﻿Put the Boss In Overalls, Says T-Bone Slim 

On one of the planets there lived a race of giants who never ruled over by a select tribe of dwarfs. These dwarfs were so fat that they seemed low and flat, like a bedbug, and that is why, I suppose, those of that tribe were hailed parasites; the giants they ruled were known as proletarians. 
But the land we speak of was not named Proletaria––I disrecall the name but it was a poetical name that made for much flag-waving and swelling of the chest, even among those of the giants. . . . Don’t get that last word twisted with a famous ball club in our own unhappy land.
Now it happened that those giants had a terrific appetite, as they say in Hollywood, for they did much heavy lifting and lots of hard work laboring early and late––long hours.
That appetite was a source of great worriment to the rulers of the land––they were afraid the giants might founder themselves or rupture their bellybutton. So they had a meeting and decided to slow down their eating by giving them only the toughest pieces of meat and shortening the noon-hour by half. Historians of the day refer to it as the “Age of Belly Robbing” and, you know, historians hardly ever lie.
Soon the country was overstocked with rotting T-bone steaks and pork tenderloins for the plutes did not dare to give the giants enough money to buy them. Dogs would sniff at them and turn to hide their tears. Doctors screeched, “Drink lots of water!”
Soon it got so the farmers could not raise enough hoofs and horns and neckbones and shanks and sowbosoms and pig knuckles and the giants had to go on vegetarian diet, eat grass like horses, and root like boars.
Some of the beef was embalmed in tins but there was no market for ‘em, for the giants had no money and China had gone on a rice diet long before them. The dwarfs never did find a way to rule giants without feeding them. 
Just before the show-down everything was lovely. Strapping young giants, blue in the face from starvation, were milling around in the streets, singing Sweet Adeline, Isle of Capri, and Hinky Dinky Parley Voo. The dwarfs thought they had the world by the tail and despite the fact that Professor Phoenix Hamburger, the great axe-grinder, had told them, “their racket was built on thin ice,” they kept on conniving on how to get the shirts off the backs of the giants.
Standard of living fell so low that the parasites had to start soup lines for the giants to save them from starvation and also to save wear and tear on their back doors. That was the main reason, you see: Their women folk were afraid of these overgrown yeomen.
These parasites were all kings, each ruling in his maudlin manner, more ludicrous than ridiculous. The giants were one, bound by the ties of slavery; each longing to one day be a king. Such a thing as making king the “servant of the populace” never occurred to them; a minor reform. 
“They wouldn’t organize even!” exclaimed the great Scandinavian poet-historian, Mr. Axel Neilsenson in disgust––the giants he meant, of course, for the pluto-parasites were already organized in a loose-fitting One Big Union of their own and were running an air-tight closed-shop for themselves.
There was some unionism among the giants, as O’Haloran, the great Irish emancipator admitted when cornered. “The percentage was,” he wrote, “about one union man for every parasite and inasmuch as there were about five million employing parasites, that also was the number of organized union men. Weight for weight, like the buying of meat for the relief kitchens, a pound of meat to each pound of eaters, and then,” he added sarcastically, “tons of eaters get all the meat below the animal’s knees.” He did not explain what became of the heavy part of the animals.
This was prior to the time that things got so bad that the “president” had to jump in there with a pair of bum legs (as they say in Hollywood) and demand: “What the hell’s going on here, the boys are losing flesh?” And suiting action to words he turned to the cash register and hit the NO SALE key a resounding crack. “Come on, boys,” sez he, “let’s eat.”
Well, for a while the giants were kinda gooey around the gills from eating high-pressure soups and wrestling with cows’ wings. (This last crack I cannot decipher but I imagine it is the historian’s sourcastic reference to the half of a boiled egg which the unemployed giants got in January and another half in February, 1937. I wish to gosh the historians would keep better track of things and skip the sourchasm.)
But before all this, education of the workers had kind of got out of the bosses’ control a little through the inefficiency of their school system and there were those of the slaves that grabbed off more education “than their just share,” as the parasites avered and purred.
Now education is a peculiar thing, when it sinks in, it stays sunk and there is no way to pump it out. Naturally the result was that the country blossomed with agitators––men who wanted to free the giants and toss a harness upon the parasites for a change.
Almost a similar incident prevailed in our own days and in our own land, which resulted in the organizing of the Industrial Workers of the World. The boys came out hollering for a One Big Union of the workers and threatened to put overalls on the boss.
But it seems the giants of the olden days were kind of slow in catching the joint and the sole result was, so far as recorded history affirms, “the stripteasers jumped into barrels to hide their nakedness but the parasites remained barren of overalls as ever. It is our duty now to dress them up; our duty is clear: High, low, jack and the game.
One of the chief arguments put up by the I.W.W. was this:
A wage increase lets us stay out later nights; we don’t have to go sneaking back home quarter past nine, hoping the boarding house missis has had another stroke or that the landlady has fallen down stairs and broke her back.
“Low pay, low mentality,” they used to say. In other words, they wanted some stepping-out money along with their watery prunes and horse feeds.

In the recent sorry days the autocratic employers have taken life after life, scores of enslaved and enchained lives, directly and indirectly––and this they have done because they thought the CIO is a threat to their hegemony. It seems that one doesn’t have to be a threat to lose his life––all that is required is that the master thinks he or they are a threat. The CIO, of course, is innocous and far from being a threat and these lives are taken all in vain or just to keep in practice––murderous business. 
