UNION SCABS.

Industrial Unionist, Volume 1, Issue 16, 15 November 1913, Page 3

UNION SCABS.

AAD OTHERS.

(An Exerpt.)

There are three kinds of scabs —tile professional, the amateur, and the union scab. The professional scab is usually a high-paid, high-skilled worker in the employer of strike breaking, and detective agencies. His position is that of a special officer in the regular scab army.

The amateur scab brigade is composed of riff raff, slum dwellers, imbeciles, college students, and other undesirable citizens.

Professional scabs are few and efficient. Amateur scabs are plentiful and deficient, and union scabs both numerous and capable. The professional scab knows what he is doing, does it well, and for the sake of the long green only. The amateur scab, posing as a free born citizen, who scorns to be fettered by union rules and regulations, gets much glory ( ?), little pay r and when the strike is over he is given an honourable discharge in the region where Darwin searched for the missing link. The union scab receive pay less than the professional scab, works better than the amateur scab, and don’t know that he is a scab. He will take a pattern from a scab pattern maker, cast it in a union mould, hand the casting to as lousy a scab as ever walked in shoe leather, and then proudly produce a paid up union card in testimony of his unionism. Way down in his heart he seems io have a lurking suspicion that there is something not altogether right in his actions, and ]t is characteristic of the union man who co-operates with scabs that lie is every ready to flash a union card in the face of innocent bystanders. He don’t know that a rose under any othername is just as fragrant ; he don’t know that calling a cat a canary won’t make the feline sing, and he don’t know that helping to run a shop while other workers bend all their energies in the opposite direction is scabbing. He relies on the name and seeks refuge behind a little pasteboard card.

When a strike is declared it becomes the chief duty of the organisation to effect a complete shut-down of the plant. For that purpose warnings are mailed, or wired, to other places, to prevent working men from moving on the afflicted city. Pickets are stationed around the plant or factory, or harbour, to stop workers from taking the places of the strikers. Amateur scabs are coaxed, persuaded, or bullied away from the seat of the strike. Persuasion having no effect on the professional strike breaker, he is sometimes treated to a brickbat shower. Shut down the plant; shut it down completely, is the watchword of the strike.

Now, while all these things are going on and men are stopped in ones and twos, a steady stream pours through the gate. Why are they not molested? Oh, they're union men, belonging to a different craft than the one on strike. Instead of brickbats and insults it’s “ Hello, John; hello, Jim; howdy, Jack,” and other expressions of good fellowship.

The “ 57 Varieties.” You see, this is a carriage factory, and it is • only the Amalgamated Association of Brimstone and Emery Polishers that are striking. The Brotherhood of Oil Pag Wipers, the Fraternal Society of White Lead Daubers, the Lndivided Sons of Varnish Spreaders, the Benevolent Compilation of Wood Work Gluers, the Iron Benders’ Sick and Death Benefit Union, the Oakdale Lodge of Coal Shovelers, the Martha Washington Lodge of Ash Wheelers, the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Oilers, the Engineers’ Protective Lodge, the Stationery Firemen, the F.0.0.L., the A.S.S.E.S. Societies have nothing to do with the Amalgamated Association of Brimstone and Emery Polishers. At the next regular meeting of those, societies, ringing resolutions endorsing the strike of the Amalgamated Association of Brimstone and Emery Polishers will be passed. Moral support is pledged, and five dollars’ worth of tickets are purchased for the dance given by the Ladies’ Volunteer Auxiliary Corps for the benefit of the Amalgamated Association of Brimstone and Emery Polishers. The whole thing is like beating a man’s brains out and then handing him a headache tablet.

During a very bitterly fought moulders’ strike in a northern city the writer noticed one of the prettiest illustrations of the workings of plain scabbing and union scabbing. A dense mass of strikers and sympathisers had assembled in front of the factory waiting the exit of the strikebreakers. On they came, scabs and unionists in one dark mass. Stones, rotten eggs, and other missiles began to fly, when one of the strikebreakers leaped on a store box and shouted frantically: “ Stop it, stop it; for ’s sake stop it, you are hitting more unionists than scabs; you can’t tell the difference.” That’s it; whenever scabs and union men work harmoniously in the strike breaking industry all hell can’t tell the difference. To the murky conception of a union scab, scabbing is only wrong when practised by a non-union man. To him the union card is a kind of a scab permit that guarantees him immunity from insults, brickbats, and rotten eggs. After having instructed a green bunch of amateur scabs in the art of brimstone and emery polishing all day, he meets a striking brother in the evening and forthwith demonstrates his unionism by setting up the drinks for the latter. Union scabbing is the legitimate offspring of craft organisation. It is begotten by ignorance, born of imbecility, and nourished by infamy.

My dear brother, I am sorry to be under contract to hang you, but I know it will please you to hear that the scaffold is built by union carpenters, the rope bears the label, and here is my card.