1 One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
2 In May the agreement between the packers and the unions expired, and a new agreement had to be signed.
3 For fully a week they were quite blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all their troubles.
4 There were one or two of these incidents each day, the newspapers detailing them, and always blaming them upon the unions.
5 All this was in June; and before long the question was submitted to a referendum in the unions, and the decision was for a strike.
6 In the end Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than one Irishman to scare him into a union.
7 Before another month was by, all the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union buttons conspicuously and with pride.
8 In the city there was a combination of employers, representing hundreds of millions of capital, and formed for the purpose of crushing the labor unions.
9 They made an offer to submit the whole question at issue to arbitration; and at the end of ten days the unions accepted it, and the strike was called off.
10 He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting for their rights.
11 He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in a far different spirit.
12 In Chicago these latter were receiving, for the most part, eighteen and a half cents an hour, and the unions wished to make this the general wage for the next year.
13 The packers, of course, had spies in all the unions, and in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain number of the union officials, as many as they thought they needed.
14 Such were the stockyards during the strike; while the unions watched in sullen despair, and the country clamored like a greedy child for its food, and the packers went grimly on their way.
15 Yet ten years before, when there were no unions in Packingtown, there was a strike, and national troops had to be called, and there were pitched battles fought at night, by the light of blazing freight trains.
16 Chicago was the industrial center of the country, and nowhere else were the unions so strong; but their organizations did the workers little good, for the employers were organized, also; and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as the unions were broken up the men were coming over to the Socialists.
17 There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers' union who came to see Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him.
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