CHAPTER X
After three days of fruitless search for work, Stephen’s outlook upon life grew very gloomy. Dominion was over-supplied with laborers. In looking backward, Stephen felt that he had applied for every sort of position from bank president to day laborer, but everywhere the answer had been the same: “Sorry, but we have nothing for you. We are even turning off our old workmen.”
In the West, in time of prosperity, positions and opportunities of every sort go begging. In time of depression there is no harder place in which to get work.
To make matters worse, Stephen from principle had always refused to affiliate himself with one of the labor organizations, and in Dominion the power of the Union is paramount. Once he had almost persuaded the foreman at one of the smelters to put him on the rolls; but when the fact had appeared that he was a non-Union man the official had changed his mind.
“I can’t risk it. It is all wrong; but if I was to hire you to-day, why to-morrow I wouldn’t have three men working.” This had been his final answer.
Shortly after this experience, Loring had been approached by a delegate who had tried to persuade him to join the Miners’ Union. The delegate had enumerated the advantages, and they were many,—a sick benefit of ten dollars a week, friends wherever he should go, work at high wages, and a seventy-five dollar funeral when he died. The delegate had asked Stephen if it were fair that when the Union, by concerted action, had brought about the prevailing high scale of wages, outsiders should both share the advantage, and yet weaken the Union position by working contrary to the fixed scale. At the end, as a peroration, the man had cited the possibilities of crushing capital at the polls, arguing with the general point of view of such men, that the chief aim of capital was to crush labor.
“You needn’t pay your dues until you get your first month’s wages,” he had concluded.