04/02/2023
Reds in the Union
August 13, 2014 ·
As you know, there is a thorough campaign to destroy and devalue union heritage and the reputation of the labor movement. This is readily apparent to many of us when we sit down at holiday dinners with extended family and have to hear *that* relative bash unions.
One of our goals with this page is to revive old symbols, old words, old strategies, and old union memories in general. Remember we all have some garbage misconceptions based on this slanderous anti-union campaign; try to keep an open mind, and do your own research.
Behold: the Sabot cat. It is a symbol long associated with the Industrial Workers of the World, so I will let them explain:
"The IWW has been associated with many things, including Direct Action, specifically direct action at the point of production -- which means workers acting collectively and democratically to assert their power in the workplace -- as opposed to political action at the ballot box or acting as an armed vanguard seeking to capture state power through force of arms.
One specific form of direct action (by no means the only such form) is Collective Withdrawal of Efficiency, sometimes better known by the unfortunate and controversial term Sabotage. Sabotage is known by many other names, such as "Ca-canny", "Wobbling the Works" (derived from "Wobbly"), or even (more recently) "Monkeywrenching" (derived from Edward Abbey's famous book, The Monkeywrench Gang, which helped inspire the formation of the radical environmental movement, Earth First!, which itself also derives much cultural iconography from the IWW).
Despite what you may have heard, sabotage is not destruction of property or machines (and the IWW does not endorse or condone such actions), nor does the term originate from workers placing their wooden shoes or "sabots" in the gears of machinery to prevent the machines' operations (despite what Kim Catrell's line of dialog in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country inaccurately suggests, no matter how favorably).
Sabotage did not originate from workers throwing their wooden sabots (shoes) into machines to stop them. In fact, the word has a much less romantic origin. The wooden sabots sometimes worn by the working class in the early industrial age made their walking inefficient. Early attempts at workers' resistance to automation by their employers did on occasion involve property destruction, but such attempts took place much earlier than the formation of the IWW.
Sabotage is the collective withdrawal of efficiency by the workers at the point of production. While the IWW as an organization never officially endorsed sabotage, various IWW members (including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Walker C. Smith) advocated it individually. Various IWW publications also suggested it, if not openly advocating it as a tactic. Further, IWW artists and cartoonists frequently utilized the Black Cat (sometimes known as "Sab-cat" or "Sabo-tabby" (the latter being a play on words, no doubt) and the Wooden Shoe to symbolize direct action, including (but not always) sabotage.
The reasoning behind the use of the wooden shoe, despite the often inaccurately quoted origins of its usage, is obvious.
The black cat symbol itself has a colorful history. Originally the cat wasn't necessarily black, but (in the United States of America and England in particular) black cats tend to have sinister connotations. IWW's, speaking in code so as to not tip off the employers and their enablers would sometimes rework the old saying "letting the cat out of the bag" to mean taking collective action. IWW members of a specific industrial union, such as the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union 110, would sometimes be referred to as "110 cats". Elected IWW officials and union hall staff (back when the IWW had paid union hall staff, as they sometimes did in large industrial organizing campaigns) were sometimes known as "hall cats". The late Franklin Rosemont of Charles Kerr Publishing Company and author of the book, Joe Hill, the IWW, and the Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture (Kerr: 2003), has even suggested that the adoption of the term "cat" by beat poets and jazz musicians may directly derive from the IWW's use of the term!
It must be emphasized, however, that never did this mean the destruction of property or machinery, especially the machinery of production. To get an accurate account of what individual IWW members were actually calling for, it's best to go directly to the source.
While these documents clearly show what sabotage is and is not, they were not enough to prevent the employers from painting a much different picture of sabotage.
As Ralph Chaplin (who wrote the IWW / labor anthem "Solidarity Forever" and created many of the IWW's famous "silent agitator" cartoons, including the IWW sabo-cat) later recounted in his autobiography, Wobbly (pp. 206-07):
Even after the war was declared, [Big Bill Haywood] fought to the last to the last ditch for reprinting Elisabeth Gurley Flynn’s Sabotage...It was never reprinted. Saner counsel prevailed. Frank Little was voted down by the General Executive Board. Bill Heywood (sic) had his way again in the matter of proscribing the ‘Black Cat’ I was using rather freely in cartoons. My "Sab Cat" was supposed to symbolize the "slow down" as a means of "striking on the job."
The whole matter of sabotage was to be thrashed out thoroughly at our trial. There is no doubt that our advocacy of it as a class-war weapon con-tributed to the jury’s hasty and unanimous verdict of guilty. The evidence, as interpreted by the prosecution, was against us, but the facts in the case were not. Gurley Flynn’s pamphlet, for instance, was a brief restatement of the type of sabotage advocated by European anarchists and syndicalists from which the IWW had adopted only a few features applicable to conditions in the USA (emphasis added).
The word 'sabotage' is derived from the French word 'sabot', wooden shoe. in the France of the previous era wooden shoes were (allegedly) dropped into machines by striking workmen ready to walk off the job. In the course of time this practice was extended to the use of monkey wrenches, explosives, or emory powder.
The prosecution used the historic meaning of the word to prove that we drove spikes into logs, copper tacks into fruit trees, and practiced all manner of arson, dynamiting and wanton destruction (emphasis added). Thanks to our own careless use of the word, the prosecution’s case seemed plausible to the jury and the public. We had been guilty of using both the "wooden shoe" and the "Black Cat" to symbolize our strategy of "striking on the job." The "sabotage" advocated in my cartoons and stickerettes was summed up in the widely circulated jingle:
The hours are long, the pay is small So take your time and buck ‘em all.
We tried to show the difference between our sit-down and slowdown strategies and the kind of sabotage used by extremists in Continental Europe."
The article goes on, and can be read in the link within the comments.
Imagine a "Russo-Bailey Safety Bill" that could be brought up and proposed by our elected officials? Both of these fine people lived in New York, worked in our City and were brutally murdered in the regular course of a working day. One while getting a bite to eat by her post in Queens, the other whilst going home on the train in Brooklyn.
Both were known for helping others, FDNY EMS Lieutenant Alison Russo-Elling, from Commack, LI, for her EMS work and being there as a first responder after 9/11, and Steamfitter Thomas Bailey, from Carnarsie, Brooklyn, who was known as "Hero" by his coworkers for stopping the brutal attack of a woman on the L train.
I'm a Steamfitter and I've always taught the new guy/gal that "the most important job you have is going home to your family in one piece at the end of the day". I'm sure in the 4,500 member EMS there's similar nomenclature. Unbeknownst to many "civilians", we have some of the most dangerous vocations. Talk to an EMS worker who has to show up first when someone needs help, talk to a construction worker after a terrible accident on the jobsite. When so many were told to stay home and shelter, we were all deemed "Essential" and manned the jobs. How many of us on our own time ran towards the towers or showed up during the recovery after the 9/11 attacks? With all our safety training, we know that horrific accidents and altercations are common in our fields. We know that there is always that chance that something cbad can happen on the job at any given time, that there is always the chance of paying the ultimate price. That being said, we also know that no one who works in this city should be murdered getting a bite to eat in their uniform or on the train headed home from the job. Any one of us could have been Allison, any one of us could have been Thomas.
Our city failed them, our elected officials have failed each and every one of us. The city and our contractors demand the best from us when we work every day, we do our part, what we get in return for our efforts just isn't good enough. All of us who live, work and pay taxes here deserve better.
