The Strike Weapon: Can It Still Work?

...In the garment district, a quarter of a million workers milled about the streets, responding, without any formal order, to what one ILGWU official called "an unwritten law" about crossing picket lines...

...it makes the world go round...

...Until recently, the United States was among the world's most strike-ridden societies...

...Though for the most part technical and economic restructuring have undercut the efficacy SPRING • 1997 • 61 The Strike Weapon of strikes, countervailing tendencies exist...

...Government officials helped, too, not only conservatives like Reagan but even labor-backed liberals like Bruce Babbitt, whose deployment of the Arizona National Guard proved critical to the Phelps Dodge triumph...

...Lean, tightly-integrated inventory, production, and warehousing methods depend on labor stability...

...Even if the Democrats controlled Congress, it is hard to imagine passage of the AFL-CIO's proposal to make the hiring of permanent replacement workers illegal...

...In the images that it has put forward for over a century, when labor withdraws, everything stops...

...Reagan's permanent replacement of thousands of air traffic controllers proved that the unthinkable could be done, though it seemed at the time like a possible special case because the workers he fired had violated a law forbidding federal employee strikes...

...Finally, in mid-September, Barnard and its union agreed on a new contract, ending a walkout that had lasted seven months...

...Globalization exacerbates the problem, as companies replace production lost in one country with increased output halfway across the globe...

...Phelps Dodge erased any notion of exceptionality two years later when it replaced long-unionized, privatesector strikers exercising rights clearly given them by federal labor law...

...At stake is more than a tactic in collective bargaining, for strikes have been central to the history of unionism in the United States, and for that matter the history of the country itself...

...On March 6, the strikers returned to work in "a gesture of good faith," but after negotiations stalled they resumed their walkout...

...Tactics include demonstrations at corporate meetings, proxy fights, lobbying, billboards and radio advertisements, the formation of community support groups, and mass rallies...

...Now there was absolute stillness, no motion, no sound...

...The past two decades have been marked by a series of dramatic strike defeats, from Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981 to the complete rout of the copper workers who struck Phelps Dodge in 1983 to the UAW's disastrous eighteen-month strike against Caterpillar that ended in late 1995...

...Adopted during a period of relative labor peace, and to some extent copied from Japan, where labor relations have been less volatile than in the United States, they have left certain companies vulnerable to strike action by relatively small groups of strategically placed workers, precisely the scenario that led to the initial organization of many of the unions we have in basic industry today...

...Successful strikes demonstrate to unorganized workers the power of unionism, drawing many to it...

...The failure of the 1919 steel strike doomed industrial unionism for another generation, while citywide walkouts in 1934 in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco helped spark the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA...

...SPRING • 1997 • 65...

...For workers, strikes appear to have gone back in time to the earliest days of the labor movement, when "turn-outs" or "standouts," as they were then called, usually ended with either a quick victory for the workers or the collapse of their organizations...

...The company's success in not only winning the strike but also in decertifying all thirty union locals that represented the strikers inspired a host of major corporations to take the replacement worker path...

...General Motors and Boeing, for example, remain vulnerable to company-wide walkouts because with workforces measured in the hundreds of thousands, recruiting, training, and deploying scabs would require a mind-boggling amount of time, money, and political capital...

...As a high-level staffer of one industrial union bluntly put it, "No one gives a shit anymore about crossing a picket line...

...Barnard's administrators, in tune with national management trends, treated the strike as much as an opportunity as a threat, a chance to put the striking union in its place and demonstrate its ability to maintain essential operations without the usual workforce...

...But they also have shown that with sufficient wit and determination, sometimes you can beat the odds...

...One simple change accounts for much of the difference: the introduction of automatic elevators...

...The Barnard strikers, for example, courted the alumnae of the college, including prominent public figures, bringing growing pressure on an institution that likes to wrap itself in feminist, liberal cloth...

...Rather than striking, many unions are exploring alternatives when negotiations break down, be it working without a contract, launching slowdowns, or mobilizing community support...

...Meanwhile, the regional UAW office provided the clerical strikers with strong financial, organizational, and political support During the 1989 NYNEX strike, the Communications Workers helped lead popular opposition to a proposed telephone rate hike, while the aggressive stand of its picketers made the company fearful that the use of permanent replacement workers would result in widespread sabotage...

...Unionized manufacturing companies now have large cadre of nonunion employees whom they can reassign to the shop floor in strike emergencies, as Caterpillar did very effectively...

...Large strikes have dropped even more precipitously...

