For instance, [he said] in the packing plants, the butchers' organization was one of the best in the country, reputed to be 50,000 strong. They were well disciplined, which is shown from the fact that when they were called on strike they quit to a man. That is, the butchers quit; but did the engineers quit, did the firemen quit, did the men who were running the ice-plants quit? They were not in the union, not in that particular union. They had agreements with their employers which forbade them quitting. The result was that the Butchers' Union was practically totally disrupted, entirely wiped out.[124]
It was quite evident that these men who laid so much at the door of the "union" scab, realized that the latter did not scab on his fellow union-men because he enjoyed it. He was forced to be a union scab because his craft had a contract—an agreement with the employer. Craftism is what it is, because it involves a separate binding agreement for each trade. These, being contracted independently by each craft, naturally expired at different dates, so that the several crafts in any given industry can never be free to act in unison. Little reverence for these agreements was shown in the convention.
It is a fact [said DeLeon] ... that it is not the unorganized scab who breaks the strikes, but the organized craft that really does the dirty work; and thus they, each of whom, when itself (sic) involved in a strike, fights like a hero, when not themselves involved, demean themselves like arrant scabs; betray their class—all in fatuous reverence to "contracts."[125]
Debs pointed to these same contracts as the cause of defeat. He cited the strike on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in 1888:
Some 2,000 engineers and firemen [he said] went out on one of the most bitterly contested railroad strikes in the history of the country. When they were out, the rest of the employees, especially the conductors, who were organized in craft unions of their own, remained at their posts, and the union conductors piloted the scab engineers over the line.[126]
"Union scabbery" helped to create a kind of "union snobbery." The craft idea tended to develop the idea of caste among workingmen, and the skilled were set off from the unskilled as the "aristocracy of labor." The industrial unionists emphatically declared that a true labor union must include all workers, the unskilled and migratory as well as the "aristocrats."
We are going down in the gutter [said Haywood] to get at the mass of the workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living. I do not care a snap of my finger whether or not the skilled workers join this industrial movement at the present time. When we get the unorganized and the unskilled laborer into this organization the skilled worker will of necessity come here for his own protection. As strange as it may seem to you, the skilled worker today is exploiting the laborer beneath him, the unskilled man, just as much as the capitalist is.[127]
But ultimately, according to Sherman, all workers—not merely the groups connoted by the term "working-class"—must be grouped in the proposed organization.
We don't propose [he said] to organize only the common man with the callous hands, but we want the clerical force; we want the soft hands that only get $40 a month—those fellows with No. 10 cuffs and collars. We want them all, so that when a strike is called we can strike the whole business at once.[128]