When labor organizes

A UNION organizer has been assigned by his na tional office to the task of forming a local union in a section of the country to which organized labor has never penetrated. The shop upon which the union has designs pays lower wages and runs for longer hours than those in the organized area of the industry. This threatens the standards which the union is trying to maintain. Some of the employers whose shops have been unionized have been protesting to the national officers that if the union does not push up the wages and shorten the hours in the unorganized shops, the union shops will be driven out of business. This pressure in addition to the national officers' desire to extend their membership leads to the decision to assign an organizer to "that sweatshop down in Tomkinstown."

The organizer, whom we shall call John O'Mara, arrives in Tomkinstown by train and puts up at a modest hotel. The seven dollars a day plus a restricted expense account which the union allows him does not permit lavish ex penditures. He has a wife and two children whose de mands are increasing as school age comes on and he always hopes that he can save a little out of his expense account to add to his weekly salary. Each week, however, he finds his expenses cutting in a little on his salary and although his wife doesn't say anything, O'Mara feels it necessary to explain to her that he met a couple of old-timers who were dead beat and he just couldn't turn them down. O'Mara has a brogue as broad as his smile, is physically robust, has a high-school education and is intelligent. He is not too good-looking to be considered dangerous by the men among their women, consequently both men and women like him. Having hung up his extra suit on the only coat hanger

in the hotel room closet, O'Mara washes the soot from his hands and face and goes out for a walk. As far as he knows there is no trace of the labor movement in Tomkinstown he engages and he has no acquaintances there. He decides that he needs a shoe shine and while this is in process the bootblack in conversation. He is in luck. The boot black turns out to be the town's leading liberal. A reference to an article in The New Republic hazarded by O'Mara as a feeler brings an easy reply from the bootblack and O'Mara knows that he is on safe ground. Guarded in quiries disclose the fact that there are a "coupla old union men" at the post office, a retired professor who is regarded by some as a "radical," and a few men at the shop who are "pretty griped" by the conditions there. O'Mara pays for his shine and goes to call on the people the bootblack has told him about. They give him a line on conditions in the town and the shop and, after following two or three leads, he secures a list of workers who might be interested.