Logic of the Strike
Seeing how many lies the authorities tell about strikers – their own countrymen – how can we trust or believe them when they speak about their enemies in wartime? One enemy we have in all countries – the profiteer on the back of the producer.
The struggle has resolved itself into which, the union or the men, shall manage the workshops? Tired of misleadings, the men are learning they can do without leaders, but the leaders cannot do without workmen. That settles who are the more necessary and important and likely to have first-hand knowledge of conditions in the industry. It is the best ideas that must lead, not personalities or antique unions. The News Chronicle reports (20/8/46), ‘as a London gasworks man said to me a day or two ago, “We workers now begin to think of the State as the master and our trade union officials as its managers. So we don’t take all they say for gospel”.’
Loyalty to fellow-workers in other lands was refused by the Transport and General Workers Union. It was the unofficial strikers who set the example of brotherly love, for, according to the New Leader (28/1/38), ‘Middlesboro’ men refuse to load war material for Japan. London men will do the same … They refused even though the official of the Transport and General Workers’ Union asked them to do the loading.’ In the light of to-day’s happenings everyone will admit (too late) how much wiser than the union were these heroes in refusing to do the boss’s bidding. And it was the same in January, 1941, when the Word quoted Bernard Harris, City Editor of the Sunday Express for 22nd December, 1940, as reporting that the workers in one of Britain’s largest engineering firms said regarding arms for Japan that ‘they were not going to work for any member of the Axis.’ Thus it always falls to the worker to protest. And it will be the same to-day with Franco Spain, if anything effective is to be done.
If a coal strike goes on for long, automatically all industry is affected or ceases; that proves to the hilt the value of labour. When Parliament is up, industry continues – ‘business as usual’; not one crumb for a bird does the government make. Mr. George Terril, President of the National Union of Manufacturers, said ‘The total loss of Russian trade for a year will not amount to the loss caused by a 3-days General Strike’ (Brisbane Daily Mail, 27/5/27). If this is so, why should workers be forced to strike for better pay and conditions? Why are they not paid better? They suffer most when they are forced to this remedy; and why do short sighted blacklegs betray these brave men?
Strikers moreover show remarkable self-discipline – the only discipline worth its salt – when things are dislocated. In Italy in 1920 metal workers were locked out. In reply they locked out the employers, and occupied the factories. According to George Seldes, ‘Not a safe was cracked, not a skull. It is true that day by day more and more factories were being occupied by the workers. Soon 500,000 “strikers” were at work, forging tools, manufacturing a thousand useful things, but there was not a shop or factory owner to boss them or to dictate letters in the vacant offices. Peace reigned.’
Listen also to another farseeing journalist, John Gunter, writing of the French stay-in strikes of 1936; ‘The strikers were a marvellous tribute to the good sense of the average Frenchman. In an industrial stoppage as comprehensive and drastic as anything seen in Europe since the war, not a tool was injured, not a machine damaged, not a person hurt, not a single drop of blood spilt.’ Edgar Ansell Mowrer cabled his newspaper that during the tensest days he would not have hesitated to lead a girls’ school through the slums of Paris. In the great department stores men and women slept on the floors instead of the beds. Though under-paid and often hungry, they never stole a cheese or opened a box of beans.
Not like a military army disciplined for destruction. Down with all that and up with the striker against it!
Many people are ignorant of human nature at its best because they only tap the worst, and so are unable to get far without promises of reward and bribes. They cry that the striker holds up the community and ignore the fact that the employing class daily penalize the whole working class by making conditions so hard and pay so poor that men and women cannot continue the work and live on the insufficient food, nor afford fuel, fares, doctors’ bills and a hundred other amenities the rich consider necessities for themselves. And it is more than their labour that they steal from the workers, as is shown by their shortened or crippled lives. The worker fills a goodly hive with honey, but often goes hungry himself. Old before he is young, worn out, too dead beat to enjoy the declining years of old age. Robbed of his birthright, the land, cursed with an inferiority complex from centuries of subjection to feudal and fascist bosses, his neck still suffers from the iron collar he was loaded with.
But a few manly ideas of brotherly kinship are seeping through, and showing him that it will repay him to solve his problem in the only way it can be solved. The bosses stand by one another everywhere when profits are endangered. The striker (misnamed) is really a passive resister towards the men who would batten and feed on his effort, but he strikes at the system that allows one man to be rich without working and another poor even though he does work. He rightly resists bad conditions and being unable to choose work suited to his capacity. The rich never resist because they never work; they never need to down tools because they never take them up.
The men who hold up the Community are the men who profit from every labourer’s task, thereby making it doubly essential that the worker should rebel. While the worker strikes, the rich lack nothing, for their large larders and coal cellars are full. The worker has an empty cupboard, one week’s pay in hand, and knows at the back of his mind that he has all the moneyed power against him, with tear gas, guns – which he himself has made – and enemies on his doorstep. For men like Bevin and Citrine with his title won’t back him up. Out of thousands let us take this example: the newspaper heading ‘Union asks Roosevelt to break Strike’. Roosevelt had sized these men up and apprised them at their true value. If you fondly hope that one day there will be no hungry children in so-called democratic countries, let me assure you it is an impossibility – because the present system functions through hungry children.
Before the war, starvation while the shops were overflowing with comforts and luxuries; the workers who never had them being tempted and taunted with only a sheet of glass between them and these things. But for strikers their lot would have been more abject still. One day the world will sit back and say, ‘Did they really stoke up trains with grain, when people were hungry; did they really burn cotton, when children were sewn into their clothes because they had no change? And was fish really thrown back into the sea sooner than profit be lost?’ And what about hunger of the soul? The multitude does not find that inside a church. The thirst for beauty and leisure, unsatisfied to-day, will return, and as of old, people’s dances and music, lovely clothes and joy will be reborn and money will be neither valuable nor necessary.
Clara Cole
Freedom 4 January 1947