II

EVERY advance by trade unionists, or even by unorganised workers, has been gained by a strike or the threat of a strike, that is by the willingness to withdraw one’s labour power. Even an individual threat to quit the job is an application of the strike weapon. Trade unions owe their birth and growth to the strike. Now they have abandoned it for parliamentary activity and class collaboration their spirit has perished though their form may linger on.

It is often said that Parliament and the Government have given higher wages or a shorter working day to the workers. This is only apparent. In 1919 the miners of Britain demanded higher wages and a national six hour day, demands they could have enforced, for British coal was in great demand, even at £6 a ton. The coal owners could not afford a stoppage. The miners were quieted by a Royal Commission and an Act of Parliament, which gave them a wages advance and a seven hour day, less than they might have enforced. (The miners of the North of England already worked less than the seven hour day.) But in 1921, when economic conditions were unfavourable and they miners’ organisation weakened, the wage advances were lost. In 1926, after the miners had been defeated on the economic field, Parliament scrapped the seven hour day for an eight hour day.

Trade Boards usually “fix” wages at or below the market rate of labour. If the market falls, then the Trade Board rate is quite often dodged by workers, driven to accept a job below rates, and by employers, who “forget” to pay the proper rate of wages, and who only remember if an inspector calls, succumbing to amnesia a few weeks later. This is particularly true of the cheap clothing trade. An overstocked labour market and a weak economic organisation of the workers always mean lower wages.

THE LIGHTING STRIKE

However, the syndicalist defence of the strike weapon does not mean approval of the trade union method of striking, which usually fails. Syndicalism uses many variations of the strike, but it is possible here to mention only a few.

Perhaps the commonest syndicalist weapon is the lighting strike. Before a trade union strikes long negotiations take place, six months notice is given, and the strike is postponed a few months. Then when, and only when, the employer and the government have prepared huge reserves of commodities or transport, and have organised police and blacklegs, the strike takes place. Agreements are made in such a way as to ensure this by long period notices and district agreements. (The miners’ district agreements have always been made to ensure a striking district being defeated by all the other districts.)

Of course, the labour leaders regard all such agreements as sacred, but if the workers are to win their blows must be sudden and in the unexpected place. Speed and surprise are essential to victory.

Almost equally important is the guerrilla strike; to wage a struggle in any section of an industry, in any locality or even in a single factory, wherever conditions may be temporarily favourable. But the highly centralised trade union movement cannot do this. Some industries, particularly engineering, vary in prosperity — aircraft may be booming, locomotive building declining — yet wage rates are determined by the condition of railway engineering. The lowest wage becomes the highest.

If the workers in a prosperous branch of industry see a chance to strike successfully, they must seek permission of the leaders at the national centre of the union. Of course, the leaders are not in sympathy, permission is refused, and the opportunity is lost.

The syndicalist method is not organisation from the top down but from the bottom upward. Each branch is allowed local autonomy, but all branches are federated into districts, all districts into a national federation of labour. This is federalism, the opposite of bureaucratic centralism.

Federalism also makes possible the sympathetic strike. Under centralism one union blacklegs another. When the iron moulders went on strike, trade union machinists and fitters continued work, helping to break the strike. When the London busmen struck in 1937, the tramwaymen and trolleybus workers, members of the same union, broke the strike.

Syndicalism federates the workers into one force, where each unit is ready to support the other. The preamble of the I.W.W. well said: “An injury to one is the concern of all.”

THE BOYCOTT

The boycott has been little used by unions, apart from the syndicalist unions of Spain and Scandinavia. Here is a mighty weapon, but one that does not cause the loss of wages of the common strike. It is of course best applied to those trades relying on the workers purchasing power. To support the claims of the employees the workers are organised to withdraw patronage of certain chain stores, cinemas, cafés, or branded goods.

The term “boycott” has lost much of its terror since the days when it was used by the Irish Land League. The League was the poor peasants defence against the landlord. When a landlord evicted a tenant farmer the League applied its boycott against the new tenant and the landlord. Domestic servants left their houses, their labourers their fields and cattle, the grocer, the butcher, and even the doctor refused to serve them.

The boycott was the most effective weapon ever used by the Irish peasantry. But the method can (in our complex economic society) even more effectively be used by the organised industrial workers.

