Selected Sabotage

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 5, 1 June 1913, Page 1

Selected Sabotage

1. The workers . . . could all tell about sabotage, and how in some stages of their contests they silently, by verbal agreement, would turn their own sabotage work in, in order to show the employers that they could use these things to their own advantage. Whether justifiable or not, it is being done. No amount of sophistry on the part of those who may be shocked will convince the workers that they are wrong in sometimes turning the tables against the capitalists.

The withdrawal of that efficiency to turn the fraud of capitalists into profits may run counter to the ethical standard of moralists, but affects the most vulnerable part of the exploiter—the pocket-book.-The withdrawal of the efficiency of the railroad service, by the railroad clerk misdirecting the loading bills, and freight handlers putting wrong tags of destination on the cars* may cause a confusion hard to untangle, even partial paralysation, but to the capitalist it has often brought home the lesson that, even if the worker is an attachment to his job, and is supposed to have no brain for himself, this withdrawal of that brain and efficiency is able to paralyse industries and prompt the employer in making terms for the employee under which he again turns in his efficiency on the job he holds. —W. E. Trautmann.