Viewpoint: Let’s Stop Avoiding Our Best Tactic—The Strike

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/2010/04/viewpoint-lets-stop-avoiding-our-best-tactic-the-strike

Joe Burns April 20, 2010


Hotel workers’ 2004 strike against San Francisco hotels included 24-hour picketing, a boycott, community rallies, and civil disobedience. Photo: David Bacon | dbacon.igc.org

As unionists search for ways to resolve labor’s ongoing crisis, virtually ignored is the one tactic with a proven ability to produce major gains—an effective strike. After two decades of avoiding the question, it’s time to face the reality of what it will take to rebuild the labor movement.

For generations the ability to strike—and halt the employer’s production—was the essence of unionism. During the heyday of American unions, from the 1930s to the 1970s, workers secured real wage gains, pensions, and employer-paid health care through hard-nosed collective bargaining backed by workplace-based solidarity and a powerful strike.

But today unions have virtually abandoned the strike. There were only five strikes last year of 1,000 workers or more, three of them among public employees, as opposed to at least 200 major strikes per year in the 1970s.

The reason is clear. Today’s version of the strike—which is very different from the traditional strike—makes no economic sense. In a typical strike today, workers set up a picket line only to watch the scabs walk past to take their jobs.

In contrast, traditional unionism was based on commonsense economics—on the notion that a strike must make an employer’s pocketbook bleed. Merely withdrawing labor cannot work for most striking workers, since employers typically have no difficulty hiring scabs. Yet for more than two decades the idea that striking workers need to stop production has been treated as a fringe idea within the labor movement.
SOLIDARITY WORKED

Labor’s other main tool was workplace-based solidarity. Whether it was expanding picket lines to an entire industry, refusing to handle scab-produced goods, or pressuring a rogue employer by choking off its supply or distribution chain, solidarity was a key union tactic.

Solidarity allowed workers to act as a class, rather than as one isolated shop at a time. These workplace-based solidarity actions were banned in the 1947 Taft-Hartley law precisely because they were so effective.

FULL story at link.

[jody]

1. Are strikes more or less effective when unemployment/underemployment is double digit for jobs that

are not highly skilled?

[doc03]

2. I am retired now but was in two major strikes in my lifetime

both times we came back for less than the company offered us the day it began. As soon as the strike starts the company gets a court order limiting pickets at the gate, you are prohibited from stopping anyone even scabs that want to enter the plant.

[Scuba]

3. Our best tactic is the vote. Striking may increase public awareness...

...thereby generating votes, but stikes cause a lot of pain as well.

[Earth Bound Misfit]

4. Unfortunately, mgmt will employ THEIR best tactic--

permanent replacement workers.

Thanks, "St. Ronnie"