The capitalist incentive to work is hunger. Capitalism requires that workers sell their labor to eat. If a capitalist won’t buy your labor, you don’t eat. What the ‘right to work’ would look like if the workers owned to job.

‘The Right to Work’ by Fred Moe from Labor Herald. Vol. 2 No. 2. April, 1923.

WE call ourselves civilized, which implies that we are honest and just. We have religions to teach us honesty and justice and love for one another. We have schools to develop our minds and direct us in the habits of peace, fair dealing, and culture. Still there are millions of us hungry and cold and asking merely the right to work and it is denied. Why?

The right to work is a natural right. It is the foundation right upon which a truly civilized society must rest. The beasts of the jungle, the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea are all born with the right to work for their living. Man is the only animal that has to buy his right to make a living. Worse yet: he often finds there are no jobs for sale although he be willing to pay the very highest price, which is all he produces over a bare existence.

Capitalist society is founded upon the power to deny the right to work. All the wealth and all the poverty, all the bloody wars and profiteering, all the greed and avarice that is rampant in the world today is due to the denial of this simple basic right to work. If the right to work had not been withheld from the great mass of mankind and farmed out at the will of the holders of privilege there would be no hoards of wealth to quarrel about and no incentive to set men at each other’s throats to murder one another wholesale in ferocious wars.

War is the competitive struggle of capitalists for the power to control the right of men to work. He who controls the largest number of jobs is the richest and most powerful man in the world. Every share of corporation stock is a certificate of ownership of some man’s job, and dividends is the rent men pay for the privilege of working, the blood of life flowing from the heart of Labor into the gullet of voracious Capital.

Will Not Admit Right To Work

The masters of society will never voluntarily surrender to the people the right to work. The principle of “hold what you have and grasp for more” is too deeply engraved on their hearts. They will go on in their mad frenzy for gold until some great catastrophe will sweep them from their seats of power. Sentimental appeals to their humanity have proven of no avail. Their humanity is interwoven with dividends, their ideals are anchored with dollars. Under extreme pressure they will yield slightly. They have surrendered the shorter workday. They will agree to give labor a dole of the extra profits it will produce under the stimulus of being “shareholders.” They will even yield to the extent of giving labor a small voice in “the management of industry.” They will do anything but get off Labor’s back. When it reaches that point Labor will have to give a mighty lunge and toss Capital into oblivion.

The employing class tell us they cannot provide all of us with steady employment because they are unable to procure a profitable market for all that we would produce over and above our keep. In other words: because we can produce in abundance only a portion of us are employed, leaving the remainder in outer darkness to starve by the wayside, for all that Capital cares. That is the logic of capitalism. It is a vicious logic, but there it is, in all its vile nakedness, stripped to the bone. The workers are permitted to make their living only on condition that Capital can sell that portion of their product they are forced to surrender as rent for the privilege of working.

Workers Must Own Their Jobs

The capitalists talk glibly about the right to work, especially when they are in the market for scabs. That is one of the thousand lies that camouflages Capital. There is no such thing now as the right to work. There is merely the right to inquire if there is a job to rent. And if there is, and the applicant’s hunger is sufficiently biting to force him to accept the owners terms, and his record is not known to be defiled with the virus of radicalism, he may be granted the privilege to work; the owner of the job reserving the right to evict him at any time without notice, for any or no cause whatsoever. That is what the capitalists mean when they talk about “the right to work.”

The right to work involves the ownership of the job. So long as Capital retains its hold on the job just so long must Labor go begging for permission to live. Living by suffrage is surely a sorrowful and humiliating condition for so-called free men to be in. What a mockery to call men free who must bend the suppliant knee to the lords of industry? The black slave was held in captivity because there were places he could run to. Where can the white slave escape to and be free? Wherever he goes, the taskmasters of Capital are there and the whip of hunger drives him to their service. Freedom, indeed! The freedom of Labor is the greatest fake and delusion of the age. Labor will never be free until it owns its job.

If Labor owned its job it would permit no man to dictate terms of employment; there would be no gang boss speeding the workers up to the limit of endurance, under penalty of discharge. They would laugh to scorn the man who would attempt to “fire” them for any of the numerous reasons for which they are “canned” today. There would be no profits going into the coffers of millionaires with which to hire sluggers and corrupt governments to beat up, jail and murder the workers. There would be no gaudy palaces maintained at the expense of Labor, no highbrow loafers parading up and down the Earth lording it over the people. The idle rich would have to go to work, even as you and I. And the idle poor would welcome the opportunity to work, as a heaven-sent blessing.

How to Reach the Goal

How are we going to reach that El Dorado where every man shall own his job? We are on our way, only we are moving too slow. Our ox-team pace will have to be quickened. The union is built around the job. The early unionists felt, instinctively, their close relationship to the job, while not comprehending the full significance of their efforts to get a grip on it. They never thought of owning the job. Their aim was better pay and security of employment. But they were on the right track; they laid down the foundation. It is up to us to complete the structure. They organized craft unions before industry was developed. Today we have the most powerful and highly organized industrial corporations in the world; and still craft unionism in its primitive form.

Organized Labor is Rip Van Winkle in the real. For fifty years it has slumbered in the cradle of craft unionism while the spiders of Capital spun the web of industrial bondage about it. Now it is waking up heavily-bearded with antiquated ideas, but willing to give ear to the voice of militancy, the only voice that does not utter bombast and meaningless platitudes. Militancy is the beacon light that will guide Labor into the safe harbor of job ownership and freedom.

Job ownership means worker’s control of industry. There is no sidestepping the issue. That’s the logic of industrial evolution. Capitalism is crumbling from its rotten foundation. It cannot save itself. It is approaching the end of its reign of terror and exploitation. It is up to the workers to prepare for the coming crisis. We cannot operate industry with craft unions. Before we take over the ownership of our jobs we shall have to amalgamate our craft unions into industrial units. Thus the question of the hour is the evolution of the industrial union. When it arrives we will then take the next step toward our goal–the conquest of the right to work.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborherald/v2n02-apr-1923.pdf