It’s Not Whether to Strike,It’s How to Win a Strike

The author addresses the big question labor continues to debate: how can the labor movement resist the corporate onslaught? Readers of this journal well know that organized labor has been in crisis for several decades.

Especially since President Reagan’s crushing of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981, large employers have waged a successful offensive against unions. While in the twenty-five years after World War II scabs were rarely hired during strikes in states with significant union density, hiring scabs and permanently replacing strikers is now a typical corporate strategy.

Since early 2011 public-sector workers, too, have faced attempts at crippling or eliminating their unions. Contract negotiations commonly revolve around how deep union concessions will be. Defined benefit pensions are going the way of the dinosaur. Two-tier contracts, where new hires get a fraction of the wages and benefits of existing workers, are the new normal. Employers intent on eliminating unions increasingly are turning to lockouts; 11 percent of work stoppages in 2011 were lockouts.

Only 6.6 percent of private-sector workers are in unions, down from a third of the workforce sixty years ago. Yet few unions put serious resources into organizing, and those who do find their efforts shackled by toothless labor law. Efforts to amend the Wagner Act to allow every worker who wants to join a union to do so—43 percent of the public according to a March 2011 poll commissioned by Fox News—consistently fail even when Democrats, as in 2009-10, control the presidency and both houses of Congress. Both parties endorse trade policies that expedite the exporting of unionized manufacturing jobs abroad.

Yet labor support for the Democratic Party remains steadfast, regardless of how little the Democrats deliver. Like clockwork every couple of years top union leaders say they are going to take a more independent stance in politics, that they are sick of the Democrats taking them for granted. But then when campaigns heat up labor is first in line again with donations and resources, arguing once again that Republican candidates, in an ever-steady rightward tangent, must be defeated at all costs.

So, what is to be done?

The author suggests that only one ingredient is missing. Striking, we are told, will put labor back on the path to victory. Labor used to know this, we hear, as the strike was labor’s primary weapon in its “first 150 years.”

There are several problems with this thesis.

First, it’s problematic history. Indeed, the author quotes two economists to note that “the strike weapon often was simply not effective” due to repression by police—and, one might add, by company thugs, the National Guard, and at times the U.S. Army. From the 1870s through the mid-1930s there were more strikes lost than won for this reason. What led to victory in the late 1930s and 1940s wasn’t simply the strike weapon but a more complex strategy. What led to victory was also the CIO’s ability to build a mass movement with deep popular support. It was the CIO’s strong stance against racism, hiring of African American organizers, and steadily working to repair relations with black community leaders and clergy.

It was engaging in sit-down strikes to prevent the police and company thugs from violently breaking up picket lines. It was the CIO union’s leaders willing to hire large numbers of the best and most experienced organizers in the country, regardless of the fact that they were openly socialists and communists. It was a stance that defined “politics” as a balance between mass struggle to pressure politicians and knocking on doors to getting prounion politicians elected.

And, as a historical aside, it’s an odd article that in the name of calling for more militancy quotes with favor that most unmilitant of labor leaders, AFL president (1924–52) William Green.

Second, the article underestimates the real fear that today’s rank and file have of going on strike. If you lived in a high-union-density state in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it was relatively easy for workers to make the decision to strike. Yes, striking workers lost wages. Workers didn’t know how long a strike might last. Workers didn’t know whether the wages lost would be worth any gains made.

Yet as part of the postwar labor–management social accord, big employers in high-union-density states didn’t hire scabs during strikes, let alone permanent replacements. Strikes were battles of attrition.

In one major strike after another in this era, workers made major gains, and unionists who went on strike knew the odds were in their favor. Real income adjusted for inflation in the postwar era doubled for the average worker, to a significant extent due to strike actions by unionists who in turn had the ripple effect of lifting most nonunion workers’ wages. Health insurance was won by strikes, dental insurance, paid sick days, paid vacation days, pensions—benefits that would have been unthinkable to a typical worker in the seventy years after the Civil War.

It’s unclear whether the author’s point is that we need labor leaders who are willing to lead their members out on strike or we need to convince the 15 million workers still in unions that they need to strike more often, or both. There is no doubt the author is correct that there are too many labor leaders today who have abandoned the strike tactic. But it’s not just a problem of poor leaders. Private-sector workers especially are well aware that they stand a good chance of being permanently replaced if they strike, as hundreds of thousands of their brethren have been over the past thirty years.

Third, it should be noted that most of the 7.5 million public-sector workers in the United States do not have the legal right to strike. Federal workers do not. Public-sector workers in thirty-nine states do not. When transit workers struck in liberal New York in 2005, the union was fined $2.5 million, each striker was fined a day’s pay, the union lost dues checkoff, and the local’s president was jailed for ten days.

Fourth and most important, it’s just too simple a remedy. Yes, without leverage labor cannot achieve gains, and the ultimate leverage labor has against management is its ability to withhold its labor. Yes, we need labor leaders who embrace striking as a tactic—a tactic of last resort, always, but a vital tactic.

But the most important question that needs addressing is not “Why doesn’t labor understand that it needs to strike more often?” The more pertinent question facing labor is “How can unions win strikes?”

The author implies that labor reaching out for public support and community allies is a diversion from what should be its main strategy: striking. Building labor–community coalitions, allying with the Occupy Wall Street movement, organizing new workers are all beside the point; striking is all that really matters. We are told that “trade unionism will rise and fall in the workplace.”

But these things aren’t a diversion from striking. They are necessary ingredients in building a labor movement that can win strikes.

You don’t win a strike by leading a well-run strike. You win a strike by the foundation you’ve laid, months and years before the strike.

You win a strike by the lengthy process of organizing the members, by creating an organizing structure commonly called contract action committees or a member-to-member action network, and by planning and implementing a strategy to win. You can’t discuss strikes without discussing contract campaigns that have the goal of educating, organizing, and mobilizing members on the job to pressure the company into negotiating a good contract.

To get a good contract when faced with a formidable adversary takes a well thought out plan. It takes a comprehensive strategy. It takes organization. It takes resources. It takes time. It takes one-on-one conversations by the thousands. It takes activists doing role plays on how to talk to uninvolved members. It takes mentoring and developing hundreds of new leaders, it takes follow-up, monitoring to find weaknesses, and organizing to eliminate those weaknesses.

It takes encouraging and trusting the members to come up with creative ideas for on-the-job actions. It takes unleashing the power of your members to win support in the community and public opinion. It takes using social media effectively.

We can look at the victorious Chicago Teachers Union strike in September 2012 for lessons on how to do all these things. What was key about the CTU strike was not just that the new leadership were never scared of taking the 26,000 teachers out on strike. What was so important about the CTU experience is that the union showed the labor movement how a strike can be won.

Over the course of two years they transformed a top-down union with little member activism into one of the most bottom-up, activist rank and files of any union in the country. And over the course of four years—starting in 2008, two years before the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) won office—the union mobilized members to build strong community and parent alliances around a program of education justice and challenging Chicago’s education apartheid school system. As a result, a poll five days into the strike showed 66 percent of parents with kids in Chicago Public Schools supported the striking teachers, and parents showed their support every morning at the 600 picket lines.

The lesson from Chicago isn’t just that striking can win. The lesson from Chicago is that if the CTU could transform their union, then every union in the country can do it, and Chicago showed us the painstaking work of internal organizing and coalition building that leads to victory.