Strike! Why Mothballing Labor’s Key Weapon is Wrong

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5967/strike_why_mothballing_labors_key_weapon_is_wrong/

Wednesday May 12 3:15 pm

By Joe Burns

When the labor movement rises again, it will not be the result of improved methods of organizing house calls, the passage of legislation, or one-day publicity strikes. Rather, it will be because the labor movement rediscovered the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, but an effective strike grounded in traditional union economics, tactics, and philosophy.


A street scene from the "Waterfront Strike" in March 1934 in San Francisco, a part of events leading up to a general strike later that year. The strikers were members of the International Longeshoreman Association, which had failed to negotiate better hours and wages with employers. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)


For generations of trade unionists and labor analysts, the strike was considered essential to collective bargaining and, as declared by economist Albert Rees in 1962, “by far the most important source of union power.” During the heyday of American unions, from the 1940s to the 1970s, workers secured real wage gains, pensions, and employer-paid health care through hard-nosed collective bargaining backed by a powerful strike.

However, after the employer offensive in the 1980s crushed striking unions in industry after industry, trade unionists largely abandoned the strike in favor of other strategies. Thus in 2008, there were only fifteen major work stoppages, compared to 470 major strikes in 1952. In place of the strike, unions developed less effective forms of struggle, such as the corporate campaign and the one-day publicity strike. While innovative, these tactics proved unable to inflict sufficient economic pain upon employers to substitute for a strike that halts production.

Since the mid-1990s, trade unionists have embraced organizing the unorganized as the preferred path for trade union renewal. However, despite massive outlays of union resources, labor’s strategy of organizing the unorganized failed to reverse, or even halt, labor’s decline.

Labor actually lost over 1.1 million private sector members from 1995 to 2008, with the percent of private sector workers in unions dropping from 10.4 percent to 7.7 percent during that period.

FULL story at link.

[nosmokes]

1. RAmen, brother.

walking a picket line sucks out loud, but it is a potent weapon.

[Atticus]

2. America will never regain its sense of optimism and well-being unless its trade unions

once again thrive.

I absolutely agree that organized labor---with the full support of the Democratic Party---should dust off its strike placards and demonstrate the "power of the people" to a new generation.

And, those not directly participating must once again be educated about respecting picket lines. My father, a union man for decades, taught me that no man worthy of respect would ever 1.) strike a woman, 2.) go back on his word, or 3.) cross a picket line.

Those who respect labor and refuse to cross a picket line amplify the strike's effect and give invaluable emotional support to people who are literally "putting it on the line" to improve safety, working conditions and pay for themselves and, indirectly, working men and women everywhere.

Union Yes!