Freeland tribune. (Freeland, Pa.) 1888-1921, 1903-01-19
THE LABOR "SCAB."
The Difference Between Legal Right
and Moral Obligation.

The doctrine that a mans right to sell
his labor when and where he pleases-
to be "scab"-is a right SO sacred as
to transcend all others found a good
many defenders at the session Of the
National Civic federation.
Mr.. Samuel Gompers riddled this
plausible assumption, which is SO popu-
lar among gentlemen who do not have
to work with their hands for living.
He said:
"The labor union movement does not
deny mans legal right to work for
whom and when and where he pleases,
but there is something apart from the
legal right, and that Is moral obliga-
ton"
He illustrated his point with the case
of man who is free to set fire to hut
that he has built out on the prairie,
but let him attempt to do that in one Of
our cities and he will be put in Jail.
Out on the prairie he does himself the
only injury that is being done. but in
the city he endangers the life and prop
erty and peace of his neighbors.
If, expounded Mr.. Gompers, the non
union man did but himself wrong,
we might pity him and concede not
only his legal but his moral right, but
the workman who tolls for wages and
expects to end his days In the wage
earning class is bound by duty to him
self, to his family. to his fellow men
and to those who come after him to join
in the union with his fellow craftsmen.
"The workman who does not do this
is q traitor to his order. He wars upon
the union, which is battling for higher
wages and better conditions Of life
battling for those things not only for
the members of the union, but for all
workmen, the 'scab included. There
fore the 'scab' excites hostility as
wage cutter and is desplsed as an in
CRATE and a sneak"
OF course it is both legally and NOR
ally wrong to offer violence to the
'scab." The state will rightly use its
whole power to protect him. But union
men, the men who make common
cause for the uplifting Of labor, are
entirely justified In refusing friend
ship, fellowship and courtesy to the
renegade. He is made an outcast In
the world Of labor, world where
much work is done for small reward
and where there must be union II
strength is to be found to resist oppres-
| sion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, now Of the
United States supreme bench, when
chief justice of the supreme court Of
Massachusetts, put the whole matter
clearly when he said:
at must be true that when combined
they 1.-THE workingmenl have the same
liberty that combined capital has to
support their interests by argument,
persuasion and the bestowal or refusal
of those advantages which they other
wise lawfully control SO long as they
| do no violence or threaten no violence"
At the bottom of the fashionable In
sistence upon 1.-The sacred right of
free man to sell his labor freely in a
free /arket" is ignorance Of existing
economic conditions.
When natural resources are, as now,
monopollzed and the public highways
are privately owned, there can be no
free market for labor. In the anthra-
cite region, for example, the only thing
that stands between the worker and
starvation w4ges is the miners union.
! Outside that union 1.-The sacred right of
the free man to sell his labor freely In
free market amounts in actual prac-
tice to his right to sell himself into vir
tual slavery to the coal trust.
Men cannot stand alone. They must
combine to enforce their rights and ad-
vance their interests. The individual
who refuses to join his fellows for the
common benefit, so far from being the
hero that President Eliot of Harvard
acclaims him, is the hut burner Of Mr..
Gompers' illustration, a source of dan
ger to his fellows, a betrayer of the
common interest He deserves no re-
spect or good will from workingmen
and is entitled to no sympathy what
ever from anybody when he finds him
self disliked, looked down upon and
stunned by union men.
What the American Tory was to the
Revolutionary patriots the "scab' Is to
wage earners who make sacrifices and
undergo hardships by which the "scab"
must profit no less than they them
selves do Were it not that unions raise
wages the "scab" would not have the
opportunity to cut wages, for without
unions the recompense Of labor would
be just enough to sustain life. No won
der, then, that the union man feels to-
ward the "scab'' much as the Ameri-
cans of Washington's time felt toward
Benedict Arnold.-New York American.
Wages In Indiana.