Between You and Me

by Sir Harry Lauder

And the employer will whine and complain! But, do you mind, the shoe's on the other foot the noo! For now, if they all quit, it hurts him. He wouldna mind Jock quitting, sae lang as the rest stayed. But when they all go out together it shuts doon his works, and he begins to lose siller. And so he's likely to find that he can squeeze out a few shillings extra for each man's pay envelope, though that had seemed so impossible before. Jock, by himself, is weak, and at his employer's mercy. But Jock, leagued with all the other men in the works, has power.

Now, I hear a lot of talk from employers that sounds fine but is no better, when you come to pick it to pieces, than the talk of the agitators. Oh, I'll believe you if you tell me they're sincere, and believe what they say! But that does not mak' it richt for me to believe them, too!

Here's your employer who won't deal with a union.

"Every man in my shop can come to my office at any time and talk to me," he'll say. "He needs no union delegate to speak for him. I'll talk to the men any time, and do everything I can to adjust any legitimate grievance they may have. But I won't deal with men who presume to speak for them—with union delegates and leaders."

But can he no see, or wull he no see, that it's only when all the men in his shop bind themselves together that they can talk to him as man to man, as equal to equal? He's stronger than any one or twa of them, but when the lot of them are leagued together they are his match. That's what's meant by collective bargaining, and the employer who won't recognize that right is behind the times, and is just inviting trouble for himself and all the rest of us.

Let me tell you a story I heard in America on my last tour. I was away oot on the Pacific coast. It was when America was beginning her great effort in the war, and she was trying to build airplanes fast enough to win the mastery of the air frae the Hun. She needed spruce for them—and to supply us and France and Italy, as well. That spruce grew in great, damp forests in the States of Oregon and Washington—one great tree, that was suitable for making aircraft, to an acre, maybe. It was a great task to select those trees and hew them doon, and split and cut them up.

And in those forests lumbermen had been working for years. It was hard, punishing work; work for strong, rough men. And those who owned the forests and employed the men were strong, hard men themselves, as they had need to be. But they could not see that the men they employed had any richt to organize themselves. So always they fought, when a union appeared in the forests, and they had beaten them all.

The men were weak, dealing, each by himself, with his employer. The employers were strong. But presently a new sort of union came—the I. W. W. It did as it pleased. It cheated and lied. It made promises and didn't keep them. It didn't fight fair, the way the old unions did. And the men flocked to it—not because they liked to fight that way, but because that was the first time they had had a chance to deal with their employers on even terms.

So, very quickly, the I. W. W. had organized most of the men who worked in the forests. There had been a strike, the summer before I was there, and, after the men went back to work, they still soldiered on their jobs and did as little as they could—that was the way the I. W. W. taught them to do.

"Don't stay out on strike and lose your pay," the I. W. W. leaders said. "That's foolish. Go back—but do as little as you can and still not be dismissed. Poll a log whenever you can without being caught. Make all the trouble and expense you can for the bosses."