Strike

in social reform, a cessation of work by wage earners pending the settlement of dispute between themselves and their employer. The most common form is a strike for higher wages. A strike designed to help other strikers win is called a sympathetic strike. In case the employes of an establishment refuse to work unless the management complies with some demand, the refusal is called a strike. In case the management refuses to allow the employes to work unless they comply with some condition dictated by the management, the refusal is called a lockout. In a strike the employes take the initiative; in a lockout the demand is made by the management. The strike is not new. Writers claim that strikes were not unknown among the workmen who labored on the Parthenon and on Solomon's Temple. It is of record that the workmen of Sparta and Athens and of Rome were organized, and that revolts occurred. The question is whether they were not of the nature of uprisings against the authority of masters, rather than a strike by freemen for higher wages or shorter hours. Several revolts are chronicled, including an outbreak of 20,000 Greek slaves at Sunium 413 B. C. and the more noted revolt of Spartacus at Capua 73 B. C.

The journeymen of the medieval craftguilds formed associations and declared strikes. In 1303 the cordwainers (leather-workers) of London were forbidden to assemble and conspire against their masters. In 1329 the journeymen girdlemakers of Breslau went on a strike. Something of the sort took place among the French tanners in 1349. In 1538 we come to the real thing:

The Bishop of Ely reports to Cromwell that twenty-one journeymen shoemakers of Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town and sent three of their number to summon all the master shoemakers to meet them, in order to insist upon an advance in their wages, threatening that "there shall none come into the town to serve for that wages within a twelfth-month and a day, but we woll have an harme or a legge of hym, except they woll take an othe, as we have doon."

The earliest strike in the United States is thought to be that of the New York City bakers in 1741. The shoemakers of Philadelphia struck repeatedly 1796-99. The terms "strike" and "scab" and "turnout" were in common use as early as 1835--the scab being then as now one who took the place of a striker. Between the strike of the bakers in 1741 and 1881, 140 years, there were, according to the reports of the United States Labor Bureau, 1,491 strikes. Over half of this number took place in the year 1880. Some 1,089 were for higher wages and 316 succeeded. Between 1881 and 1900, 14,457 American strikes were ordered by labor organizations, and 8,326 strikes were declared by workmen not acting under orders. Fifty-three per cent of the union strikes succeeded; thirty-five per cent of the non-union strikes won. The magnitude of the interests involved may be set forth impressively in a tabular view:

To the above figures large losses of time and wages must be added as the result of lockouts. Strikes are expensive. The industrial loss from British strikes for the years named was not less than $40,000,000. An examination of grievances shows that wages and hours of labor are the chief points of dispute the world over. Other questions seem to be regarded as abstract.

The right of labor to strike is unquestionable. The work of their hands is the only thing workingmen have to sell. They have a perfect right to put a price on it and to refuse to work if they do not get their price. Workers are justified in demanding reasonable hours and sanitary conditions, otherwise laborers would be slaves. On the other hand, the cause of strikes is prejudiced too often by accompanying acts of violence. A farmer who fails to sell a load of apples to a merchant is not justified in breaking the merchant's windows. A harvest hand who is turned from the gate because he asks higher wages than the farmer is willing to pay is not justified in wrenching the gate from its hinges. The case is not altered when a thousand men offer their services and are refused. It is difficult for men on the street with empty dinner pails and hungry children at home to out-wait and out-argue the well fed occupant of a comfortable office; it is true that strikes would be settled more quickly if the employer were dependent on labor for daily bread; but for all that, nothing delays the day of justice like carousing and violence to persons and destruction of property. Labor leaders like John Burns, Samuel Gompers, and Terence Powderly understand this full well.