Chapter 30 The Scab
One of the most universally shared attitudes is that the scab is a wretched character.
He is unscrupulous and sneakily in league with the boss.
Together, scab and boss plot to deprive union workers of their rights
and of the jobs that are legitimately theirs.
Scabs are hired to force union workers to accept lower wages.
When it becomes known that scabs are also used to beat up union workers and pickets,
the case is virtually complete.
The scab is the greatest enemy of the worker.
These are the facts that are taught in many of our centers of learning, to be challenged
only at the risk of one's reputation as a scholar.
Nevertheless, this flummery must be refuted.
The first point to establish is that a job is not a thing which can be owned by a worker
or by anyone else.
A job is the manifestation of a trade between a worker and an employer.
The worker trades his labor for the money of the employer at some mutually agreeable
rate of exchange.
So when we speak of my job, we are only talking figuratively.
Although we are in the habit of using such phrases as my job, my customer and my tailor,
we do not presume ownership in any of these instances.
Take first the case of my customer.
If this phrase were taken literally, it would denote that the merchant has an ownership
right over the custom of the people who habitually buy from him.
He would own the customer's patronage, and he would, therefore, have a right to object
if his customer patronized another merchant.
The sword cuts both ways.
Let us take the case of my tailor.
If we were to take this phrase literally, we would have to say that the tailor may not
shut down his shop, relocate or declare himself bankrupt without the permission of the customers.
He is their tailor.
In both these cases, of course, it is clear that the possessive pronoun is not meant to
imply literal possession.
Clearly, neither buyer or seller has the right to insist upon the permanence of a business
relationship, unless, of course, a long-term contract has been agreed upon by both parties.
One and only then would the merchant and the customer have the right to object if either
party ended the relationship without the consent of the other.
Now let us consider my job.
What is the worker implying when he objects to the scab taking his job away?
The worker is arguing as though he owned the job.
He is, in other words, assuming that service, after a certain period of time, obligates
the employer to the employee as strictly as if they had agreed to a contract.
But in fact, the employer has never obligated himself contractually.
One wonders how the workers would react if the principle upon which their anti-scab feeling
is based were adopted by the employer.
How would they feel if employers assumed the right to forbid long-term workers from leaving
their employment?
What if he accused another employer who dared to hire his worker of being a scab?
Yet the situation is entirely symmetrical.
Clearly there is something wrong with an argument which asserts that once people voluntarily
by what shift in logic is a voluntary relationship converted into a strictly involuntary relationship?
Hiring an individual does not imply slave-holding rights over that person, nor does having worked
for an employer give one the right to a job.
It should be evident that the worker never owns the job, that it is not his job.
The scab, therefore, is guilty of no irregularity when he takes the job which the worker formerly
held.
The issue of violence between workers and scabs is a separate issue.
The initiation of violence is condemnable, and when scabs initiate violence, they deserve
our censure.
But the initiation of violence is not their defining characteristic.
When they engage in it, they do so as individuals, not as scabs qua scabs.
Milkmen, after all, sometimes go berserk and commit aggression against non-aggressors.
No one would take this as proof that the delivery of milk is an intrinsically evil enterprise.
In like manner, the use of illegitimate violence on the part of scabs does not render the
enterprise of scabbing illegitimate.
In recent times, the muddled and inconsistent thinking about scabs has become increasingly
evident.
Liberals, traditionally most vociferous in denouncing scabs, have of late shown signs
of confusion on this issue.
They have come to realize that in virtually all cases the scabs are poorer than the workers
they seek to replace, and liberals have almost always championed the poor worker.
Also the specter of racism has been raised.
In many cases black scabs have been pitted against white unionized workers, Mexican workers
Workers Against Mexican-American Workers, Japanese Workers Against Higher-Paid American Workers.
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Decentralization School Board clash in Brooklyn, New York is
a dramatic case in point.
Under the local school board system, Rhodie McCoy, the black school board administrator,
fired several white teachers for alleged racist behavior toward their young black pupils.
In response, the white-dominated United Federation of Teachers Union struck the entire New York
City educational system, including Ocean Hill Brownsville.
If the black Ocean Hill Brownsville school district was to continue to function, unit
administrator McCoy would have to find replacements for the striking white teachers.
He did.
And they were, naturally, scabs.
Hence the quandary faced by the Liberals.
On the one hand, they were unalterably opposed to scabs.
But on the other hand, they were unalterably opposed to the racism of the United Federation
of Teachers.
Clearly there was more heat than light in their attitudes.
Scabs obviously have been unjustly maligned.
does not give the employee any proprietary privileges closed to workers who wish to compete
for the same job. Scabbing and free competition are opposite sides of the same coin.