ECONOMICS AND THE WORKER

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 4, 1 May 1913, Page 3

ECONOMICS AND THE WORKER

“ To strike or not to strike” is not a question for which the average worker needs any argument other than his own instincts. Yards of statistics have been collected, time and time, to prove the strike a 'profitless weapon. Thousands of articles have been written condemnatory of such an uncivilised method of checking starvation. Thousands of sermons have been preached, deploring such an unbrotherly, un-Christian proceeding as the strike; but the worker stands unperturbed. He goes on striking. And every year the number of strikes increases, more and more workers are involved, and wider grows the strike area. Now, what is the matter with the strike weapon ? It conforms exactly with everyday commercial custom. It is businesslike and up-to-date. The New Zealand dairy farmers, in order to maintain high prices, allow only a certain quantity of butter to go on the market for consumption in New Zealand. The rest is packed off elsewhere. The New Zealand dairy farmer may be very patriotic on occasion, but he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn for the New Zealander when the price of butter is in question. The more butter he can export to other countries, the higher its price in his own. If there is much butter in the market, it will be cheap. If only a little, it will be dear. Naturally. And the dairymen see to it that it is dear, too. They withhold their commodity—butter—towards that end.

The workers have a commodity—their labour-power. If they withhold it from the labour market, in other words, if they strike, they create a shortage, a livelier demand, and, consequently, the price of labour power—wages —tends to rise. The scab is the first to receive the benefit of this economic law; he gets a bonus. If sufficient scabs cannot be found to break the strike, the rebels win, their wages rise. But these wages can be maintained only through the workers’ power again to withhold their commodity, their labour energy; in short, through the strength of their organisation. Does it not follow, then, that the workers can never dictate wages until they have the power of a monopoly over their own commodity ?

To organise into One Big Union of all and sundry, is to form such a monopoly, and the Social General Strike is its logical expression. —A. 11.