...The rise of conglomerates also has made it harder to win strikes...

...This time, events did not follow the old script...

...With the percentage of the workforce that belongs to a union less than half of what it had been a half-century ago (nearly 35.5 percent in 1945, 14.9 percent in 1995), proportionately far fewer people have had the experience of belonging to a union, growing up in a union household, or having friends or neighbors who are involved with organized labor than in earlier years—a major factor in the declining respect for picket lines...

...Unionists and their supporters need to grapple with the implications of the decline of the strike and the meaning of militancy in such changed circumstances...

...By contrast, in 1996 picket lines largely failed to stop tenants, deliverers, and even unionized construction workers from entering struck buildings, a dramatic demonstration of the diminishment of solidarity even in what generally is dubbed a union town...

...Striking telephone workers, for example, discovered in the early 1970s that automated switching equipment turned their walkouts into long sieges, in which they could only hope that accumulated maintenance problems, backlogged installation orders, and political pressure might force company concessions...

...Following successful strikes by the International Association of Machinists against Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the union received a spurt of calls from unorganized workers seeking to join up in the cities where the aircraft makers had plants...

...A carefully planned campaign—along with the economic reserves to go the long haul—can sometimes lead to strike success even under unfavorable circumstances...

...Solidarity needs to be taught, be it in the home, at work, or in the streets...

...Still, given the matrix of economic, technological, and social developments, it seems unlikely that even smarter, more flexible unionism will reverse the quarter-century decline in striking, at least in the foreseeable future...

...When companies have truly huge unionized workforces, replacement workers become impractical...

...Even as politicians right and left bemoan the decline of community, worker solidarity usually gets categorized as a form of group selfishness rather than as common sacrifice for the general good...

...Ultimately, the fate of the strike lies with the broader fate of organized labor...

...in 1974, 424 strikes began that involved 1,000 or more workers...

...In doing so Greyhound, Continental and Eastern airlines, the Chicago Tribune, International Paper, and Caterpillar took advantage of first the high unemployment of the early Reagan years and then the normalization of strikebreaking...

...From 1948 to 1953, when American labor was at its peak, over half the work days lost to strikes worldwide and nearly a quarter of all strikers were in the United States...

...But a closer look points to a more complex message, for in the end the Barnard strikers won most of what they wanted, retaining the health plan they preferred and agreeing to only a minimal increase in contributions to finance it...

...During the midand late-1980s, more large strikes involved nonmanufacturing than manufacturing workers...

...Over the past two centuries, work stoppages have ebbed and flowed in frequency, but the depth of the current drop, along with the increased ability of employers to weather long confrontations (Caterpillar remained profitable throughout the UAW strike), raises the question of the possible obsolescence of the strike...

...Walkouts, they contend, need to be accompanied by so-called corporate or contract campaigns aimed at public opinion, political leaders, other workers, and company boards of directors...

...When school reopened in the fall, no professors relocated their classes and most students ignored the struggle...

...On February 22, 1996, two hundred Barnard College clerical workers, members of UAW Local 2110, walked off their jobs, protesting the college's insistence that they pay more for health insurance and switch health plans...

...In addition, these companies have large cadre of skilled workers who would not be easy to replace...

...That changed during the 1980s...

...Out of the terrifying quiet came the wondering voice of a big tirebuilder near the windows: "Jesus Christ, it's like the end of the world...

...At the same time, organized labor itself will succeed only if it stops playing by the old rules...

...The ability of companies to continue operating when struck challenges the deep beliefs of many workers and sympathetic intellectuals...

...As the economy shifts from manufacturing to services, relocating work often becomes more difficult, another development that potentially boosts the efficacy of strikes...

...As strikes become less common, unions need to find new means to demonstrate their ability to exert power on behalf of working people and to defend them from corporate aggression...

...Barnard, and Columbia University with which it is affiliated, have seen more than their share of strikes over the years, but most have been oneor two-day affairs...

...This reaction is perhaps understandable when strikers already have better salaries and benefits than most wage earners in surrounding communities...

...The left long has promoted the notion that ordinary human labor creates value...

...Today, firms offer strikebreaking services ranging from legal advice to security guards to trained replacement workers, with none of the opprobrium or even the renown attached to their predecessors, such as the Pinkerton Agency and the Bergoff Service Bureau...

...Strikers already have learned this hard lesson...

...In 1992, for example, during the first of its two recent strikes, Caterpillar offered its workers a top wage rate equivalent to $39,000 a year...

