Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/77

 packing, rubber, textile, automobile, etc., the value of the partial settlement has vanished. It is virtually out of the question to play off one set of employers against the others. They are too firmly united together, financially and industrially, for this. The workers must win against them as a whole, either upon a local or national scale, mostly the latter.

An impermissible form of partial settlement is that often practiced in the coal industry, where the reactionaries sign up some of the mines of certain companies and let the rest remain nonunion. This puts a premium upon nonunionism and gives the employers in question a terrible weapon to use against the organization. All they have to do in the slack seasons or other periods of active offensive against the workers in order to defeat the union, is to transfer production from their union to nonunion mines, This they have done many times with disastrous results.

Likewise, in great strikes of workers in basic and key industries, such as the railroads, coal mining, etc., partial settlements are usually unwise and often disastrous. They destroy the political effect of such strikes. They are a confession of weakness, of failure to achieve the original aim of the strike, which was to defeat the government, or, the whole body of employers.

Had Farrington succeeded in his previously mentioned plan of signing up a state agreement for Illinois in the midst of the 1922 strike it would have ruined that great struggle, not merely because of the flood of Illinois coal thrown on the market, but especially because the settlement would have signalized the failure of the union to get control of the whole central competitive district. The employers very much favored Farrington's treacherous maneuver. As a rule, in strikes of a broad and marked