Professional scabs are few and efficient.
Amateur scabs are plentiful and inefficient,
and union scabs both numerous and capable.
-Oscar Ameringer
Hellraisers Journal: Thursday March 19, 1908
Oscar Ameringer on Scabs: Professionals, Amateurs, and Card Holding
From The Industrial Union Bulletin of March 14, 1908:
UNION SCABS
—–By OSCAR AMERINGER
There are three kinds of scabs; the professional, the amateur and union scab.
The professional scab is usually a high-paid, high-skilled worker in the employ of strikebreaking and detective agencies. His position is that of a petty officer’s in the regular scab army.
The amateur scab brigade is composed of bums, riff-raff, slum dwellers, rubes, tramps, imbeciles, college students and other undesirable citizens.
The last, and by far the most important class is the union scab.
Professional scabs are few and efficient. Amateur scabs are plentiful and inefficient, and union scabs both numerous and capable.
The professional scab knows what he is doing, does it well and for the sake of the long green only.
The amateur scab, posing as a freeborn American citizen, who scorns to be fettered by union rules and regulations, gets much glory (?), little pay and when the strike is over he is given an honorable discharge in the region where Darwin searched for the missing link.
The union scab receives less pay than the professional scab, works better than the amateur scab and don’t know that he is a scab.
