﻿Flood of Dividends Where Is Labor?
BY T-BONE SLIM

European nations are doing a heluva lot of defying, considering the amount of beefsteak they eat. There they are, the whole kaboodle, showing their muscles—”feel of mine” they scream hysterically—”17,000 airplains”.
It isn’t likely they will fight before breakfast, but we never can tell. If they are crazy enough to get up there and lie about their strength, they are just crazy enough to start something. They are in the business of robbing one another like the derelicts of life on a smaller scale. There isn’t sense in it. It’s skullduggery.
So what? In this country (we’re back home now) “Banks Are Prepared To Handle Flood of Dividends.”
Hmm. Flood?
Where was labor when that flood started?
Hibernating? The hell you say! Hibernating from the vast depression.
Now here is a subject right smack in the realm of reason: “flood of dividends”.
I put a question up there and I pause for an answer: Where was labor?
It is to be hoped that labor will show up organized the next time, a member of the I.W.W. in good standing.
Airplanes are all right; but beefsteak too has its fine points.
In view of the fact that buying power is just what it takes to keep a nation hale and hearty, a worker is a traitor to himself and the nation if he fails to strike for sufficient wages to keep the country agoing and keep himself from growing peaked. If he has already let the wages slip down to almost nothing, he is two traitors—or is it four?
Money in the bosses’ barrels doesn’t grease the nation’s griddle. Money reinvested in new and unneeded industry is money thrown away. Money buried in foreign lands in bare-faced robbery. So it is practically a worker’s duty to strike and keep striking until money gets going around in the channels where it will do the most good. (If there was another way I’d tell you.) But we cannot go to the boss as individuals and ask him to come across. He’s too apt to say: “Sorry to hear you are leaving our service.” Times have changed. The boss is no longer an individual. He represents industry, and we are not hobnobbing with him as individuals.
In addition to that the boss represents the power of all organized employers. So that’s what we are tackling single-handed! (Cuts?) Some workers are so dumb they’d tackle the armies of the Mikado singlehanded. But it won’t work.
No, we’re not inviting the lightning to strike us. We organize a workers’ One Big Union and harness that lightning. If there’s any striking to be done—we’ll do it.
True enough the organized employers (the employing class) can lick any union in existence today and the bosses have men out in the field organizing orphan unions here and there, everyplace and over again; disconnected, isolated, and all bound round with a contract. Such unions generally have a finger man (that’s his sole job). But the employing class can’t lick the working class. They’re too light in the poop and the forecastle. That’s where the One Big Union comes in.
Heretofore- the-workingclass has been conciliatory. The employing class always was belligerent.
“Go and get your time” is a war measure. It’s a direct attack against your four children—it denies them food, clothing, shelter and life itself. A man must be a pretty low form of life to see organized employers jump his children and not lift a hand to prevent it!
It’s high time the workers organize a One Big Union of workers and lay down some rules and regulations for the guidance of the employers—and children shall not go to bed hungry.
Ignorance of the employers is no excuse—they are a menace. They have been in swing positions all these years, and they must take the responsibilities.