Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CAUSES OF FRICTION AND UNREST LABOR'S INDUSTRIAL DEMANDS1 Causes of Labor Unrest The present Labor unrest is due to many causes, and it is important to separate those which are permanent from those which are temporary. Among the latter we may note especially the high cost of living, the large amount of unemployment, and the anxiety to which this gives rise, a certain impatience due to the exhaustion and strain of a long war, uncertainty as to the method of fulfillment of the promises given to trade unions, the knowledge that many people have made enormous profits out of a world disaster, and the belief that a nation which can find £7,000,000 a day for war, over a period of years, can afford to maintain its workers on a scale that formerly seemed well-nigh impossible. Moreover, there is a strong feeling among the workers that the psychological moment for them to improve their lot has arrived, and that if they fail to take the fullest possible advantage of it, such an opportunity may never occur again. They think that industrial conditions, in a year or two, will have settled down, for good or evil, into a groove, and then it will be a slow and laborious process to change them. But underneath these temporary causes of unrest, there are others which are permanent, and only as we succeed in removing these can we hope for any enduring settlement. Briefly, the permanent causes are four. First, the workers, better educated, more alert, more conscious both of their disabilities and of their strength than they have ever been before, are determined to secure a standard of living which, at the very least, will raise them above the poverty line. They refuse to believe that it is an essential condition of modern society that the great mass of them, year after year, should constantl...