In the 16th century, a scab was a "a low or despicable person," and the labor sense of this word dates back as far back as 1777. The understanding of the term "scab" rose in the 1800s and changed from industrial slang into more of a household world after the unionizing drives of the 1930's.
Author Jack London, who was born on this day in 1876, penned the most famous description of scabs in the U.S. labor movement:
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, He had some awful stuff left with which He made a scab.
A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
Although the poetic diatribe does not seem to appear in any of London's published work, it figured in a 1974 Supreme Court case, in which Justice Thurgood Marshall quoted the passage in full. London once gave a speech entitled "The Scab" in 1903, which he published in his book The War of the Classes.
"It is not nice to be a scab. Not only is it not in good social taste and comradeship, but, from the standpoint of food and shelter, it is bad business policy. Nobody desires to scab, to give most for least."
Did you know there have been scabs in professional sports too, not just on the picket line? In 1987, National Football League (NFL) players went on strike when owners refused to loosen the free agency rules in their contracts. For three weeks, the owners fielded scab players who earned $4,000 a game. The fans reacted with disgust,re-naming some of the new squads to reflect their use of temporary players: The Washington Scab-Skins, the Chicago Spare Bears, the San Francisco Phony-Niners and the Miammi Dol-Finks. (In spite of my DC-ite status, I must admit that "Scab Skins" is my choice for wittiest name of the group!)
The Rising Role of Permanent Replacement Workers
Before 1981, no major U.S. industry had hired permanent replacements during a labor strike, even though the law allowed them to do so. The turning point came with the federal air traffic controllers' strike, which resulted in a series of events that would redefine labor relations in America. When 12,000 air traffic controllers, members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), walked off the job on August 3, 1981, Republican President Ronald Reagan declared the strike illegal and called for all striking workers to be fired and permanently replaced with scabs. Reagan's decision was a huge blow to unions and signaled in a shift in the use of strikes.
- In the decades before 1981, major work stoppages averaged around 300 per year.
- From 1985 to 1990, the average was 52.
- By 2006, the average had dropped to less than 30 a year.
[Source: NPR and NY Times]
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