﻿Don’t Ask the Cook to Fight For Your Beans  
By T-BONE SLIM 

The main reason “power to call off strikes” has been taken away from union officials, in late years, is because they cannot view a strike in an impersonal matter. Their pay does not stop when the strike starts and hence it is they appear as a strange body more or less disinterested in the outcome of the strike. Being not affected personally they hafto guage the merits of the strike through other persons or workers and this they cannot do as well as the workers directly affected and whose pay is at a standstill. 
Then again, their sympathies might run away with their reason over the dormant wages of the membership and they might make of an “honest to goodness strike” a gargoyle of sentimentalism. 
Further, they might be stampeded by something or other the wily employer murmured contrary to facts or they might be overcome by the histrionics of the state assemblyman or other sweetvoiced singers not a party to the strike and they might call off the strike before the boys got fairly well warm. 
We must remember that we pay the wages of our union officials and even the state assemblymen, as well as other sopranos, and they are servants of ours so long as they are on our payroll. (All bosses and would-be bosses are on our payroll.) 
At first blush it might seem as if I have a confliction in the use of the original words “impersonal manner” but when we consider that workers view a strike as “our strike” we can see the person is in the subjective and the whole action in the final analysis is impersonal––all else is seemingly so––unstable. 
I cannot conceive how any man whose pay runs right along like Tennyson’s brook should have the unmitigated guts to pass upon the life of a strike, to call one “on” or call happy, content, and thankful that the workers do not chop them off the payroll. 
I’m not saying the officials are dishonest. The idea I wish to convey is they are soft. Too long a disassociatin with the vicissitudes of the more prosaic points of production has played havoc with their hormones, as they say in Harvard, and their metabolism is out of whack. You can see yourself, fellow worker, it will not do to send those physical wrecks into a lion’s den. 
Now the I.W.W. has been very fortunate in the selection of its officials in the past and none of them have ever chosen unto themselves superhuman powers but have always placed their faith and trust in the rank and file of the membership. And never have they been deceived or disappointed. 
Never has the rank and file expected the officials to step out single handed and draw the fire of the employers’ ire––we go ourselves. In other words, we do not expect the cook to fight for our chuck and that is why the I.W.W. is such an outstanding success. 
We’ll bring home the bacon, all he has to do is cook it.