"Scabs" Are the True Labor Day Heroes

As long as I can remember, unions have attacked as “scabs” those willing to accept work for wages and conditions those unions reject, even if it involves crossing union picket lines. In fact, that usage goes back centuries, from English slang for a mean, low, “scurvy” rascal or scoundrel. As Stephanie Smith put it in Household Words:

From blemish…to strikebreaker, the history of the word scab…shows a displacement of meaning from the visceral or physical to the moral register…Just as a scab is a physical lesion, the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor.

Those union attacks have included some real “fist in your face” examples, such as the following, generally attributed to Jack London:

After God finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab…No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.

Few current examples can match that level of vituperation. But “scab” remains near the surface. For instance, when Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner responded to a 2017 AFSCME strike authorization with a website enabling citizens to apply for government positions, the result was “cries of ‘SCABS’ filling the public airways.”

Union rhetoric asserts that scabs are harmful to workers. But they offer no proof of harm. So as we come to another Labor Day of union claims to advance workers’ interests, perhaps that name-calling should be considered more carefully.

Debaters know to advance their most convincing argument. However, calling someone a scab is an ad hominem (against the man) attack, not an argument. It amounts to “You are bad, therefore your argument/position is wrong.” But “bad” people sometimes have better arguments than “good” people, who can sometimes argue nonsense. Consequently, asserting badness implies nothing about the rightness of any particular argument/position. Given that yelling “scab” is the most frequent, and often only, “argument” unions offer against such people, one could conclude they have no real argument.

Further, even if someone considers you bad, you still retain your unalienable rights from the Declaration of Independence and a guarantee of equal treatment under the law from the Constitution. Those must be equally held by all. Yet denying others the ability to offer their labor services in competition with union members who reject their employers’ offers denies both their economic liberty and their right to equal treatment.

It also denies employers’ rights. An employer holds the right to decide who it will hire or continue to employ. Prior to signing a contract, a worker has no claim to a job. Workers acquire ownership interests in their jobs only if their contract creates one. But unions treat a certification vote as giving members rights to their jobs that would be violated if a scab took them. How did workers, without any individual ownership rights to deny competition from others, conjure up those rights right for themselves as a union, overriding employers’ rights?

In essence, the basis of calling someone a scab is only their willingness to work for less than union demands. But is that bad? If a store offers you lower prices for what you want to buy, you don’t call them names. You seek out bargains, which are the fruit of competition. So what makes monopoly good when your union labor is involved, but bad otherwise? (remember, the Wagner Act had to define labor as not a commodity, or antitrust laws would have made unions illegal). The only reason is narrow self- interest. You don’t want anything to undermine the current terms of your job, even if it was extracted with government-delegated coercive union power. But such a possibility only threatens unions, not workers’ interests.

In fact, it is special treatment of unions, not scabs, that harms workers. At the higher wages unions extract, fewer jobs are available. Those crowded out of such opportunities go elsewhere, increasing labor supply for non-union jobs. That lowers the earnings of existing workers as well as entrants seeking such jobs, which makes up the vast majority of workers. Because higher costs result as well, workers also pay higher prices as consumers and taxpayers.

In other words, scabs should not be demeaned. They are part of the solution to unions’ bleeding compensation from employers beyond what workers could get in an open labor market.

Blame and defamation belongs instead to unions whose “assault and battery” cuts against employers’ interests create “scabs” of those whose only offense is seeking an open market for their livelihoods.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read.

Collective bargaining is the labor equivalent of price fixing. Suppliers can’t get away with price fixing, manufacturers can’t get away with price fixing, wholesalers can’t get away with price fixing, and neither can retailers. The only segment of the manufacturing chain that it’s legal in ...is labor. The only reason it’s legal for them is the 1935 Labor Relations Act, which specifically granted them the right to bargain collectively.

Until then collective bargaining was in violation of the Sherman Antitust Act. But since the NLRA was enacted after the Sherman Act, where those two conflict, the later enacted bill takes precendence. So the net effect of the NLRA was to exempt the practice of collective bargaining from anti-trust laws.

The NLRA, I might add, was passed during the Great Depression by two demoncrat-controlled houses of congress (with veto-proof majorities in both chambers) and signed by a demoncrat president (who also was America’s first Fascist Socialist president). It should be repealed so that unions also are subject to the same laws as every other aspect of business. Doing so would harelip Nancy Pelosilly, and that alone is reason enough to do it. Besides, labor unions are nothing more than small-scale socialism, and no free market is worthy of the name when one and only one link in the chain can engage in lawful price fixing.

[/soapbox]

I scabbed at the deli in a striking Foodtown market for a couple of weeks while I was between jobs back in the 70s.

I was last out one evening except for the manager. There were only three cars in the parking lot; his, mine and one around the corner of the building. When I pulled out I noticed that the car around the corner started moving, with no lights on, and it began to follow me. I took a couple of turns I’d not normally take on the way home to confirm I was being followed, then instead of going home I drove to police headquarters. I parked and exited the car and “invited” the occupants of the tailing vehicle to stop. They took off.

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