

Similarly Claude Jodoin, president of the Canadian Labor Congress, addressing a labor seminar in Hamilton, said:

If workers today have decent wages, vacations, pension plans, insurance, and other benefits, they have them because of trade union activity.⁴⁰

Likewise the Canadian Labour, official journal of the Canadian Labour Congress, in its 1961 Christmas editorial bluntly claimed that "the lessons of brotherhood and cooperation that Christ taught are implicit in the work of the labour movement which strives to ensure that 'the meek shall inherit the earth.'" In December, 1960, Canadian Labour proudly stated that the modern labor movement had made great strides in banishing poverty and unhappiness and in abolishing unsatisfactory conditions, and that "the present is far superior to the past, but there remains much to be done."

Given their humanistic post-Christian presuppositions, it is not really surprising that these secular labor leaders should pay so much tribute to what man has done and can achieve in reliance upon his own ability and reason. Rather than recognizing man's dependence upon his Creator and his need for a Savior, these men continually ignore God and His Anointed One. They refuse to acknowledge that God is the giver of all good things and that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Instead they boast in their hearts, "My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). It is time that these men take to heart the Word of God given to man in the Book of Deuteronomy: "Thou shalt remember the Lord thy God; for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant" (Deut. 8:18).

The pride of some union leaders may also be detected at work in their defence of compulsory union membership. The proponents of compulsory unionism claim that the workers owe allegiance to the unions because the unions have provided men with the necessities of life. An advocate of the closed shop went so far as to say that "all workers owe it to themselves and to their country to join a Brother­hood or Union and to pay dues willingly … Life is a friction with our fellow human beings. Activity in the life of your local is living as it is planned in the democratic way of life." ⁴¹

In such claims there would seem to be no awareness of that fact that for all that modern man possesses and has, he is utterly dependent upon the common grace of the Lord, whose sunshine and rain fall upon the just and the unjust, and whose providence undergirds every moment of each man's life so that not one hair falls from his head without God knowing it. Here we find a gross overestimation rather than a wrong estimation of the union's role.

Perhaps this overestimation reaches its apogee in current trade union apologetic with the words with which Tannenbaum closed his apologia for the labor movement:

The trade-union is our modern "society," the only true society that industrialism has fostered. As the true society it is concerned with the whole man, and embodies the possibilities of both the freedom and the security essential to human dignity.⁴²

In these words we find an absolutization of a human institution just as dangerous as the Marxist absolutization of the economic aspect of life and the class struggle. Lacking the true ordering principle for his philosophy of labor in the Word of God, Tannenbaum was forced by his positivistic and pragmatic sociological method to stay with the so-called facts; that is to say, he adjusted his thinking and analysis to what there was about him. But in doing so, let us be sure to observe, he lost hold of the facts. For in every so-called positive "fact" of human society, including a trade union, there is not only some inescapable structure of creation ordinances (e.g., one cannot set up a form of trade union that is not somehow bound to the structural requirements of a trade union as a form of human association), but also the degree of conformity to or deviation from God's creation norm (which is a divine command, a norm, not a structural law in the sense of the laws of nature studied by the natural scientists) which has been operative in the cultural-forming-activity of the men who built the modern trade unions and labor associations. When a man's eyes are closed to this fact, whether he be a self-confessed humanist or Christian sociologist, he is, in a fundamental sense, blind to the integral meaning of the Holy Scriptures, and without their light he will not be in a position to see any social fact for what it is, including a trade union fact. If Tannenbaum wishes to call such blindness sticking to the facts, well and good, provided we all know that "sticking to the facts" means this sort of positivistic and pragmatic blindness.

In absolutizing the trade union as the "true society" Tannenbaum forgets that even our modern technological society reveals a multiplicity of true human bonds in industry, but also in the churches, families, schools and universities, farms, and political parties. If these are not true human communities or associations, what else does Tannenbaum think they are? And as Petro has proved, even in the trade unions themselves there is often precious little true society, since the unions are often led by racketeers. Does Tannenbaum consider James Hoffa and his thugs good examples of human friendship and community? For this reason we believe that Tannenbaum has gone much too far in claiming that the trade union is the only true society there is today.

