The problem of scabs...

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

So this is one of the most contentious issues in organized labor and the class struggle: What is to be done about scab labor and those who hire them?

Now, there are two kinds of scab labor. First, there's the labor which is provided by various companies whose sole business is providing scabs for various places during labor disputes. The other kind is the worker who does not take part in a strike action, but instead crosses the picket line to work.

I've read some old IWW literature, and other things from the history of the labor movement. Their views were pretty clear: Threats, broken windows, busted kneecaps, slashing tires, etc.

The reasoning, of course, is pretty clear. Strike actions are the point when the class struggle is at its most naked. All bets are off. Victory depends on keeping the strike going until the other side is willing to negotiate and capitulate to demands. The strike must continue, by any means necessary.

Now, I can almost sympathize with the second (i.e. independent) kind of scab laborer....because let's face it, money is already hard to come by and during a strike, that's even harder.

But the first kind? Fuck them. When those buses come, slash those tires and hurl a few bricks through those windows. Those bastards don't deserve your pity.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

It's not about pity. We don't base our analysis on whether someone has a sad story behind them - almost anyone does. The point is that scabbing hurts the proletariat, and as such we are against it, even if the scab was raising money to help his adorable slightly Dickensian children, who all have tuberculosis, to survive.

[Art Vandelay]

No sympathy for scabs of any sort. The IWW had it right - the strike must continue by any means necessary. As Jack London once said:


No man has a right to scab as long as there is a pool of water deep enough to drown his body in, or a rope long enough to hang his carcass with..

[Sewer Socialist]

It's understandable why scabs do what they do, but that doesn't mean that we support what they do, or that we shouldn't stop them.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Now, I can almost sympathize with the second (i.e. independent) kind of scab laborer....because let's face it, money is already hard to come by and during a strike, that's even harder.


Yeah I think this comes out of a failure of most of labor, at least in the u.s.

Someone can be a "innocent" seeming scab because most strikes have come to use pickets and work stoppages as performance rather than a tactic (for a variety of reasons) and the labor movement has failed and bureaucratic leaders indifferent or hostile to making a strike by a section of workers (edit... More than) a sectional issue, a class issue. So unionists observe picket lines more for moral reasons (broadly, of course there are still militants and radicals out there) while other union workers or nonunion working class people think, fuck it, I'll cross the line coz I really need to take the bus today.

If everything is just induviduals or specific occupations, then best of luck to those grocery store workers, but that store has some good deals.

So for many scabs then, there's no stake and a short-term paycheck makes a lot more sense than vague notions of solidarity when you have to compete for jobs anyway.

In more militant times the class line can become clearer and being a scab has to become more of a political or conscious choice rather than just negligent "looking out for number one, I'm just trying to make rent this month".

Fuck them either way but the weakness of labor and business unionism strategies is a weak picket against scabbing.

[Creative Destruction]

This kind of gets into hairy issues that cross with immigration. I'm pretty sure (after speaking to and working with some immigrants in Texas) that they're not aware that they're brought onto pressure the rest of the workforce. They're scabs by incident, not really by choice. And it isn't a new thing. Back in the 70s when the UFW was in its hey-day, Caesar Chavez organized deportations because farmers were using immigrant workers to break strikes.

This points to a breakdown in the labor movement. If we were in a more radicalized atmosphere, where there was stronger class unity, I'd be more inclined to give much of a shit about scabs. As it is, I can't really muster much outrage for this in particular, unless it's an outright ideological snuff (non-union workers crossing the line to stick it to the union, etc.) Before we can get to a point where something like this actually matters, we need to get a sense of unity back. You can't really build that on the picket line, as of these days anyway.

eta. lol:

http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2014/02/12/tristram-hunt-mocked-for-crossing-picket-line-to-deliver-lec

[BIXX]

Really workplace e unity is so fucking hard to cone by anyway. I'm not too worried about scabs at this point in my life, but fucking do good snitches. Fuck those two faced pieces of shit.

