Ben Compton Joins the Construction-Camp Strike

Ben Compton Joins the Construction-Camp Strike is a decisive test of whether Ben will act on his working-class convictions when they threaten his own job. After Nick Gigli tells him that the construction bosses have been cheating the men on their time, Ben chooses the strike over obedience to Volle; when the walkout collapses under employer pressure, Ben and Nick leave the camp together.

Background and the Dispute

Ben is working at a construction camp where men are paid at a window by the construction boss. Nick, an experienced young laborer who has worked in several industries and served time in jail during the Paterson strike, has become Ben’s close political influence. On Friday evening, an argument breaks out at the pay window. That night, Nick tells Ben that the bosses have been shorting the workers on their hours and that the men plan to strike the following morning. Ben answers that he will join them if they walk out.

The dispute turns on the workers’ pay and their power to refuse work, but the camp’s organization leaves them vulnerable: the boss can assign tasks, dismiss an individual worker, and call the men back with the whistle. Ben’s decision is therefore not an abstract endorsement of labor solidarity. It is a commitment made immediately before the camp’s authority tests it.

Ben Refuses the Boss

The next morning, only a few of the pick-and-shovel men appear for work. Ben waits uncertainly by the cookshack while the camp resumes its routine. Volle notices him and orders him to hitch up a team and go to the station for tobacco. Ben looks down at his feet and refuses, explaining that he is on strike.

Volle laughs at the idea that Ben would walk out alongside the Italian workers, using an ethnic slur to dismiss the possibility. Ben answers by rejecting the insult and asserting both his American birth and his allegiance to his class. Volle turns threatening, declares Ben fired, and warns that his brother would beat him. The exchange makes the conflict personal: Ben’s refusal costs him his position, while the boss tries to make solidarity seem incompatible with Ben’s identity.

Nick responds to Ben’s commitment by calling him a brave comrade in Italian and kissing him on both cheeks. The gesture gives the decision an intimacy distinct from the boss’s threats: Ben has not only refused an order but been recognized by a fellow worker as someone who has taken a side.

The Walkout and Its Immediate Result

Ben bundles his belongings and goes to find Nick, who is among a group of Italian workers. The superintendent and gang bosses have gathered with revolvers in holsters. They tell the men that the company has always treated labor fairly, insists it will not allow a strike to tie up a job involving substantial money, and threatens to fire anyone who does not return when the whistle blows. They also invoke Pennsylvania’s vagrancy laws, turning the threat of losing work into a warning about what may happen to workers who leave.

When the whistle sounds again, the others return to work. Ben and Nick do not. Carrying their bundles, they walk down the road and leave the camp. Nick, tearful, reflects that the workers have been too patient and gentle and do not yet know their strength. The strike has not won its immediate demand in this scene: the workforce is dispersed, and the two men who hold out must leave their jobs. Yet their departure marks a practical consequence of Ben’s choice and preserves the solidarity the camp’s threats have failed to make him renounce.

Place in Ben’s Labor Activism

The construction-camp walkout belongs to a broader sequence in which Ben’s political convictions move from speech into costly action. Earlier, during a New Jersey textile strike, he is invited to speak to workers and urges Webb Cruthers to address them as well. At an attempted overflow meeting, Ben is dragged away by police; Webb then speaks to the crowd. That episode places Ben among workers facing police obstruction, while the camp strike tests his willingness to bear the consequences of refusing an employer directly.

After the camp, the narrative follows Ben through further itinerant work with Bram Hicks. They travel for jobs, including harvest work and a fruit cannery, before deciding to go to Everett to support the Industrial Workers of the World. There, Ben encounters a harsher confrontation: wobblies are seized at the dock and assaulted by deputies. Later, at a meeting supporting Russia’s workers, Ben speaks against the war and is arrested; he is released on bail on the condition that he stop agitating until trial. These later episodes do not undo the construction-camp strike’s immediate defeat. They show instead how the refusal first enacted at the pay window becomes part of a continuing pattern of labor organizing met by employer and state coercion.