Tannenbaum's absolutization of the modern labor union would seem to reflect the earlier socio-economic theories of the European syndicalists and of the Fabians and guild-socialists in England. In addition to ideas derived from Marx, the European syndicalists continued to carry forward ideas drawn from other socialists such as Proudhon and also ideas drawn from anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin. The cornerstone of syndicalist doctrine is the inevitability of the class struggle and the need of the proletariat to perfect its own appropriate forms of collective organization and social institutions. "Events," says one author, "have not fallen out quite as Marx in his revolutionary mood anticipated. It has begun to appear as though in his prognostications, he had not reckoned with all the conditions. And syndicalism is one of the forces which go to restore faith when it had fallen in need of being restored."⁴³ For in its crude form syndicalism was a revolutionary doctrine. G. D. H. Cole ex­plains their doctrine in his book, The World of Labour:

The Syndicalist interprets Marx's saying that "the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the workers themselves" as meaning that emancipation can only come to them organized as workers … Class they hold as a natural division, "party," artificial and intellectual. They quote with appreciation the words of Nietzsche, "the State is the coldest of masters…" Wherever there is a people it does not understand the state, it detests it.⁴⁴

The Syndicalists were, however, ready to use the state where it existed, but they made use of political democracy only the better to destroy it. Thus the syndicalists were quite outside the Marxist tradition in denying the value of political action. For this reason they tended to rely on direct action, the general strike, and other forms of violence as distinguished from organized political revolu­tion. The weapon of these direct actionists was to be the general strike, and their ideal a community-owned monopoly controlled by those employed in industry. According to Cole the social general strike has as its purpose not attaining some particular economic or political goal, but "the complete overthrow of capitalist society and the substitution of a new order."⁴⁵ Like the guild socialists, they looked forward to a pluralist form of industrial organization and to the producer's control of industry achieved through the direct action of the unions in the general strike.

In England the Fabians led by G. D. H. Cole advocated guild socialism rather than syndicalism as the only cure for society's ills. The defects of Syndicalism were obvious and real enough. A modern critic states them thus:

Syndicalism must meet the challenges – that the trade unions cannot take over industry by themselves and they cannot therefore expect to be allowed to run it for themselves; that if the State nationalizes an industry it does so primarily in the national interest and not in the interest of the workers in that industry – which would be the main aim of the unions if they had sole control; that the trade unions do not have the technical, administrative and commercial experience to run large-scale industries, and that the trade union government of industry might be no more democratic than capitalist authoritarianism.⁴⁶

The guild socialist tried to skirt around these difficulties by emphasizing decentralization, giving as much power as possible to the individual workshop, and suggesting that the industry should be owned by the nation and only handed over to the guilds to be operated under charter – the state protecting the consumer through its power over prices and wages. Peaceful evolution to this happy state was also predicted. According to Cole:

It seems clear that the thing to aim at – whether we can attain to it or not – is not an early revolution, but the consolidation of all the forces on the lines of evolutionary development with a view to making the "revolution" which in one sense must come, as little as possible a civil war and as much as possible a registration of accomplished facts and a combination of tendencies already in operation.⁴⁷

To this end a policy of encroaching control of industry by the workers themselves was advocated. "By encroaching control is meant a policy directed to wresting, bit by bit, from the hands of the possessing classes, the economic power which they now exercise, by a steady transference of function and rights from their nominees to the representatives of the working class."⁴⁸

With Marx, the Fabians and the guild socialists shared both the theory that value is created corporately by society more truly than by individuals singly and the moral conviction that any institution, private property included, must be justified by its social utility. They shared with Marx an apprehension about the human consequences of industrial exploitation of the workers, but they also shared with William Morris an admiration for the moral qualities of craftsmanship. For this reason their plans for a decentralized organization of industry in guilds, and a corresponding diminution of political power, belonged to the ideology of craft-unionism and were not Marxian at all. Tannenbaum, together with the guild socialists, seems to identify the modern trade union with the medieval guilds and both look to the modern trade union to "recreate the bonds of community" torn apart by the industrial revolution. Such an identification betrays a complete lack of insight into the historical development of Western social institutions and a disregard for what we described in the first chapter of this book as the opening up process of history which discloses the higher modal aspects or law-spheres of God's creation. As we pointed out, in every modal moment of the divine cosmic structure there are given certain principles or norms which should become concretized in the development of human society.

