﻿T-BONE SLIM SAYS:

Heretofore the shipowners trusted the passengers to pay the stewards’ wages. But it now appears that the passengers have laid down upon the shipowners, and neglected to perform their part of the program. That, my dear sirs and sisters, amounts to a betrayal of confidence; for who is there to say the ship owners did not have confidence in the passengers? Almost childish confidence? Yes, by God, perfect faith?
And now the passengers have proven false to that confidence, and have refused to relinquish the farthings to those noble stewards of the bounding main.
Alas, this is a situation that requires great moral stamina to consider, and I am writing through tears. The steward works a full month expecting to rake down a hundred and a quarter, and what does he get? A lousy $45. The horror of it! All because the passengers failed to hold up their end. The company has done its part. It went into its lockers and read forty-five bucks to the expectant steward. Surely there isn’t a man so dumb that he would expect the company to pay more than one-third of the man’s wages? Surely? (Expectation doesn’t fetch it.) We must organize more.
Now it happens the ship owners were paying one-third of the steward’s and messmen’s wages and the passengers were paying two-thirds. So it would seem to me the stewards should sign an agreement with the passengers and take chances with the company—the passengers are so uncertain.
This all sounds crazy, doesn’t it? She do.
Either I am crazy, companies are crazy, stewards are crazy, or passengers are crazy.
Let’s look at it again.
The company pays the steward forty-five dollars of the man’s wages, and the steward is supposed to scrape in front of the passengers for the rest of his stipend. It can’t be possible. The company does the hiring and firing and the passengers are expected to pay the big part of the steward’s wages. Generous public! But the milk of human kindness has soured in the hearts of the traveling public—which proves it wasn’t grade A milk—and the steward is left stranded with all pockets empty. The remedy: Join Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union No. 510 of the I.W.W. and organize your fellow worker stewards, forget the passengers, and put the whole cost of “government” on the boss. Forty-five bucks is too low a figure for the privelege of bossing us.
“Shore leave” will hereafter be known as “shore rights.”
P.S.—Chinese money has Chinese on one side of it, and English, French or Russian on the other side as the case may be. Therefore, stewards, see to it that your monogram is stamped on both sides of the bill.