Lambert here: Now do inflatable giant rats.
By Ian Afflerbach, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of North Georgia. Reposted from Alternet.
Over its long history, the American labor movement has displayed a remarkably rich vocabulary for shaming those deemed traitors to its cause.
Some insults, such as “blackleg,” are largely forgotten today. Others, such as “stool pigeon,” now sound more like the dated banter of film noir. A few terms still offer interesting windows into the past: “Fink,” for example, was used to disparage workers who informed for management; it seems to have been derived from “Pinkerton,” the private detective agency notorious for strikebreaking during mass actions like the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
No word, however, has burned American workers more consistently, or more wickedly, than “scab.”
Any labor action today will inevitably lead to someone getting called a scab, an insult used to smear people who cross picket lines, break up strikes or refuse to join a union. No one is beyond the reach of this accusation: United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called former president Donald Trump a “scab” in August 2024, after Trump suggested to Elon Musk that striking workers at one of Musk’s companies ought to be illegally fired.
While working on my book “Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult,” I discovered that labor’s scabs were among the first Americans identified as sellouts for betraying their own.
Reinforcing Class Solidarity
The use of scab as an insult actually dates to Medieval Europe. Back then, scabbed or diseased skin was widely seen as the sign of a corrupt or immoral character. So, English writers started using “scab” as slang for a scoundrel.
In the 19th century, American workers started using the word to attack peers who refused to join a union or worked when others were striking. By the 1880s, periodicals, union pamphlets and books all regularly used the epithet to chastise any workers or labor leaders who cooperated with bosses. Names of scabs were often printed in local papers.
Scab likely caught on because it directed visceral disgust at anyone who put self-interest above class solidarity.
Many of labor’s scabs clearly deserved the label. During a strike of Boston railroad workers in 1887, for instance, the union bombarded its chairman with cries of “traitor” and “scab” and “selling out,” because he gave in to company demands prematurely, just as the union’s funds were also mysteriously depleted.
The most powerful expression of this shame comes from the pen of Jack London. Best remembered today for adventure tales such as “White Fang,” London was also a socialist. His popular 1915 missive “Ode to a Scab” captures the venomous contempt many have felt about those who betray their fellow workers:
“After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab… a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul… Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles… No man has a right to scab as long as there is a pool of water deep enough to drown his body in.
In 1904, however, London had written a longer and less famous essay, “The Scab.” Instead of shaming scabs, this essay explains the conditions that drive some workers to betray their own.
“The capitalist and labor groups,” London writes, “are locked together in a desperate battle,” with capital trying to ensure profits and labor trying to ensure a basic standard of living. A scab, he explains, “takes from [his peers’] food and shelter” by working when they will not. “He does not scab because he wants to scab,” London insists, but because he “cannot get work on the same terms.”
Rather than treat scabs as vampire-like traitors, London asks his readers to see scabbing as a moral transgression driven by competition. It is tempting to imagine society as “divided into the two classes of the scabs and the non-scabs,” London concludes, but in capitalism’s “social jungle, everybody is preying upon everybody else.”
Driven to Scab
London’s words ring with a harsh truth, and we can illustrate his point by looking at the discomforting status of Black strikebreakers in American labor history.
During their heyday from the 1880s through the 1930s, major labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor did include some Black workers and at times preached inclusion. These same groups, however, also tolerated openly racist behavior by local branches.
Civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois once noted that among the major working-class trades in America only longshoremen and miners welcomed Black workers. In most fields, they had to try to join unions that were often implicitly – if not explicitly – segregated.
To find work as masons, carpenters, coopers – or any other skilled trades dominated by unions that would often discriminate based on race – Black laborers often had to work under conditions that others would not tolerate: offering their services outside the union, or taking over work the union had done while its members were striking.
In short, they had to scab.
Class and Race Collide
It shouldn’t be hard to see the competing moral claims here. Black workers who had struggled with racial discrimination claimed an equal right to work, even if this meant disrupting a strike. Unions saw this as a violation of working-class solidarity, even as they overlooked discrimination within their ranks.
Managers and corporations, meanwhile, exploited this racial friction to weaken the labor movement. With tensions high, brawls often broke out between Black strikebreakers and white strikers. An account of the 1904 Chicago miners’ strike noted, “some one in the crowd yelled ‘scab,’ and instantly a rush was made for the negroes,” who fought back the mob with knives and pistols before city police intervened.
As this ugly pattern repeated itself, a stigma began to cling to Black workers. White laborers and their representatives, including American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, often called Black people a “scab race.”
In his 1913 essay “The Negro and the Labor Unions,” educator Booker T. Washington urged unions to end their discriminatory practices, which forced Black Americans into becoming “a race of strike-breakers.” Nonetheless, this racial stigma persisted. Horrendous racial violence in the “Red Summer” of 1919 followed close on the heels of the Great Steel Strike, during which nonunion Black workers had been called in to keep steel production humming along.
Preventing Fissures among Workers
While terms like “scab” and “sellout” have often been used to reinforce labor unity, these same terms have also worsened divisions within the movement.
