STRIKE STRATEGY
4—Unemployed and Employed.
The question of the unity of the unemployed with the employed, especially during periods of deep industrial depression, is a matter of the most vital consequence in the working out of a successful strike strategy. The policy of the employers in this respect is simple and brutal. They try to drive a wedge between the unemployed and the employed, to make the unemployed a hunger-driven mass ready to take the jobs of the employed when they venture to strike in defense of their standards of living.
As usual, the reactionary trade union leaders, with their traditional policy of abandoning the unemployed to their own devices, assist the employers in using them as a weapon against the employed workers. Many a strike has been lost from this cause.
A task of the strike strategist is to unite the unemployed and the employed in a common fight against the employers. But as in the case of so many problems of strike strategy, work on the solution of this task must be started long before the outbreak of a particular strike, and even before the growth of the industrial crisis produces its vast army of unemployed. It must be a settled policy in the unions to identify the interests of the employed with those of the unemployed. There must be a whole series of measures fought for, such as the shorter work-day and work-week, equal division of work, etc., which tends to eliminate the number of unemployed.
The unions must never drop the fight for state relief for the unemployed. And when the industrial crisis comes and mass unemployment develops, the unemployed must be organized to fight for relief. Their organization must be saturated with a no-scab ideology. The trade unions must stay in the closest co-operation with these organizations of the unemployed, joining in their demonstrations and fighting for their demands.
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