[Footnote 86: Locomotive Engineers' Journal, Vol. 22, p. 33.]

The insurance features have further been the means of securing and
retaining members and thus building up these trade organizations as
factors in collective bargaining. The power of the brotherhoods to
secure satisfactory agreements with their employers is largely measured
by the strength of the organizations, and that strength is usually in
direct proportion to the development of their insurance systems. Thus
not only is insurance a prime support in the collective bargaining of
the unions, but it insures control in the exercise of that function. The
infrequency of railroad strikes may be attributed largely to the almost
perfect control of the head officials of the brotherhoods over their
membership.




CHAPTER II.


DEATH BENEFITS.

The most needed trade-union benefits are those against death and these
were the first to be established. At the present time about one half of
American national trade unions maintain death benefit systems. In 1904,
out of a total of one hundred and seventeen national unions affiliated
with the American Federation of Labor, fifty-three were paying death
benefits.[87] Of those unions not affiliated with the American
Federation of Labor, ten were also paying such benefits.