In man's long development out of the undifferentiated state of primitive society the enclosed structures of such a society became broken up to make room for the emergence of the separate cultural spheres. All these separate cultural spheres are valid concretizations within the temporal world order of the structural principles given at creation. The historical norm of differentiation thus insures the unfolding of the individualizing tendency of persons, nations, and societal relationships. Yet in the historical aspect of creation, as a normative sphere, these principles require positivization or specification. They must be concretely applied in all human relationships which have an historical aspect. It is the duty of the cultural leaders who possess historical power to formulate the concrete requirements of culture and society for their own age, but their power is not to be exercised arbitrarily. They must act in accordance with the divinely established norms of both continuity and differentiation.

The norm of continuity requires that cultural form-giving must give due respect to tradition as well as to progress. Progress takes place when the principles contained in the post-historical law-spheres are realized in human society. But this realization must not occur in a revolutionary fashion, destroying what is good in the new advance.

The norm of differentiation demands that in the development of society from a primitive phase, the new forms of communal and associational relations between individuals must be concretized into new institutions and social forms.

Now since the historical aspect is normative, violations of historical norms are possible, and leaders in business and political life may fail to act normatively in accordance with the structural principles and ordinances of the creation.

It would for this reason be retrogressive for modern men to return to a social form of organization based upon the lines of the medieval guilds. The opening process of human culture itself points this fact out, since the guilds were still part of the undifferentiated medieval society, where the guilds often performed a mixture of industrial, legal, and political functions. Dooyeweerd points out:

Especially when in the later Middle Ages the craft guilds had acquired great political power and in the towns the progress of social differentiation began to reveal itself, these guilds displayed very complicated structural interlacements. Repeatedly we find the following differentiated structures in them interwoven with each other:
1.  the structure of a private, economically qualified trade union;
2.  that of a coercive organization with a public legal sphere of competence derived from the city government, connected with an economic monopoly and the so-called guild ban;
3.  the structure of a part of the political organization of a town on a military basis;
4.  the structure of an ecclesiastical organized group with an altar and church services of its own…
5.  The structures mentioned here are in their turn interwoven with all kinds of features peculiar to an undifferentiated community; the guild as a fraternity, with its common meals and guild feasts, with its duties of mutual aid and assistance in all kinds of circumstances.⁴⁹

It is difficult for modern man to understand the nature of the medieval guild and of the organic social system of which it was an integral part. Medieval society was characterized by the prominence of the small social group. From such organizations as family, guild, village community, and monastery flowed most of the cultural life of the age. Unlike modern society, which is based upon contract, medieval society was based upon status. In the Middle Ages, Jacob Burckhardt has written, "man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category."⁵⁰ The reality of the separate, autonomous individual was as indistinct as that of centralized political power. Both the individual and the State were subordinated to the immense range of association that lay intermediate to the individual and ruler and that included such groups as the patriarchal family, the guild, the church, feudal class, and manorial village.

In his Community and Power, Robert A. Nisbet explains the organic social philosophy underlying medieval social institutions as follows:

"All who are included in a community," wrote Aquinas, "stand in relation to that community as parts to the whole." The immense influence of the whole philosophy of organism and that of the related doctrine of the great chain of being, which saw every element as an infinitesimal gradation of ascent to God, supported and gave reason for the deeply held philosophy of community. Whether it was the divine Kingdom itself or some component mundane association like the family and guild, the whole weight of medieval learning was placed in support of the reality of social wholes, of communities…

The centrality of community was much more than a philosophical principle however. Whether we are dealing with the family, the village, or the guild, we are in the presence of systems of authority and allegiance which were widely held to precede the individual in both origin and right. "It was a distinctive trait of medieval doctrine," Otto von Gierke writes in Political Theories of the Middle Ages, "that within every human group it decisively recognized an aboriginal and active right of the group taken as a whole." As many an institutional historian has discovered, medieval economy and law are simply unintelligible if we try to proceed from modern conceptions of individualism and contract. The group was primary; it was the irreducible unit of the social system at large…

