LABOR: Impotent Banks

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In a long article in The American Federationist, official organ of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers declares labor banks to be no panacea for industrial strife.

" So far as any fundamental change in the modern industrial world is concerned," says Mr. Gompers, " the wage-earners need not look for reconstruction or reconstitution through the establishment of labor banks and particularly through the establishment of labor banks under existing laws. Labor banks must conform to banking laws and these laws themselves constitute an insuperable bar to any but the most modest and limited reforms."

True to his life-long contention that the strike is organized labor's one effective and indispensable weapon, Mr. Gompers warned labor to beware of capitalistic and reactionary propaganda which would persuade the laboring man that co-operative labor banks may do away with the need for strikes. "The necessity for the strike will cease," he says, " only when there are no longer conditions imposed upon wage earners against their will and to which they cannot agree."