It’s too reductive, then, to simply shame scabs as sellouts. It’s important to understand why people might be motivated to weather scorn, rejection and even violence from their peers – and to take steps toward removing that motive.
In 2024, Canada’s Parliament passed landmark “anti-scab” legislation, which prohibits 20,000 employers from bringing in replacement workers during a strike.
This law will not only force companies to listen to their workers’ needs during a time of crisis, it will also create fewer divisions within the labor movement – and fewer opportunities for any worker to become a scab.
14 comments
Comments are closed.
Damon Runyon, the sportswriter and apparent confrere of New York gangsters, once wrote in the short story “Princess O’Hara”, “A fink is such a guy as is extra nothing.”
Also, of course, “Which Side Are You On?”:
It’s hard to explain to a crying child
Why her Daddy can’t go back
So the family suffer but it hurts me more
To hear a scab say, “Sod you, Jack”
What an odd article to reproduce here.
Im all for nuance and while there’s some interesting historical material here, the article fails to note the reality that scabbing today is most often done by workers who travel long distances to earn huge paydays as replacement workers. These aren’t oppressed minorities locked out of the workforce, they’re jerks who scab for a fat check regardless of the ramifications.
from Jack London:
In the late 1970’s i was in a pub in Gulgong NSW when a man walked across the room and gave another man quite a beating, no-one intervened like they usually would when things got serious. It was explained to me that that man had scabbed in the shearers strike of 1953 and was foolish to come back to this town where such perfidy is not only not forgotten but your children carry your shame. Things are different now but up until mid 1980’s scabbing was a dangerous business in Australia.
There is a delicious imagery in the word scab, the flaked off bit of bloodied skin left on the shop floor at the end of a shift, a material formed after the rupture of labor-management relations, it’s the labor what takes the beating and the scab is the prophylactic what protects the management.
A labor solidarity antiphylactic? Anyways, it’s a good word.
As only around 6% of US private workforce is unionized, this is largely a nostalgic look back to the golden age of US manufacturing and labor unions. Most of the remaining unions are a bit of a joke. Corruption, anti-union NLRB, Palmer Raids, Red Scares, McCarthy purges, COINTELPRO, neoliberal deindustrialization, financialization, and anti-union narratives in public discourse and pop culture have all but destroyed the labor movement in the US.
Nowadays, we have union members who, like good Medieval serfs, worship the likes of Elon The Oligarch. Back in the day, the serfs might want to roll out a guillotine or two. Now they have been conditioned into Collective Stockholm Syndrome. The revolution will not be televised, because there aint gonna be no damn revolution.
Neo-Feudal Techno-Totalitarian Oligarchy is what we have now. That’s linear “human progress” eh
In some parts of the country public employee unions are very powerful. In fact, they are so powerful that they dictate the terms and conditions of labor contracts. Police and fire unions are especially powerful.
I’m not talking about so-called public sector unions. Police and “unions” are oxymoronic, they are more like a private armed gang, serving the oligarchy, rather than a labor union. The police are the ones called in to break skulls when the proles step out of line. Police are anti-labor, pro oligarchy
About 40 years ago the Fairbanks Scale Co. in St. Johnsbury, Vt. was purchased by a large conglomerate. Shortly thereafter the United Electrical Workers (UE) struck Fairbanks. The company brought in scabs and housed them at local motels. The UE set up picket lines at the motels. One day the UE held a big rally at the factory gates to support the picket line blocking the scabs from entering. It was a wild scene with traffic backing up. Down from the housing project across the road came a school bus, which got caught in the traffic jam. All of a sudden all the windows on the bus came down and every window had two kids with their heads out yelling “Scabs go home. Scabs go home.” That electrified the crowd and soon a couple hundred people were yelling “Scabs go home. Scabs go home.” The company realized it had no public support, the scabs did go home that very day, and the strike ended with a UE victory.
The UE doesn’t take any crap from what I’ve read about them – had I known about them earlier I might have become an electrical worker just to be a part of it. Here’s an article touching on them striking at Fairbanks Scale, although it may have been a different time than the strike you referred to – https://harpers.org/archive/2018/09/labors-last-stand-supreme-court-janus-decision-unions/
Lots to like about the US, especially this –
“According to the constitution’s articles, the president of the union cannot earn a salary exceeding that of the highest-paid worker in the industry. Any officer can be recalled at any time by a vote of the membership. No representative of the union may negotiate alone. And no one may be discriminated against on the basis of race or gender—a founding principle not only applied in the matter of union membership but also expressed in union demands. The UE was calling for racial equality before the civil rights movement; for ending gender discrimination before the second wave of the feminist movement; and for equal pay for comparable work before such a concept was widely understood. When author and labor educator Bill Barry tells me that a chambermaid has the same skill level as an autoworker—the only difference being that the one makes a union wage and the other doesn’t—he is speaking very much in the UE tradition. ”
Solidarity!
