﻿Every Method Of Exploiting Labor Is Bad 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
The position of the American economic royalist is: get something for nothing, have power without responsibility, wealth without effort, and life uninterrupted. 
Not without fight, brother, and plenty of spinach. 
Bend not the ear to defeatist singers, brave in their dreams and cravens when awake. List not to the yodlers of depression, they are laboring under a miasma of self-hypnotism. The day is here! The world is here! We are here! 

There isn’t much choice in exploitation of labor as among political democracies, benevolent totalitarianism, or idological communism. It all amounts to the same for the workers: “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-fed.” 
Why labor should choose one of these as a superior form of skinning, is somewhat of a mystery. Why labor should put his okay on any form of skinning is more than I can comprehend. He is choosing the lesser of several evils, as he thinks, but nevertheless he a selecting for himself an evil. If evil in all they have, why go to the trouble of putting our blessing on any one of them? 
There is no virtue in the exploitation of labor no matter under what form of evil it is done, or what the of the dinners are. It’s just the degree of punishment. 
But why spend a whole lifetime choosing the “best” possible punishment for ourselves? Am I getting humorous?—Forgive it. 

I wonder what the industrial autocrats would think if the workers put over a program of exploitation of the bosses? Yes, and did it under the banner of the Young Men’s Christian Association or Daughters of the American revolution? 
They would say, exploitation is the worst possible kind of “no good.” 
It is. 
It all depends on whose bark is being peeled. 
This may sound a bit fantastic, bosses working their fingers to the bone to support us, and folks might say: “Slim has fallen out of the tree again and hit his head.” 
What calumny! It Is entirely possible—with the modern machinery we have built and the speedup they have dreamt. They can support the workers far easier than we support them. (They’d have more sensible bosses over them.) 
But we’re too big hearted to ask them to peel off a shirt and get busy. All we want them to do is to earn their salt—like the rest of us deserving democrats. Some might say, “long as we have supported the bosses on the fat of the landscape all these years, it is no more than fair and right that they support us for a while.” 
I do not subscribe to that. That is vindictiveness, if not outright revenge. 
“You mean to say, Slim, the bosses are making us support them as a matter of pure vindictiveness?” 
Not at all, Shorty, they take us or a bunch of monkeys, great big, hornyi-handed, ignorant baboons—that’s how dumb they are, the buffoons. 
But we will show them. We will organize a One Big Union of workers. We will line them up one at a time. And our delegates shall be many and in many places.