Over its lengthy historical past, the American labor movement has displayed a remarkably wealthy vocabulary for shaming these deemed traitors to its trigger.
Some insults, similar to blackleg, are largely forgotten right now. Others, similar to stool pigeon, now sound extra just like the dated banter of movie noir. Just a few phrases nonetheless provide attention-grabbing home windows into the previous: Fink, for instance, was used to disparage employees who knowledgeable for administration; it seems to have been derived from Pinkerton, the personal detective company infamous for strikebreaking throughout mass actions like the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
No phrase, nonetheless, has burned American employees extra constantly, or extra wickedly, than scab.
Any labor motion right now will inevitably result in somebody getting known as a scab, an insult used to smear individuals who cross picket strains, break up strikes, or refuse to hitch a union. Nobody is past the attain of this accusation: United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called former president Donald Trump a “scab” in August 2024, after Trump recommended to Elon Musk that striking workers at one of his companies ought to be illegally fired.
Whereas engaged on my book Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult, I found that labor’s scabs had been among the many first People recognized as sellouts for betraying their very own.
Reinforcing class solidarity
Using scab as an insult really dates to medieval Europe. Again then, scabbed or diseased pores and skin was broadly seen because the signal of a corrupt or immoral character. So, English writers began utilizing “scab” as slang for a scoundrel.
Within the nineteenth century, American employees began utilizing the phrase to assault friends who refused to hitch a union or labored when others had been putting. By the Eighteen Eighties, periodicals, union pamphlets, and books all frequently used the epithet to chastise any employees or labor leaders who cooperated with bosses. Names of scabs had been typically printed in native papers.
Scab seemingly caught on as a result of it directed visceral disgust at anybody who put self-interest above class solidarity.
A lot of labor’s scabs clearly deserved the label. During a strike of Boston railroad workers in 1887, as an example, the union bombarded its chairman with cries of “traitor” and “scab” and “promoting out,” as a result of he gave in to firm calls for prematurely, simply because the union’s funds had been additionally mysteriously depleted.
Essentially the most highly effective expression of this disgrace comes from the pen of Jack London. Greatest remembered right now for journey tales similar to White Fang, London was also a socialist. His popular 1915 missive Ode to a Scab captures the venomous contempt many have felt about those that betray their fellow employees:
“After God had completed the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, He had some terrible substance left with which He made a scab . . . a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul . . . The place others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten rules . . . No man has a proper to scab so long as there’s a pool of water deep sufficient to drown his physique in.”
In 1904, nonetheless, London had written an extended and fewer well-known essay, “The Scab.” As a substitute of shaming scabs, this essay explains the situations that drive some employees to betray their very own.
“The capitalist and labor teams,” London writes, “are locked collectively in a determined battle,” with capital attempting to make sure income and labor attempting to make sure a primary way of life. A scab, he explains, “takes from [his peers’] meals and shelter” by working when they won’t. “He doesn’t scab as a result of he desires to scab,” London insists, however as a result of he “can’t get work on the identical phrases.”
Reasonably than deal with scabs as vampire-like traitors, London asks his readers to see scabbing as an ethical transgression pushed by competitors. It’s tempting to think about society as “divided into the 2 courses of the scabs and the non-scabs,” London concludes, however in capitalism’s “social jungle, everyone is preying upon everyone else.”
Pushed to scab
London’s phrases ring with a harsh reality, and we are able to illustrate his level by trying on the discomforting standing of Black strikebreakers in American labor historical past.
Throughout their heyday from the Eighteen Eighties via the Thirties, main labor organizations such because the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor did include some Black employees and at instances preached inclusion. These same groups, nonetheless, additionally tolerated overtly racist conduct by native branches.
Historian Philip S. Foner tells the story of Robert Rhodes, a union bricklayer in Indiana whose “white union brothers refused to work with him.” The Bricklayers and Masons International Union of America did have a fantastic of $100 for such discriminatory practices, however Rhodes was stymied in efforts to get any cash, and his racist coworkers punished him for attempting. He ended up being accused of “scabbing” by the union, and, in a brutal irony, fined. Rhodes stop and altered his profession.
Civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois once noted that among the many main working-class trades in America solely longshoremen and miners welcomed Black employees. In most fields, they needed to attempt to be part of unions that had been typically implicitly—if not explicitly—segregated.
To seek out work as masons, carpenters, coopers—or another expert trades dominated by unions that will typically discriminate primarily based on race—Black laborers typically needed to work below situations that others wouldn’t tolerate: providing their companies exterior the union, or taking on work the union had finished whereas its members had been putting.
In brief, they needed to scab.
Class and race collide
It shouldn’t be onerous to see the competing ethical claims right here. Black employees who had struggled with racial discrimination claimed an equal proper to work, even when this meant disrupting a strike. Unions noticed this as a violation of working-class solidarity, whilst they missed discrimination inside their ranks.
Managers and firms, in the meantime, exploited this racial friction to weaken the labor motion. With tensions excessive, brawls typically broke out between Black strikebreakers and white strikers. An account of the 1904 Chicago miners’ strike famous, “somebody within the crowd yelled ‘scab,’ and immediately a rush was made for the negroes,” who fought back the mob with knives and pistols earlier than metropolis police intervened.
As this ugly sample repeated itself, a stigma started to cling to Black employees. White laborers and their representatives, together with American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, typically known as Black folks a “scab race.”
In actuality, Black employees had been simply a small percentage of strikebreakers. Most frequently, strikebreakers had been white immigrants, who, like their Black counterparts, might face discrimination by unions. Black People additionally had an extended historical past of labor activism, struggling for union membership, improved working situations and higher wages in cities similar to New Orleans and Birmingham.
In his 1913 essay “The Negro and the Labor Unions,” educator Booker T. Washington urged unions to finish their discriminatory practices, which pressured Black People into turning into “a race of strike-breakers.” Nonetheless, this racial stigma persevered. Horrendous racial violence within the “Purple Summer time” of 1919 adopted shut on the heels of the Great Steel Strike, throughout which nonunion Black employees had been known as in to maintain metal manufacturing buzzing alongside.
Stopping fissures amongst employees
Whereas phrases like scab and sellout have typically been used to bolster labor unity, these identical phrases have additionally worsened divisions inside the motion.
It’s too reductive, then, to easily disgrace scabs as sellouts. It’s necessary to know why folks is likely to be motivated to climate scorn, rejection and even violence from their friends—and to take steps towards eradicating that motive.
In 2024, Canada’s Parliament passed landmark “anti-scab” legislation, which prohibits 20,000 employers from bringing in substitute employees throughout a strike.
This legislation is not going to solely pressure firms to hearken to their employees’ wants throughout a time of disaster, it is going to additionally create fewer divisions inside the labor motion—and fewer alternatives for any employee to change into a scab.
Ian Afflerbach is an affiliate professor of American Literature on the University of North Georgia.
This text is republished from The Conversation below a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.
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