Over its lengthy historical past, the American labor motion has displayed a remarkably wealthy vocabulary for shaming these deemed traitors to its trigger.
Some insults, reminiscent of “blackleg,” are largely forgotten immediately. Others, reminiscent of “stool pigeon,” now sound extra just like the dated banter of movie noir. A couple of phrases nonetheless provide fascinating home windows into the previous: “Fink,” for instance, was used to disparage employees who knowledgeable for administration; it appears to have been derived from “Pinkerton,” the personal detective company infamous for strikebreaking throughout mass actions just like the Nice Railroad Strike of 1877.
No phrase, nevertheless, has burned American employees extra persistently, or extra wickedly, than “scab.”
Any labor motion immediately will inevitably result in somebody getting known as a scab, an insult used to smear individuals who cross picket traces, break up strikes or refuse to affix a union. Nobody is past the attain of this accusation: United Auto Employees President Shawn Fain known as former president Donald Trump a “scab” in August 2024, after Trump steered to Elon Musk that hanging employees at considered one of Musk’s firms must be illegally fired.
Whereas engaged on my e book “Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult,” I found that labor’s scabs have 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 extensively 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 affix a union or labored when others have been hanging. By the Eighteen Eighties, periodicals, union pamphlets and books all recurrently used the epithet to chastise any employees or labor leaders who cooperated with bosses. Names of scabs have been usually 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.
Hanging employees generally publicly disgrace those that have crossed a picket line.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis through Getty Photographs
A lot of labor’s scabs clearly deserved the label. Throughout a strike of Boston railroad employees in 1887, for 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 have been additionally mysteriously depleted.
Essentially the most highly effective expression of this disgrace comes from the pen of Jack London. Greatest remembered immediately for journey tales reminiscent of “White Fang,” London was additionally a socialist. His standard 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, nevertheless, London had written an extended and fewer well-known essay, “The Scab.” As an alternative of shaming scabs, this essay explains the circumstances 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 fundamental lifestyle. 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.”
Slightly 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, all people is preying upon all people else.”
Pushed to scab
London’s phrases ring with a harsh fact, and we are able to illustrate his level by wanting on the discomforting standing of Black strikebreakers in American labor historical past.
Throughout their heyday from the Eighteen Eighties by the Nineteen Thirties, main labor organizations such because the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor did embrace some Black employees and at instances preached inclusion. These identical teams, nevertheless, additionally tolerated brazenly racist conduct by native branches.
Scab – an insult that’s quick, visceral and searing – caught on within the nineteenth century.
PhotoQuest/Getty Photographs
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 Worldwide Union of America did have a wonderful of US$100 for such discriminatory practices, however Rhodes was stymied in efforts to get any cash, and his racist co-workers punished him for attempting. He ended up being accused of “scabbing” by the union, and, in a brutal irony, fined. Rhodes stop and adjusted his profession.
Civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois as soon as famous 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 a part of unions that have been usually implicitly – if not explicitly – segregated.
To search out work as masons, carpenters, coopers – or every other expert trades dominated by unions that will usually discriminate based mostly on race – Black laborers usually needed to work below circumstances that others wouldn’t tolerate: providing their providers exterior the union, or taking up work the union had performed whereas its members have been hanging.
Briefly, they needed to scab.
Class and race collide
It shouldn’t be arduous 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, at the same time as they missed discrimination inside their ranks.
Managers and companies, in the meantime, exploited this racial friction to weaken the labor motion. With tensions excessive, brawls usually broke out between Black strikebreakers and white strikers. An account of the 1904 Chicago miners’ strike famous, “some one within the crowd yelled ‘scab,’ and immediately a rush was made for the negroes,” who fought again 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, usually known as Black individuals a “scab race.”
Booker T. Washington urged unions to confess Black employees as a solution to alleviate racial tensions.
Common Historical past Archive/Getty Photographs
In actuality, Black employees have been only a small share of strikebreakers. Most frequently, strikebreakers have been white immigrants, who, like their Black counterparts, may face discrimination by unions. Black People additionally had an extended historical past of labor activism, struggling for union membership, improved working circumstances and higher wages in cities reminiscent of 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 compelled Black People into turning into “a race of strike-breakers.” Nonetheless, this racial stigma endured. Horrendous racial violence within the “Crimson Summer time” of 1919 adopted shut on the heels of the Nice Metal 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 usually 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 essential to know why individuals may 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 handed landmark “anti-scab” laws, which prohibits 20,000 employers from bringing in alternative employees throughout a strike.
This regulation won’t solely power firms to hearken to their employees’ wants throughout a time of disaster, it would additionally create fewer divisions inside the labor motion – and fewer alternatives for any employee to turn out to be a scab.
Ian Afflerbach, Affiliate Professor of American Literature, College of North Georgia
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