The strike threat system

Working Class Solidarity vs the Bloody Aristocracy of Labour

One of the most resonant myths about the origin of the strike-threat system is that it emerged out of a concerted struggle of the poor against subjection by the employers. However Hutt found that it was the relatively affluent artisans who first organized the collusive pricing of their labor. The idea was to defend their special rights and privileges and to keep the lower orders (scabs) in their place. Even Beatrice and Sydney Webb who were apologists for the labour movement conceded that militant unionism arose to maintain the relative status of different levels of workers, not to elevate the most disadvantaged. The Webbs described the union system as "strengthening the almost infinite grading of the industrial world into separate classes, each with its own distinctive ends, and each therefore exacting its own 'rent of opportunity' or 'rent of ability." (The Strike Threat System, p 26)

Hutt reported the opinion of William Thompson (1775-1883), a writer and reformer who was very much in favour of the cooperative advancement of labour. For Thompson the workmen's combinations of his day were "bloody aristocrats of industry…The apprenticeship or excluding system depended on mere force and would not allow workers to come onto the market at any price…whether that force be the gift of law or whether it be assumed by the tradesmen in spite of the law, it is equally mere force" (Collective Bargaining p 10).

The early literature of the trade union movement is full of abuse amounting virtually to dehumanisation of the unemployed or lesser workers, 'knobsticks' and 'scabs', who were regarded as a threat. J S Mill summed up this attitude.

"Those whom we exclude are a morally inferior class of labourers to us; their labour is worthless and their want of prudence and self-restraint makes them more active in adding to the population. We do them no wrong by entrenching ourselves behind a barrier, to exclude those whose competition would bring down our wages, without more than momentarily raising theirs, but only adding to the total numbers in existence." (Collective Bargaining, p 11)

So much for the solidarity of the working class. Antipathy towards other workers who happen to be outsiders to the privileged group is the reverse of working class solidarity and this is expressed in demarcation disputes and contests for membership and control of the workplace. Above everything else the lack of solidarity of the working class is manifest in the pay and conditions achieved by the most powerful unions, through strikes and the threat of strikes and other exclusionary and productivity-eroding practices that have damaged other industries, the workers in those industries and the community at large.

The moral legitimacy of violence by trade unionists.

Hutt noted that exploiters of aggressive nationalism usually make much of legendary struggles for "freedom" in ages past, so unionists and their apologists have perpetuated the myths of "labor's bitter history."

The threat of violence is usually kept hidden (the gun under the table) as much as possible in genteel talk about "collective bargaining". This is the term invented by Sydney and Beatrice Webb to convey a picture of convivial and benevolent solidarity among the workers. As described above, this picture is an illusion.

The question of the moral legitimacy of "the right to strike" is confused by the different meanings of "strike" and "the right to strike". It is often presented as a self-evident fact that workers have the right to absent themselves from the workplace in a free society. From this it is supposed to follow that there is a right to have mass "absenting" when the shop stewards signal "all out".

Leaving aside the matter of contractual agreements that may be violated by leaving work at short notice, the gritty moral issues arise when (a) not all the workers want to go out and (b) management tries to recruit replacement workers for the ones who have gone out.

What is the legitimate use of violence? Agents of the state have the right and indeed the duty to use violence (under clearly defined rules) to maintain law and order and to protect the realm. The lawful use of private violence is generally restricted to self-defence. In the light of this principle, the use of violence by trade unions to enforce conformity in strikes and the use of violence on picket lines is clearly outside the law unless the law has been revised to permit the unions to operate outside the limits that apply to everyone else.