I would like just to add that the Canadian ‘anti-scab’ law just passed by the federal government was inspired, if not a copy, by the provincial law of the Province of Québec which was passed 47 years ago! Indeed, it is to the great René Lévesque prime minister (Parti Québécois) that for the first time in North America such a law has been passed in 1977 following a very violent confrontation in a flour mill strike and in aeronautic strike. Of course Anglo-Canadian like to do Québec bashing, nonetheless we are often ahead in social measures, which will be considered anathema in the USA, copy after by the Federal government…
Americans would be surprised, but again the Parti Québécois, introduced a day care at 9$ (back them 7$) a day in the 1990s; I just read how much it cost in the Washington area, I was in shock that a family could spend on the 5 digits for kindergarten! Again, the Federal government is now pushing for such ‘universal’ daycare all over Canada. Of course, there is still familly in Qc who doesn’t have place in the daycare, but it is much better situation than before.
Of course, nothing is perfect, so many jobs could now be done outside the physical place, that the anti-scab law would need an update not to be bypassed. In Canada, the rate of unionized is around 30%, much higher than the USA: inequalities are, of course, lower, though in the rise giving the influence of neoliberal policies.
> René Lévesque
Am I right that Lévesque was a paragon of “universal concrete material benefits”? He was loved, IIRC, and not just for his nationalism
A remembrance of scab-like behavior I observed at the age of 18 while working in a heavy chemical plant, for which the core of initial maintenance and production workers moved from Syracuse to Coastal Georgia in the late-1950s. They brought the union with them and also seemed to like their new weather:
The previous year the local negotiated their new 3- or 5-year contract; I can’t remember the duration. A member of the union negotiating committee went over to the company side as a foreman shortly after the new contract was ratified. This was a relatively small local with about 100 members. My employee number was 254 in the 17th year of the operation. Union-management conflict was virtually unheard of, aside from the occasional “I was next on the list and should have been called in for the overtime” (time-and-a-half, double-time on weekends, with a 4-hour minimum for a 15-minute job). Everyone knew everyone. The new foreman found himself in a rather untenable situation when the union workers in his shop refused to talk to him. They followed instructions and work orders to the letter. But that was it – work-to-rule makes things difficult both parties, management in particular. I don’t remember a union member ever speaking to the man they rightly viewed as a turncoat.
My machinist/instrument repairman father, who had started working there at the beginning, was best friends with a different foreman – they fished together every Saturday the weather allowed and took a week off together in November when trout and flounder fishing was best. I asked and my father and his friend never discussed this. It wasn’t relevant to their friendship. The behavior of all involved was a good lesson to learn at the beginning of a diverse working life. Trust, but with great care.
Georgia being a Right-to-Work-for-Less state, there were also a few outright scabs who did not pay their union dues but were the first to file a grievance when work rules were violated. Of course, the union steward was required to press their grievance as enthusiastically as for a union member, and they got all the substantial benefits, now rare as hens’ teeth, secured by the union. IIRC for the most part they were outcasts, too. Barely tolerated. And the one I remember well was a lazy as any one person could be. And sloppy. When a drop of red hot slag fell into his perpetually unlaced welding boot, no one really cared. Tough crowd.
A remembrance of scab-like behavior I observed at the age of 18 while working in a heavy chemical plant, for which the core of initial maintenance and production workers moved from Syracuse to Coastal Georgia in the late-1950s. They brought the union with them and also seemed to like their new weather:
The previous year the local negotiated their new 3- or 5-year contract; I can’t remember the duration. A member of the union negotiating committee went over to the company side as a foreman shortly after the new contract was ratified. This was a relatively small local with about 100 members. My employee number was 254 in the 17th year of the operation. Union-management conflict was virtually unheard of, aside from the occasional “I was next on the list and should have been called in for the overtime” (time-and-a-half, double-time on weekends, with a 4-hour minimum for a 15-minute job). Everyone knew everyone. The new foreman found himself in a rather untenable situation when the union workers in his shop refused to talk to him. They followed instructions and work orders to the letter. But that was it – work-to-rule makes things difficult both parties, management in particular. I don’t remember a union member ever speaking to the man they rightly viewed as a turncoat.
My machinist/instrument repairman father, who had started working there at the beginning, was best friends with a different foreman – they fished together every Saturday the weather allowed and took a week off together in November when trout and flounder fishing was best. I asked and my father and his friend never discussed this. It wasn’t relevant to their friendship. The behavior of all involved was a good lesson to learn at the beginning of a diverse working life. Trust, but with great care.
Georgia being a Right-to-Work-for-Less state, there were also a few outright scabs who did not pay their union dues but were the first to file a grievance when work rules were violated. Of course, the union steward was required to press their grievance as enthusiastically as for a union member, and they got all the substantial benefits, now rare as hens’ teeth, secured by the union. IIRC for the most part they were outcasts, too. Barely tolerated. And the one I remember well was a lazy as any one person could be. And sloppy. When a drop of red hot slag fell into his perpetually unlaced welding boot, no one really cared. Tough crowd.
Solidarity Forever!