“WORK TO RULE”

Many ingenious strike tactics have been invented by the French syndicalists. Of these the “work to rule” of the railwaymen (on a few occasions copied by the English railwaymen) is the best known. Thousands of laws and rules for running the railways are made by the directors and government. Of course most of them are unused and even unknown, their place being taken by common sense and daily experience of the job. When the French railwaymen were forbidden to strike their Anarchist fellow-workers were delighted to point out to them the absurdity of the law, so the Anarcho-syndicalists decided to carefully fulfil the law.

The railway laws were carried out just as the government said they ought to be. One French law demands the driver to make sure of the safety of the train before crossing a bridge. So express engine drivers stopped their trains at every bridge to consult the guard. The expresses were late.

A favourite rule of militant railwaymen was that which said that tickets must be examined on both sides. The rule says nothing of city rush hours. The results of “working to rule” were to tie up the railways, make the law look an ass, and win the railwaymen’s cause.

A somewhat similar Syndicalist tactic used on the continent was the “good work strike.” Workers building cheap working class houses would put their very best workmanship into the shoddy materials. Doors hung straight, windows opened, roofs were waterproof, and walls were perpendicular.

The most amusing case of this form of strike action is surely that of the accusation against the I.W.W. section operating in a salmon-canning plant. It was said that they stuck on cheap labels on the most expensive cuts of salmon. From the poor districts of the world came new orders for salmon and from the better-off bitter rebukes.

THE SOCIAL STRIKE

All Anarcho-Syndicalist strikes are not intended to protect some section of workers or raise wages by a few shillings. Some are intended to rally all the workers in defence of their class interests, and some transcend even class interests and defend humanity.

The social strike has been used against war, as in the Catalonian workers’ general strike against the Moroccan war in July, 1909, and in the German armament workers’ congress in Erfurt which decided to make no more war weapons to destroy men, but to compel their employers to convert their factories to produce useful commodities.

The resolution of the German workers was maintained for two years until broken by the orthodox trade unions. The Anarcho-Syndicalist workers of Sömmerda held out until their jobs were taken by members of the trade unions. Had the trade unions of the world supported and copied this brave action, Hitler and the Second World War would not have been.

Another good example of the social strike comes from Spain. Some years ago the Spanish government wished to build a women’s prison in Barcelona. The building workers of Catalonia refused to build it. In vain the government sought workers from other parts of Spain, the prison site remained untouched until foreign labour was imported.

STAY-IN STRIKES

All this ways of striking are but skirmishes before the real battle; training fort he most powerful of Syndicalist weapons — the stay-in-strike. The workers, instead of leaving the factories or other plant in their employers hands tob e used for blacklegging, stay in the plant and lockout the employers. The plan is blackleg-proof and protects the strikers. To baton them the employers must first smash their own property.

A few examples will show us the efficacy of this weapon. In the U.S.A. the automobile workers had suffered many defeats until, in 1937 they staged a „stay-in“, and victory was theirs.

In 1936 the French workers found their wages falling. The factory workers seized the factories and were quickly followed by millions of others, even the sales girls oft he fashionable shops. By their action they won wage increases, holidays with pay, the forty hour week, and many other gains. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards the workers helped into power a „Popular Front“ of Liberals, Socialist Party, and Communists. Almost immediately the Popular Front Government began to filch the gains of May, 1936, to introduce industrial conscription and prepare the path of French Fascism.

In Italy in 1920 the metalworkers were tob e locked-out for refusing a reduction in wages. Instead they locked-out the employers. The strike was everywhere successful. Supported by the railwaymen, the bakers and other workers, the engineers lacked nothing. Unfortunately, the workers handed back the factories in return for increased wages.

Since then lies have been invented to crate a picture of disorder. Listen, however, to a celebrated journalist, George Seldes in „Sawdust caesar“...“Not a safe was cracked. Not a skull... Commotion everywhere except in Italy. It is true that day by day more and more factories were being occupied by the workers. Soon 500,000 ‘strikers‘ were at work building automobiles, steamships, forging tools, manufacturing a thousand useful things, but there was not a shop or factory owner there to boss them or to dictate letters in the vacant offices. Peace reigned.“