Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/76

 clothing, building, printing, etc., are the ones in which the method of the partial settlement is applicable. Often in such industries, by signing up individual employers, independent associations, or split-offs from the main employers' organization, the balance are so fearful of losing their present trade and permanent markets that they abandon their resistance.

Partial settlements at critical moments in competitive industries also sometimes stampede the main bodies of employers and break their associations. And by the same token, often the workers involved, seeing the employers' ranks thus crumbling and receiving financial aid from the workers who have settled, are encouraged to fight the harder.

But partial settlements carry with them many dangers which must be carefully guarded against. There are dangers of scab work being done in the settled shops in spite of all precautions; of lockouts of their workers when the main association remains undefeated; of so supplying the burning needs of the market that the hardest pressure is taken off the employers generally, of weakening the picket committees by making it difficult to tell which are really settled employers and which not; of robbing the strike of its mass character and thus its throbbing solidarity spirit; of creating an antagonism of interest between those workers who have gone back to work and those who remain on strike.

But even in the competitive industries, because of the generally growing strength of the employers, the value of the partial settlement is a diminishing quantity. More and more it is becoming necessary to defeat the employers en bloc, and to do this must ever be the left wing's chief aim.

In industries which are thoroly trustified or in which a few large combinations of capital dominate, such as steel,