Within the town were innumerable small associations, the guilds – organizations based first upon occupation, to be sure, but also upon sacred obligations of mutual-aid, religious faith, and political responsibility. Here, too, in these urban social organizations we are dealing with structures of authority and function which long resisted the later efforts of businessmen and political rulers to subjugate or destroy them…

The larger philosophy of community unquestionably had its influence, but the major reason for the profound hold of the family and the local community and guild upon human lives was simply the fact that, apart from membership in these and other groups, life was impossible for the vast majority of human beings … The solidarity of each functional group was possible only in an environment of authority where central power was weak and fluctuating. As Ernest Barker has written, the medieval state "abounded in groups and in the practice of what we may call communal self-help because it was not yet itself a fully organised group. When it became such it asserted itself and curtailed the rights of groups with no little vigor." It is indeed this curtailment of group rights by the rising power of the central government that forms one of the most revolutionary movements of modern history.⁵¹

The modern trade union cannot perform all these guild functions in the highly differentiated state now existing in modern society, and it is anachronistic on the part of Tannenbaum to suggest that they do or can. For one thing the modern unified state has a monopoly of armed power in modern society which cannot today be distributed to such non-state associations as labor unions. Again no one in his saner moments really believes that the labor union can or should assume the function of a church or school. The opening process of the historical aspect of God's creation as it has developed in Western society implies (1) the destruction of the undifferentiated social bonds of the medieval guild, (2) the development of the unification and centralization of political authority and the power of the sword of justice in the state, ( 3 ) the advance of the civil rights of the individual, and (4) a harmonious development of all the voluntary institutions and associations outside of the state. It is pre­cisely owing to these four factors that only in the modern state does one find trade unions. Thus Tannenbaum's attempt to identify the modern trade union with the medieval guilds betrays a lack of insight into the historical development of Western society and a confusion with respect to the structures of human bonds as we find them in modern life. He is trying to close what has been "opened."

At the same time we would agree with Tannenbaum in his view that "trade unionism is the conservative movement of our time. It is the counterrevolution. Unwittingly it has turned its back upon most of the political and economic ideas that have nourished Western Europe and the United States during the last two centuries."⁵² From this point of view the trade unions may justly be accused of trying to break the historical norm of differentiation by trying to hold fast to the norm of continuity, and they are thus guilty of holding back the opening process of the historical aspect of reality. If Tannenbaum is correct, by the turn of the twenty-first century membership in a particular trade union may be as important a hereditary right as membership in a medieval guild. Already in one or two craft unions which control apprenticeship strictly it is desirable, if not necessary, to have had a father or grandfather in the craft. Even now, expulsion from a trade union may mean something like a sentence of industrial death. Appeal procedure is cumbersome and often unsatisfactory, and unless a union has broken its own rules, the courts may be unable to intervene. Tannenbaum admits as much when he writes:

The union is a new "society" in which membership has become essential … This new society has a logic and needs of its own, and it lays down conditions and establishes disciplines for both. The worker cannot get any kind of job he wants. He cannot even learn any trade he wants to, because apprenticeship may be limited, the books of the union may be closed, the initiation fees may be high, or the union may discriminate against him by forcing him to pay for a permit to work without offering an opportunity to become a permanent member. His career in the job he gets is circumscribed by the seniority rules. The amount he earns is defined for him, his freedom of movement is circumscribed by the fact he may not be able to enter another industry, or get the same kind of job in another place … If he leaves his union he will lose his job. He must carry out its policies even if he objects to them. His freedom of speech and of criticism is restricted by the fact that local leaders are in a position to do him injury in ways he cannot escape, or for which he cannot find redress because recognition of these grievances has not as yet become part of either the written or the common law, except in his organization…

A union now has powers of "governance" over the lives of its members … Yet it has no adequate common or written law to order the relations between the individual member and the union … The courts have not wished to interfere in the affairs of a private association and have limited their cognizance to those areas where the member was denied orderly procedure and adjudication as determined by the constitution of the union itself.⁵³

