MoJo: What Does Today's Occupy Strike in Oakland Have to do With 1946?

[Hissyspit]

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/occupy-oakland-general-strike-1946?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Motherjones%2Fmojoblog+%28MotherJones.com+%7C+MoJoBlog%29

What Does Today's Occupy Strike in Oakland Have to do With 1946?

—By Tasneem Raja and Gavin Aronsen| Tue Nov. 1, 2011 10:06 PM PDT

When the acrid fog of flash-bang grenades and tear gas cleared on last week's violent clash between protesters and police in Oakland, the city emerged as a new focal point of the worldwide Occupy movement. On Wednesday, thousands are expected to flood downtown and march on the Port of Oakland—the country's fifth-largest—in a massive daylong protest and general strike. It's an impressive escalation from a patchy idea first tossed out just days ago at a General Assembly meeting in Frank Ogawa Plaza, the scene of last week's showdown. This is collective action on speed, and while most (not all) Occupy protesters are calling for a peaceful protest, city officials are preparing for trouble, just in case.

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Fred Glass, a professor of labor history at City College of San Francisco, recently went on local public radio show KQED to discuss optimal conditions for brewing up a general strike. His recipe calls for four conditions: widespread anger among the working class, a "spark" to kick things off, someone willing to stick their neck out and call for a general strike, and an organizing structure. In Oakland today, the first is largely a given and Occupy Oakland has provided the latter two. If school teachers and port workers don't show up for work en masse on Wednesday, the injury suffered by Iraq vet-turned-activist Scott Olsen last week could be credited as the spark that drew mainstream sympathy to the local Occupy movement.

The 1946 general strike was sparked when store managers at two downtown Oakland department stores where retail clerks were striking—Hastings and Kahn's—enlisted the aid of "some 250 police . . . with tear gas and riot gear" to push through picket lines and escort non-union delivery trucks to the stores. The American Federation of Labor voted to strike in solidarity with the clerks, and 100,000 workers from 142 unions across Alameda County declared a "work holiday" and walked off their jobs on December 3 of that year. It was the last of a wave of postwar strikes across the country, fed by working class anger against outsized corporate profits and high inflation, says Glass. Oakland's general strike lasted 54 hours, finally called off by the AFL after the city promised to stop sending "scab" delivery trucks to businesses with workers on strike. In terms of tangible gains, the mostly female retail clerks of Hastings and Kahn's didn't get any of the concessions they wanted, but four labor candidates were elected to Oakland's city council the next year.

While several local unions have endorsed Wednesday's action, Glass says Occupy Oakland's idea of a general strike doesn't jibe with the legal and logistical realities on the ground today. "I think that the Occupy Oakland has a marvelous spirit and it has a great moral authority to it," he told KQED. "But their democratic process does not have the kind of legal responsibilities that unions do with their contracts." For instance, there's the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, which states that a solidarity strike in support of other workers is illegal. Moreover, several local unions have their hands tied by no-strike clauses in their contracts; SEIU Local 1021, Oakland biggest union, can endorse the strike but can't officially tell its members to join in. For the same reason, the Oakland Education Association is encouraging its members to take personal days.

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[Leopolds Ghost]

1. Kick for great justice

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. Also, isn't it funny how the Taft-Hartley act broke the back of unions' right to strike?

And unions embraced this notion of them being collective bargaining tools without a bargaining chip?

And the labor movement started to decline in the decades shortly thereafter?

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Something tells me the days of wild cats are back.