ted a
new principle which, if generally adopted, was apparently destined to
revolutionize the structure of American labor organizations. The
Alliance purported to be a federation of the "basic" trades in the
industry, and in reality it did represent an _entente_ of the big and
aggressive unions. The latter were moved to federate not only for the
purpose of forcing the struggle against the employers, but also of
expanding at the expense of the "non-basic" or weak unions, besides
seeking to annihilate the last vestiges of the International Building
Trades' Council. The Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, probably the
most aggressive union in the American Federation of Labor, was the
leader in this movement. From the standpoint of the Federation, the
Structural Alliance was at best an extra-legal organization, as it did
not receive the latter's formal sanction, but the Federation could
scarcely afford to ignore it as it had ignored the International
Building Trades' Council. Thus in 1908 the Alliance was "legitimatized"
and made a "Department" of the American Federation of Labor, under the
name of the Building Trades' Department, with the settlement of
jurisdictional disputes as its main function. It was accompanied by
departments of metal trades, of railway employes, of miners, and by a
"label" department.

It is not, however, open to much doubt that the Department was not a
very successful custodian of the trade autonomy principle.
Jurisdictional disputes are caused either by technical changes, which
play havoc with official "jurisdiction," or else by a plain desire on
the part of the stronger union to encroach upon the province of the
weaker one. When the former was the case and the struggle happened to be
between unions of equal strength and influence, it generally terminated
in a compromise. When, however, the combatants were two unions of
unequal strength, the doctrine of the supremacy of the "basic" unions
was generally made to prevail in the end. Such was the outcome of the
struggle between the carpenters and joiners on the one side and the wood
workers on the other and also between the plumbers and steam fitters. In
each case it ended in the forced amalgamation of the weaker union with
the stronger one, upon the principle that there must be only one union
in each "basic" trade. In the case of the steam fitters, which was
settled at the convention at Rochester in 1912, the Federation gave what
might be interpre