[47] By separate occupations, railway conductors,
brakemen, and locomotive engineers were from 50-100 percent organized;
printers, locomotive firemen, molders and plasterers, from 30-50
percent; bakers, carpenters, plumbers, from 15-30 percent organized.[48]
Accompanying the numerical growth of labor organizations was an
extension of organization into heretofore untouched trades as well as a
branching out into new geographical regions, the South and the West. On
the whole, however, though the Federation was not unmindful of the
unskilled, still, during the fifteen years after 1898 it brought into
its fold principally the upper strata of semi-skilled labor. Down to the
"boom" period brought on by the World War, the Federation did not
comprise to any great extent either the totally unskilled, or the
partially skilled foreign-speaking workmen, with the exception of the
miners and the clothing workers. In other words, those below the level
of the skilled trades, which did gain admittance, were principally the
same elements which had asserted their claim to organization during the
stormy period of the Knights of Labor.
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