[Devrim]

Have any of the people saying it's not important actually been on strike?

Scabbing is not acceptable. 870 is right. It's not about feeling sympathy for somebody who has kids, and doesn't want to strike.

Considering that many strikes nowadays are just token one day stoppages, the 'I can't afford to strike' argument is hardly relevant. The longest I've ever been on strike for was three and a half weeks (we were paid weekly). It's tough. We had no strike pay, and like many workers, lots of people there were one pay packet from disaster. Nobody scabbed though.

In the mid to late 80s, I worked at a place where there was one worker who had scabbed in a previous strike, and nobody spoke to him. The previous strike had taken place in 1971.

As for violence against scabs, it's a tactical matter. It's not a good thing in itself. The good situation is when you can stop people outside work, and persuade them to join you. Violence against scabs is generally a sign of weakness. It shows that their is Dickson amongst the workers. Sometimes it's neccesary though.

Devrim

[Mr. Piccolo]

I agree with most responses here. I don't have much sympathy for scabs Solidarity in the workplace is extremely tough to maintain as it is.

[Blake's Baby]

...

Now, there are two kinds of scab labor. First, there's the labor which is provided by various companies whose sole business is providing scabs for various places during labor disputes. The other kind is the worker who does not take part in a strike action, but instead crosses the picket line to work...

What is the difference here?

Seems to me that case 1 is usually 'temp workers who are being bussed into a situation they may know nothing about' and situation 2 is 'deliberately going against your workmates'.

So, I'd say 2 is worse, if anything. The workers in 1 also have Dickensian children starving somewhere, probably (as I'm in the UK), Poland.

One problem that exists in UK strikes (especially public sectors strikes) is that there is no solidarity expected across union lines - I don't know what it's like elsewhere. In the UK, there are about 6 million unionised workers out of a workforce of more than 30 million. Co-incidentally, the public sector is about 6.5 million people. The overlap isn't exact but the majority of unionised workers are in public-sector jobs.

In education there are 2 main unions for schoolteachers (and about 6 smaller unions), the lecturers' union, and the union(s) that some support staff belong to. If the NUT (National Union of Teachers) organises a strike, NAS-UWT (National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers) and Unite (or is it Unison? The ancillary staff union anyway) will usually instruct their members to cross the picket line. Same thing happens with different unions in the health service or in local government. Sometimes there are simultaneous strikes by Unite and Unison, but not often, and they only tend to be a day or even 4 hours, especially in the health service. So you're only 'really' a scab if you're a union member of the union on strike and cross the picket line. Otherwise you can claim that 1-it's not your union on strike and your union has told you to cross the picket line or 2-you're not a union member anyway.

I have literally never heard of a non-union member refusing to take the better pay and conditions a strike might have won however. I wonder why that is?

[Devrim]

I think that you shouldn't cross. When I worked at the GPO for example we never crossed anyone's picket lines although it obviously came up quite often.

Devrim

[Lord Testicles]

Yeah, you shouldn't cross a picket line even if it's not your unions picket.


So you're only 'really' a scab if you're a union member of the union on strike and cross the picket line. Otherwise you can claim that 1-it's not your union on strike and your union has told you to cross the picket line or 2-you're not a union member anyway.

I disagree with this, if someone crosses the picket line they are a scab regardless of if their union isn't striking or worse still, actively tells it's members to cross because that person is still strike breaking.

[consuming negativity]

has there ever been a case of one union crossing another's picket line? it seems a bit absurd that the union itself would engage in anti-union activity against other unions...

[Devrim]

has there ever been a case of one union crossing another's picket line? it seems a bit absurd that the union itself would engage in anti-union activity against other unions...

Er...yes...lots of them.

