Quotation from: War of the Classes

Written by: Jack London


The organization of labor is one of the chief acknowledged factors
in the retrogression of British trade. The workers have become
class conscious as never before. The wrong of one is the wrong of
all. They have come to realize, in a short-sighted way, that their
masters' interests are not their interests. The harder they work,
they believe, the more wealth they create for their masters.
Further, the more work they do in one day, the fewer men will be
needed to do the work. So the unions place a day's stint upon their
members, beyond which they are not permitted to go. In "A Study of
Trade Unionism," by Benjamin Taylor in the "Nineteenth Century" of
April, 1898, are furnished some interesting corroborations. The
facts here set forth were collected by the Executive Board of the
Employers' Federation, the documentary proofs of which are in the
hands of the secretaries. In a certain firm the union workmen made
eight ammunition boxes a day. Nor could they be persuaded into
making more. A young Swiss, who could not speak English, was set to
work, and in the first day he made fifty boxes. In the same firm
the skilled union hands filed up the outside handles of one machine-
gun a day. That was their stint. No one was known ever to do more.
A non-union filer came into the shop and did twelve a day. A
Manchester firm found that to plane a large bed-casting took union
workmen one hundred and ninety hours, and non-union workmen one
hundred and thirty-five hours. In another instance a man, resigning
from his union, day by day did double the amount of work he had done
formerly. And to cap it all, an English gentleman, going out to
look at a wall being put up for him by union bricklayers, found one
of their number with his right arm strapped to his body, doing all
the work with his left arm -forsooth, because he was such an
energetic fellow that otherwise he would involuntarily lay more
bricks than his union permitted.

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