Perhaps some day the real history of the labor movement may be
written, but not now. We are too close to events to get proportions,
or to estimate the dynamic power of policies, movements, or men
--things are yet too warm from human contact to be estimated
coolly and impartially.--SAMUEL GOMPERS

MORE than twenty years have elapsed since I chose the subject
"Trade Union Interest in Production" for an honors paper at
Wellesley College, later expanding it into a doctoral dissertation at
Radcliffe College in 1933. At that time considerable public interest
was focused on various experiments in union-management co-
operation which seemed to promise a veritable revolution in trade
union thought and techniques. Reviewing the report of the Com-
mittee on Recent Economic Changes ( 1929), Wesley Mitchell ob-
served:

Perhaps none of the changes reported here will prove more important
in the long run than the changes in the economic theories on which
the American Federation of Labor and certain outside unions are act-
ing. That organizations of wage earners should grasp the relations be-
tween productivity and wages, and that they should take the initiative
in pressing constructive plans for increasing efficiency upon employers,
is not wholly without precedent; but the spread of such ideas and the
vigor with which they are acted upon by large organizations must startle
those who have believed that trade unions are brakes upon economic
progress. ¹

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