﻿How One Big Union Can Put an End to This Skinning Game 
BY T-BONE SLIM

There’s living wages in work but we have to be organized to get it. Restaurant owners try to jerk a house and lot from our coffee with the result that coffee comes to us badly crippled if not fatally injured—on crutches so as to say.
Of course they don’t get the house and lot and have to die licked—(poor, weak innocent coffee to haunt their graves.)
Workers are averse to the acceptance of office (even in unions) so I cannot see why they participate in political action. Ragged business men on the other hand grab for political jobs and of course will represent their own kind, their cousins, their aunts, their nephews, nices, son’s-in-laws, sons, daughters, grandpap and grandmother—you’ll find their names on the public payrolls—and when rolltop jobs do not reach around they start a revolution. Stay out of it. Let ‘em revolute. Surely you wasn’t going to do their revoluting for them? Seeing as you’ll need your energies in matters nearer home?
If you let them organize you to pull their political chestnuts you better use lots of baking soda on the burns,—white of an egg is good, too. One Big Union is not a chestnut pulling bee.
They have tried to introduce politics into every union the workers organized, tried to make of it a political side-show they, themselves, to take the bows under the big top. They’ve got the unmitgated guts of a yearling calf!
“This is a free country, the flies do not need to come around me when I’ve got a piece of rubberband,—” This is the attitude the bosses take toward their workers, “they need not come around me when I’m in the skinning game.” (They are very frank that way) Where they get the authority to monopolize any places for skinning purposes is more than I can “forstay”—they picked themselves. But now that we know our freedom and know that he runs a skinning plant we should organize and question his right to remove our hide . . .
Ownership of the tools of exploitation is an unsettled proposition, also workers built those tools primarily for the purpose of production but they are being used almost exclusively for exploitation of workers.
Now it happens we cannot come to an agreement as to the ownership of the means of production is pure Greek to them . . . Sentiment of the working class can be had only through a One Big Union of the workers and it is well within reason to think the One Big Union will overwhelmingly decide the tools of production, plants, powers and materials belong to the working class by order of priority right of creation.
Paid for by capitalists?
Dammit, forgot all about that. They paid for it with the capital labor created. (That’s like using the godfearing butchers cash register to pay for two pound of bologny, mostly........ ?. Ingenius aren’t they?) Labor creates capital and then they pay labor with the money labor produced. And even they make a big rake off on the new values they buy from labor—mind you, production hasn’t cost them two cents so far; labor stood all the expense and then they, the employers, have the guts to offer twenty cents on a dollar of value—mind you, that dollar is worker’s dollar in the first place and when employer uses part of it to pay for a dollar’s worth of production he merely increases his debt to labor and he now owes us two (toilers—that’s how capital grows and that’s how crooked they are.
This condition cannot of course be corrected by any Paupers Benevolent Association of Perkins corners of International Accord of Political Palaver. No, it requires Workers One Big Union. No other determination is possible. He shall decide and no other decision can be final or legal. Workers being the interested party it must decide as whole, and no whole is possible without One Big Union—no vote is rational without One Big Union.
Well Slim, do you think it will ever come to a vote? (No. It would be waste of time.) Once the workers have their One Big Union owners of industry cannot be found. Every one of them will say: “Yes, boys, I used to own it, but no more—it must belong to two other guys,”—Why vote on a thing that is there for any body to take for anybody to have, for anybody to hold. Are we voting suckers? Or are we bull heads?