The combination or the federation of existing organizations is but the natural response of the workers to the ever-growing complexity of modern industrial life.  Ever closer organization on the part of the employers, the welding together of twenty businesses into one corporation, of five corporations into one trust, of all the trusts in the country into one combine, have to be balanced by correspondingly complete organization on the part of the workers.  There is this difference of structure, however, between the organization of employers and that of the employed.  The first is comparatively simple, and is ever making for greater simplicity.  Without going into the disputed question of how far the concentration of business can be carried, and of whether or not the small business man is to be finally pushed out of existence, it is beyond question that every huge business, for example, each one of our gigantic department stores, includes and represents an army of small concerns, which it has replaced, which have either been bought up or driven to the wall.  In either case the same amount of trade, which it once took hundreds of separate small shopkeepers to handle, is now handled by the one firm, under the one management.  Such welding together makes for the economy in running expenses which is its first aim.  But it also makes for simplicity in organization.  It is evidently far easier for the heads of a few immense businesses to come together than it was for the proprietors of the vast agglomeration of tiny factories, stores and offices which once covered the same trade area, or to be quite accurate, a much smaller trade area, to do so.

But if, at the one end of the modern process of production and distribution, we find this tendency towards a magnificent simplicity, at the other, the workers’ end, we have the very same aim of economy of effort and the cheapening of production resulting in an enormously increased complexity.  The actual work performed by each worker is simplified.  But the variety of processes and the consequent allotting of the workers into unrelated groups make for social complexity; render it not easier, but much harder for the workers to come together and to see and make others see through and in spite of all this apparent unlikeness of occupation, common interests and a common need for cooeperative action.

Again, take a factory, such as a cotton mill.  The one firm, before marketing its product, will have employed in its preparation and final disposal till it reaches the consumer, groups engaged in very different occupations, spinners, weavers, porters, stenographers, salesmen, and so on.  The industry which furnished employment to one, or at most, to two groups, has been cut up into a hundred subdivisions, but the workers have still many interests in common, and they need to cling together or suffer from all the disadvantages of unorganized or semi-organized occupations.

The first unions were naturally craft unions.  The men working in the same shop, and at the same processes got together, and said:  “We who do this work must get to know the fellows in the other shops; we must just stick together, make common demands and support one another.”