trol than the Railway Employes' Department now does. It would have to have full sway over the bargaining and striking activities of all the railroad metal trade workers, and be financed with portions of their dues to correspond. Nothing short of this would do, because genuine solidarity and unity of action is out of the question in an industry if one or more outside organizations have to be consulted and harmonized before definite action can be taken.
in other words, the industrial union would handle the immediate interests of the shop mechanics in the railroad industry, and the craft unions would look after their more remote interests in other industries, their fraternal benefits, etc. Such an arrangement would, of course, throw the weight of the affiliation to the industrial union. The railroad metal trades worker would be a railroad man first and a boilermaker or machinist second. But even this double affiliation could hardly be considered final. Sooner or later the movement would reach the stage that it has in Continental Europe, where the shop mechanics usually belong entirely to the railroad industrial unions and have no connections whatever, except a free transfer, with the metal trades unions. But it will take a lot of education before we come to that. The bi-union system of control will probably have to be used for considerable time.