...SoSPRING • 1997 • 63 The Strike Weapon phisticated union leaders—often at the regional or national level—have been encouraging local activists to analyze their circumstances carefully before embarking on walkouts, and unless chances for winning are very strong, to spurn the tactic...

...Technological changes in part account for the sharp drop in the number and efficacy of strikes since the heady post-World War II days...

...Short of a dramatic change in national politics, akin to the coming of the New Deal, only a massive revival of the labor movement will likely change the environment sufficiently to make strikes more winnable and more common...

...In addition to workforce size and skill, the degree of automation, the level of competition, the elasticity of product demand, and the political tenor of worksite communities all contribute to the likelihood of strike success or failure...

...As strikebreaking successes have piled up, companies have seemed almost eager for work stoppages, for they present a path toward deunionization, once just a dream but now a practical possibility...

...The 1877 railroad strike, the first national labor protest, resulted in over a hundred deaths, terrified the propertied classes, and placed the labor question at the top of the national social and political agenda...

...Fewer and fewer workers want to take the risks strikes entail...

...Instantly the noise stopped . . . A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire tools...

...Large, multiproduct, multiplant firms have the economic wherewithal to endure long work stoppages, even when workers succeed in shutting down production at a particular facility or of a particular product...

...Many agree with Julie Kushner, a UAW official who helped lead the Barnard strike, that it remains labor's "chief power...

...Caterpillar also benefited from the tendency in U.S...

...Even when circumstances are favorable, many unionists argue that strike victories require elaborate strategic planning...

...In spite of all that has happened, very few labor leaders are willing to renounce striking...

...The end of World War II saw the largest strike wave in the country's history, with five million workers walking off their jobs during the year after V-J Day, ensuring labor a prominent position in the postwar political economy...

...In 1946, fifteen thousand striking building service workers brought New York City's central business district to a virtual halt, idling a million and a half workers and causing such economic damage that after five days New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey felt compelled to negotiate a truce...

...The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service reported only 372 work stoppages in 1996—down from a peak of 3,111 in 1977—the lowest figure since the agency began keeping records nearly a half-century ago...

...The near universal acceptance of the very term reflects how much moral and social norms have changed, for this sanitized, seemingly technical phrase lacks the emotional charge and class consciousness associated with the once far more common appellation, scabs...

...Many unionists stress that specific circumstances—often outside of labor's control— make all the difference between winning and losing...

...industry, documented in the economist David Gordon's last book, Fat and Mean, toward an ever greater ratio of white-collar and supervisory person.nel to production workers...

...These days, labor withdraws itself and, all too often, nothing much happens: a plant keeps operating, production is shifted elsewhere, a college muddles through...

...Al60 • DISSENT The Strike Weapon though its strike frequency roughly paralleled the rate in European countries with strong labor movements, strikes in the United States typically involved more workers and lasted longer than those elsewhere, so that proportionate to the size of the workforce, more work days were lost to labor conflict in the United States than in virtually any other country...

...As Jonathan D. Rosenblum documents in Copper Crucible, his fine history of the 1983 copper strike, Phelps Dodge used as its playbook a pseudo-academic study entitled Operating during Strikes, put out by a unit of the Wharton School led by Herbert Northrup, a one-time protege at General Electric of Lemuel R. Boulware, perhaps the most notoriously anti-union Fortune 500 executive of the 1950s...

...Of course, many if not most workers never shared the romantic notions of their advocates, but their frustration at the growing imbalance of power at 64 • DISSENT The Strike Weapon the workplace, and its practical consequences for their lives, is palpable...

...When faced with determined employer action, especially the hiring of permanent replacement workers, even strikes by the most powerful unions have been crushed...

...Won or lost, strikes shaped the development of organized labor...

...Although economic and technical changes have had a profound impact on strike action, social and political factors have been even more important...

...The sea change in public attitudes toward strikers has made possible one of the most devastating antilabor developments of the past two decades— the widespread use of permanent replacement workers...

...Not surprisingly, workers in highly automated industries like telecommunications have become increasingly reluctant to strike...

...But a new sobriety toward striking is evident throughout the labor movement...

...With the Barnard administration displaying a newfound toughness, for two weeks the chants of picketers disrupted business, professors held classes off campus, and sympathetic students demonstrated...

...In the 1820s and 1830s, strikes by artisans seeking to shorten their work day led to the formation of the first citywide labor federations and the Working Men's parties...