Devrim

[Invader Zim]

The last time there was an industrial action at one of the places where I work virtually everybody scabbed because, as they saw it, when they voted for industrial action they were voting for somethig other than what the union chiefs actually then called. Thankfully, I was working elsewhere that day.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I recently broke off a friendship with a person over them scabbing. He was a supervisor at one location and workers at another site had gone on a wildcat strike over healthcare. The company then bussed in supervisors to work the site. His complaint was that the strikers swore at him as they drove through the gates, oh boohoo for you. Fuck scabs

[Creative Destruction]

One problem that exists in UK strikes (especially public sectors strikes) is that there is no solidarity expected across union lines - I don't know what it's like elsewhere.

In the US, not only is it not expected, but solidarity strikes are illegal.

[Blake's Baby]

Yeah, you shouldn't cross a picket line even if it's not your unions picket.



I disagree with this, if someone crosses the picket line they are a scab regardless of if their union isn't striking or worse still, actively tells it's members to cross because that person is still strike breaking.

I'm not saying it's my view, I'm saying it seems to be a prevailing view among workers at these establishments. When unions are telling workers to cross other unions' picket lines it's pretty bad I think.

[Creative Destruction]

Have any of the people saying it's not important actually been on strike?

I haven't, but that's kind of my point. The working class in the United States does not have the requisite sort of unity (even at a small level) to hold meaningful strikes to begin with. The first thing begets the other, not the other way around. You're not going to win a strong working class through strike actions if the will of the working class just isn't there to begin with. In this sense, scabs crossing picket lines do not have the impact of betraying your fellow workers as it would have been here in, say, the 20s to the 60s.

To be clear, I have been around strikes and I have not crossed any lines, nor would I. But I also do not throw shit in the way of some workers who found themselves in that circumstance unless it's for an expressly ideological reason; meaning, they actively realized what they were doing it and were doing it for a purpose. There are many workers who will be bussed in or brought into a workplace and not even realize that this is the reason they're being brought on, as is the case -- like I said -- with many immigrant workers.

I'd be more strongly of the opinion against scabs, regardless of their circumstance, if I lived in a country that clearly had those lines drawn. There isn't really an excuse for that unless you live under a pile of rocks. It's a little bit different in countries where there is, to be perfectly blunt, no labor movement to speak of, though. I mean, I can think of one or two cases, during the fast food strikes here organized by the IWW, where no one actually realized there was a picket line. I don't want to get too mean about it, but many strikes in the US amount to performance art, basically.

[Sewer Socialist]

In the US, not only is it not expected, but solidarity strikes are illegal.

Refusals to cross picket lines are often legal and protected by law.

It's true that solidarity strikes, aka sympathy strikes or secondary strikes, are illegal, but workers and unions still have the right not to cross pickets without themselves being on strike. I believe this is protected as "concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining" in a workplace, via the National Labor Relations Act (aka the Wagner Act). It doesn't apply outside of a specific picketed workplace, however. So, the truck drivers' union may refuse to cross a picket line of food workers, for example, but must continue to do the rest of their work. This only applies to legal pickets.

Even pickets which are not related to a workplace, like a protest, may be legally respected. The MLRA (aka Taft-Hartley) gives the right to refuse to work under dangerous working conditions, and the union might declare that crossing picket lines is dangerous; the ILWU refused to cross pickets of demonstrations against Apartheid in the 1980s.

Of course, unions often agree to contracts which prohibit this.

There is some sort of loophole that employers often use at construction sites, which is to declare separate entrances for different contractors. I don't really understand why this works legally, to be honest, but you will often see a worksite setup with a chainlink fence with seemingly superfluous gates in it; recently this was observable at Terminal 5 at the Port of Portland with CGT.

Workers refusing to cross picket lines may find that the employer has hired scabs to do so, however.

As far as one union scabbing another, you can find many examples, especially by the Teamsters: http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2014/10/ilwu-waste-management-strike-teamster.html

[Creative Destruction]

Refusals to cross picket lines are often legal and protected by law.

Okay, but that's not what I was talking about.

[Sewer Socialist]

Ah. I misunderstood.