A Brighter May Day

May 1 this year finds a far different condition in the labor world than that which prevailed a year ago.

Last May Day we had 550,000 coal miners from the anthracite and bituminous fields on strike; 1,200,000 railroad shop and maintenance of way men were promoting the strike that affected about half their number a month later; the textile workers of New England and the South were facing reduced wages and the miserable conditions of employment that always accompany business depression; the metal trades suffered from similar phenomena of " hard times."

Now the coal miners in every field are at work. The shopmen's strike is over, except for sporadic guerrilla warfare, and substantial wage increases are in the offing. The textile industry has declared a general increase in pay which will recover most of the wage losses suffered during the business slump of the past two years. A sarcity of common and skilled labor has turned the market in labor's favor in every industry except the shoe industry where radical unions are waging a die-hard fight with opportunist employers. The only deadlock in the labor situation is in the building trades where employers and the unions are still dickering for new wage scales in the New York field, involving 115,000 men.

The attempt of the radicals to " bore within " American Federation of Labor unions has been steadily on the decline, but the movement persists. William Z. Foster and his Trade Union Educational League are directing their main attack upon the United Mine Workers, whose officials are conservative but whose rank and file are known to be extremely susceptible to the radical propaganda.