...With this signal, in perfect synchronization, with the rhythm they had learned in a great mass-production industry, the tirebuilders stepped back from their machines...

...With funding from corporations and conservative thinktanks, Northrup acted as a oneman cheering squad for corporate strikebreaking, bucking up the resolve of the executives with whom he regularly met...

...A March 1996 strike of three thousand workers at two General Motors brake parts plants in Dayton, Ohio brought twenty-six assembly plants to a halt in less than three weeks, resulting in the layoff of one hundred and seventyfive thousand workers and first-quarter company profits some $900 million below expectations...

...As the strike dragged on through the spring and summer, some forty strikers drifted back to work...

...Some unions are spurning the traditional, nominal picket line for more innovative, aggressive measures, be it civil disobedience or "picketing" repair and service workers in the field (during a 1989 strike against NYNEX, the Communications Workers put pickets outside individual manholes, scaring the dickens out of the managers and temporary replacements below...

...Few building service workers hold such power today...

...In 1946, most New York building managers did not even try to hire replacement elevator operators because they realized that the culture of solidarity that pervaded the city and its liberal polity, in which organized labor loomed large, would have made the effort futile...

...These days, when strikes do occur they tend to be more bitter and violent than those three or four decades ago, because they often are last-ditch efforts by unions to defend work conditions, jobs, or representation rights...

...The workplace—so often posited as the locus of power for the otherwise powerless—now frequently seems just another venue for demonstrating the helplessness of the meek and the omnipotence of property...

...Though not highly skilled, elevator operators occupied a strategic position in the skyscraper cities of mid-century America, able to bring them to a halt simply by withdrawing their labor...

...In both cases, the unions snatched victory from what looked to most observers like the inexorably closing jaws of defeat...

...The widespread impact of the strike reflected General Motors' adoption of lean inventory practices and its decision to concentrate brake part production in two plants near each other, a reversal of the preference American industry developed— following the great industrial strikes of the 1930s—for multiple sourcing and geographic dispersion...

...But disregard for strikers is prevalent even when they clearly are exploited, as visible on New York's purportedly liberal Upper West Side, where this winter streams of shoppers have been ignoring the poorly paid immigrant workers picketing a well-known gourmet fish store...

...Whereas once typesetters held the levers of power, now delivery people—the least skilled newspaper workers—have the best shot at bringing a paper to its knees (though the current Detroit newspaper strike demonstrates that even they have at best a long shot...

...The days of the ritualized walkout, when companies kept paying strikers' health insurance premiums and made no effort to resume production, are long gone...

...The UAW was seeking a thousand dollars a year more when the national median income for households was only $30,000...

...62 • DISSENT The Strike Weapon In 1938 the Supreme Court ruled that the hiring of a new permanent work force during strikes over economic issues did not violate the NLRA, but for decades thereafter few major companies took this route, believing that, with deunionization unlikely, it would needlessly poison future workplace relations...

...Furthermore, a consensus is growing that to be successful, striking has to consist of more than withdrawing labor...

...A half-century later thirty thousand members of the same union struck the same area, but this time business continued as usual, albeit in dirtier offices, during the thirty days it took the union to win a new contract...

...If skill requirements are high enough, replacement workers simply cannot cut the mustard, as the professional baseball and football team owners discovered...

...While above all else, the use of replacement workers has to be seen as a facet of the general corporate antilabor drive of the last quarter-century, consultants, academics, and politicians facilitated this counterrevolution...

...Changes in printing methods now make it possible for a handful of management employees to put out a daily newspaper...

...in 1995, just 31...

...It is far easier to move lingerie production than skilled nursing care or Ivy League education...

...It is also true, however, that many workers spurn unions precisely because they fear being forced to strike...

...Strike defeats, they know all too well, have lasting effects, embittering workers against their unions, discouraging nonunionists from organizing, and emboldening employers...

...In many industries, the introduction of highly automated processes has reduced or eliminated the ability of workers to stop core operations...

...Justintime inventory accelerates the ripple effect of walkouts...

...For example, in Industrial Valley, writer Ruth McKenny described the beginning of a 1936 strike against Firestone Tire: The tirebuilder at the end of the line walked three steps to the master switch, and drawing a deep breath, he pulled up the heavy wooden handle...

...At first glance, the Barnard clash seems to illustrate a widely held belief that strikes no longer work...

...Nor is legislative relief probable...

...At the time of the Caterpillar strike, for example, little more than a quarter of the company's worldwide workforce belonged to the UAW...