How Organized Labor Shames Its Traitors – The Story of the ‘Scabber’

Throughout its long history, the American labor movement has developed a remarkably rich vocabulary with which to shame those perceived as traitors to its cause.

Some insults, like “blackleg,” are largely forgotten today. Others, like “stool pigeon,” now sound more like the dated banter of film noir. A few terms still offer interesting windows into the past: “Fink,” for example, was used to disparage workers who informed on management; it appears to derive from “Pinkerton,” the private detective agency notorious for breaking strikes during mass actions like the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

But no word has burned the American workers as often and as frequently as “scab.”

Every labor action today will inevitably result in someone being called a “scab,” a slur used to smear people who cross picket lines, break strikes or refuse to unionize. No one is beyond the pale: United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called former President Donald Trump a “scab” in August 2024, after Trump suggested to Elon Musk that striking workers at one of his companies should be illegally fired.

While working on my book, “Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult,” I discovered that the strikebreakers were among the first Americans to be identified as traitors for betraying their own people.

Strengthening class solidarity

The use of scab as an insult actually dates back to medieval Europe. At that time, scabby or diseased skin was generally seen as a sign of a corrupt or immoral character. So English writers began using “scab” as a slang term for a scoundrel.

In the 19th century, American workers began using the word to attack coworkers who refused to join a union or worked while others were on strike. By the 1880s, the term was frequently used in magazines, union pamphlets, and books to punish workers or union leaders who collaborated with bosses. The names of strikebreakers were often printed in local newspapers.

Scab probably caught on because it stirred up a deep-seated hatred for anyone who put self-interest above class solidarity.

Many of the workers’ strikebreakers clearly deserved the label. During a Boston railroad strike in 1887, for example, the union bombarded its president with cries of “traitor” and “stakebreaker” and “sellout” for prematurely giving in to company demands just as the union’s funds were mysteriously being depleted.

The most powerful expression of this shame comes from the pen of Jack London. Best remembered today for adventure stories like “White Fang,” London was also a socialist. His popular 1915 missive “Ode to a Scab” captures the venomous contempt felt by many for those who betrayed their fellow workers:

In 1904, however, London had written a longer and lesser-known essay, “The Scab.” Rather than shaming strikebreakers, this essay explains the conditions that drive some workers to betray their own people.

“The capitalist and labor groups,” London writes, “are locked in a desperate struggle,” with capital trying to secure profits and labor trying to secure a basic standard of living. A scoundrel, he explains, “takes food and shelter from[his fellow workers]” by working when they do not want it. “He does not scoundrel because he wants to scoundrel,” London emphasizes, but because he “cannot get work on the same terms.”

Rather than treating scabs as vampiric traitors, London asks his readers to see scabs as a moral transgression driven by competition. It’s tempting to imagine society “divided into the two classes of the scabs and the non-scabs,” London concludes, but in the “social jungle of capitalism, everyone preys on everyone else.”

Driven to Scab

London’s words contain a harsh truth, and we can illustrate his point by looking at the troubling status of black strikebreakers in American labor history.

During their heyday from the 1880s through the 1930s, major labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor included some black workers and sometimes preached inclusivity. However, these same groups also tolerated openly racist behavior from local chapters.

Historian Philip S. Foner tells the story of Robert Rhodes, a union bricklayer in Indiana whose “white union brothers refused to work with him.” Although the Bricklayers and Masons International Union of America had been fined $100 for such discriminatory practices, Rhodes was thwarted in his attempts to raise money, and his racist colleagues punished him for his efforts. Ultimately, he was accused of “scabbing” by the union and, in a brutal irony, fined. Rhodes resigned and turned his career around.

Civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois once noted that in the main working classes of America, only dockworkers and miners welcomed black workers. In most industries, they had to try to join unions that were often implicitly—if not explicitly—segregated.

To find work as a mason, carpenter, cooper—or other trades dominated by unions that often discriminated on the basis of race—black workers often had to work under conditions that others would not tolerate: they had to offer their services outside the union, or take over work the union had done while its members were on strike.

In short, they had to make crusts.

Class and race clash

It shouldn’t be hard to see the competing moral claims here. Black workers, struggling with racial discrimination, demanded equal employment rights, even if it meant breaking up a strike. Unions saw this as a violation of working-class solidarity, even as they ignored discrimination within their ranks.

Meanwhile, managers and companies took advantage of this racial tension to weaken the labor movement. With tensions high, fights often broke out between black strikebreakers and white strikers. An account of the 1904 Chicago miners’ strike noted that “someone in the crowd shouted ‘scab’ and immediately a charge was made upon the negroes,” who fought back the crowd with knives and pistols before city police intervened.

As this ugly pattern repeated itself, a stigma began to attach itself to black workers. White workers and their representatives, including American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, often referred to black people as a “scab race.”

In reality, black workers were only a small percentage of strikebreakers. Most often, strikebreakers were white immigrants, who, like their black counterparts, could face discrimination from unions. Black Americans also had a long history of labor activism, fighting for union membership, better working conditions, and better wages in cities like New Orleans and Birmingham.

In his 1913 essay “The Negro and the Labor Unions,” educator Booker T. Washington urged unions to end their discriminatory practices, which forced black Americans to become “a race of strikebreakers.” Nevertheless, racial stigma persisted. Horrific racial violence in the “Red Summer” of 1919 followed shortly after the Great Steel Strike, in which nonunion black workers had been called upon to keep steel production going.

Preventing rifts between employees

Although terms such as “scabber” and “sell-out” have often been used to strengthen the unity of the labor movement, these terms have also exacerbated divisions within the movement.

It is therefore too simplistic to shame strikebreakers as traitors. It is important to understand why people might be motivated to endure contempt, rejection, and even violence from their peers—and to take steps to remove that motivation.

In 2024, the Canadian parliament passed a groundbreaking anti-strikebreaking law that prohibits 20,000 employers from hiring replacement workers during a strike.

This law not only forces companies to listen to the needs of their employees in times of crisis, it also ensures less division within the labor movement – ​​and fewer opportunities for workers to become strikebreakers.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization that brings you facts and reliable analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Ian Afflerbach, University of North Georgia

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Ian Afflerbach is not an employee of, an advisor to, an owner of stock in, or receiving financial support from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic appointment.