As industry became more highly specialized, there slipped in, especially during the last fifty years or so, a disintegrating tendency.  The workers in what had been one occupation, found themselves now practicing but a small fraction of what had been their trade.  They were performing new processes, handling novel tools and machinery unheard of before.  The organizations became divided up into what were nominally craft unions, in reality only process unions.  Or if a new organization was formed, it was but a mere clipping off the whole body of operatives.  And these unions, too, would probably have their international organization, to which they could turn to come in touch with brother workers, similarly qualified and employed.  There is necessarily involved an element of weakness in any organization, however extensive, built up upon so limited a foundation, unless the membership has other local and occupational affiliations as well.  So, to meet this defect, there have been formed all sorts of loose aggregations of unions, and almost every day sees fresh combinations formed to meet new needs as these arise.  Within the wide bounds of the American Federation itself exist the state federations, also city federations, which may include the unions in adjoining cities, even though these are in different states, such as the Tri-City Federation, covering Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois.  The district councils, again, are formed from representatives of allied trades or from widely different branches of the same trade, such as the councils of the building trades, and the allied printing trades.  There are the international unions (more properly styled continental) covering the United States and the Dominion of Canada.  With these are affiliated the local unions of a trade or of a whole industry, sometimes, from all over the continent of North America.  Among these the most catholic in membership are such broadly organized occupations as the united mine-workers, the garment-workers, the ladies’ garment-workers, the iron, steel and tin-plate workers.  An international union composed of separate unions of the one trade, or a state or a city federation of local unions of many trades, bears the same relation to the component single unions as does the union itself to the individual workers; so we find that all these various and often changing expressions of the trade-union principle are accepted and approved of today.

Even more significant are other groupings which may be observed forming among the rank and file of the union men and women themselves.

Sometimes these groups combine with the full approval of the union leaders, local and international.  Sometimes they are more in the nature of an insurgent body, either desiring greater liberty of self-government for themselves, or questioning the methods of the organization’s leaders, and desiring to introduce freer, more democratic and more modern methods into the management of the parent organization.  This may take the form of a district council, and in at least one noteworthy instance, the employes of one large corporation send their representatives to a joint board, for purposes of collective bargaining.