The only remedy for this new version of "bastard" feudalism within our society that Tannenbaum can suggest is a system of industrial law and industrial courts to protect the individual from injustice by his union. "The new experiences," he writes, "call for a new judiciary, aware of the special questions that need to be dealt with, but free from the costly and time-consuming practices of the ordinary courts."⁵⁴

In principle Tannenbaum can have no objection to the coercion of the individual worker, for, as a good pragmatist, following in the footsteps of John Dewey's teaching in Human Nature and Conduct,⁵⁵ the question whether a man should be compelled to join and to stay in a labor union against his will is not a matter of principle, but an experimental matter to be decided scientifically by concrete consequences. Since, however, the coercer and the victim will obviously place different evaluations on the consequences, it becomes a major question how such concrete consequences can determine what ought and ought not to be done.

Tannenbaum, by his pragmatism, has landed himself within the camp of the totalitarians. Just as the medieval absolutization of the earthly church ecclesiastical institution resulted in papal totalitarianism, so Tannenbaum's absolutization of the social institution of the labor union has resulted in his justification for this new form of social totalitarianism. If it is true that the labor union is indeed the one perfect and "true society," then no doubt such economic and social domination of the individual worker by the labor union may be justified.

No Christians, however, should subscribe to such a doctrine, since they believe that no earthly institution or association can thus swallow up the individual. God alone is absolute sovereign of the consciences of men. No particular bearer of authority on earth is the highest power, from which other forms of authority are derived. No community or institution, not even the union, must absorb the individual completely. Only the Kingdom of God should absorb all of men's interests. And the Kingdom of God should not, in the collectivist sense, be identified with any temporal organization. According to the biblical teaching a community is characterized by the relationship of authority and obedience. But this authority is always limited, being defined by its own structural principle or creation ordinance. Within human society, therefore, there is no organization such as the state or a labor union which is the whole in which other societies are but parts. Judged by the criterion of the biblical doctrine of sphere sovereignty, of which we shall write later, Tannenbaum thus shows himself to be lacking in a coherent view of man in society, since he favors communal relationships at the expense of individualized relationships. While we would agree with him that economic individualism has tended to depersonalize human beings, we would not agree that the pendulum should now be al­lowed to swing so far in the other collectivist direction that the individual is submerged altogether by the group of which he is a part. A balanced view of human society will seek to find a harmony and balance between the needs and rights of the group and the needs and rights of the individual, between communal and intercommunal bonds, and between the state and other communities and associations of human society. A true society will thus be pluralist, not syndicalist.

Tannenbaum rightly recognizes the great role played by modern trade unions in defeating both the ambitions of economic individualism and of state collectivism and of the police state. But it seems that in place of the leviathan state he would like to establish the leviathan cooperative business enterprises and to abolish the state altogether and so return to a form of guild socialism. Yet this very antistatism itself developed into Laski's theory of economic monism of the Russian communist variety.⁵⁶

While the Christian also objects to the totalitarian state, he, unlike the guild socialists, the syndicalists, and now Tannenbaum, recognizes that the state, as a divinely ordained institution of the creation order, cannot be eliminated from this world as long as the powers of sin and darkness continue to thwart God's purpose for man. Attempts to do so, as in Marx's doctrine and prophecy of the "withering away of the state," and as in the anarchism of the syndicalists, must inevitably result in the substitution of the state's qualifying function of justice and law with another function, that of economic power, and that, as the Soviet experiment has proved, can only lead to an even greater totalitarianism.

It would thus appear that before we can profitably discuss the nature of a trade union and of its proper function in society, we must first discuss the nature of society as a whole and of the way in which its various institutions and associations should cohere. One's view of a trade union is inevitably determined by one's view of society itself. One's view of society in turn depends upon one's view of man's nature and destiny. Tannenbaum's attempt to discuss the nature and function of the modern labor union and to work out a philosophy of labor purely in terms of his functional and pragmatic doctrine of work, and his avoidance of the ultimate issues have prevented him from giving us a clear insight into the basic issues and problems involved. It is the claim of the Roman Catholic Church that it does indeed develop its philosophy of labor and its doctrine of work and labor relationships in terms of its larger philosophy of man in society, and it is therefore the Roman Catholic philosophy of labor we shall now consider.