Table of Contents
Joe Burns has written an important book, stressing through a series of examples the importance of the strike to the past and future of the labor movement. Burns shows how the strike has been reduced to near death by the constant hostility of the courts, the union busting tactics of management, and the incompetence and cowardice of union leaders. Burns also makes an eloquent plea for a return to old fashioned, class conscious, militant unionism which, he argues persuasively, can restore the strike and rejuvenate the labor movement.Julius Getman, author of Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement
A close look at labor history reveals that strikes have not only been a critical vehicle of workers power but have also been an irreplaceable fulcrum of workers transformation. Its been in strikes that skilled and unskilled workers, white workers and workers of color, men and women, and native born and immigrant workers have discovered, experienced, and acted upon their shared interests. Its been in strikes that capitalisms tensions between competition and cooperation have been played out, that workers have experienced the meaning of solidarity and the prospects for a future society based on it. The disappearance of the strike, so well explained here by Joe Burns, is not only a consequence of labors weakness; it is a cause of it, too.Peter Rachleff, author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement
Joe Burns shows us how badly employers needed to outlaw solidarityand the drastic consequences for workers. He argues that unions cannot combat the corporate onslaught with high road rhetoric or symbolic actions; they must exercise their power to disrupt the business as usual of profit-making. This book will prompt some major rethinking.Jane Slaughter, founder of Labor Notes Magazine
To Betty Burns
1. THE STRIKE AND THE RISE OF THE WORKING CLASS
By wielding the threat of a powerful, production-halting strike, trade unionists forged a better way of life for millions of working class Americans during the roughly fifty year period from 1930 through 1980. During this time, workers secured real wage increases, pensions, employer-paid health care, protection from arbitrary treatment by supervisors, as well as seniority systems that rewarded length of time with the employer. Writing in 1962, labor economist Albert Rees declared the strike by far the most important source of union power.
Rees was not alone in this belief. Reviewing labor textbooks publishing from the 1950s through the 1980s, one finds near universal agreement that collective bargaining made little sense unless it was backed by the threat of a strike that halted production. In his 1980 book Labor Economics, Roy Helfgott wrote that, the unions ability to strike, and thus halt the employers production, is essential to the collective bargaining process. In this view it is the potential of a disruption in production that induces employers to strive to effectuate agreement with the union. Writing nearly a quarter of a century earlier, labor analyst Jack Barbash made largely the same point in the 1956 book The Practice of Unionism, stating that The decisive weapons which the unions utilize (or hold in reserve) to give meaning to collective bargaining are the strike, the boycott, and the picket line.There can be no collective bargaining, if, from the unions standpoint it cannot utilize these means.
Most workers of the period did not need textbooks to tell them all this, as they knew about the power of the strike from their own experiences. During the 1950s, for example, workers repeatedly struck to back up their bargaining demands. Major strikes (those of over 1000 workers) averaged 350 per year during the decade, as opposed to 20 per year from 2000 through 2009. Unions of the 1950s shut down entire industries for weeks or even months at a time to win improvements for their members.
One can pick an industry and see how the strike made a difference in the lives of workers. Take auto, for example. In the early 1930s, life was difficult for autoworkers. Although the pay was higher than for other manufacturing work, the job was sporadic and stressful. An autoworker could be employed one week, and then have to get by without a paycheck the next. In addition, autoworkers were required to work off the clock, cutting their hourly pay considerably, and auto companies often targeted workers over forty for termination, considering them past their prime. Autoworkers also faced the speedup, the ever-increasing pace of production work.
By the mid-1950s, however, the auto industry had undergone a major transformation. No longer a high turnover job, auto work became the ticket to a better life. With the job now came employer provided health care, pensions, and supplemental unemployment insurance. Although still suffering from the monotony inherent in production work, many workers could afford a home and to send their kids to college. Twenty years of hardnosed collective bargaining, backed by strike activity, had wrestled these improvements from the reluctant management of auto companies.
Autoworkers also joined with workers in other industries to gain concessions from employers. During the great strike wave of 1946, for example, autoworkers joined steelworkers, miners, and hundreds of thousands of workers in other industries in engaging in long-term strikes. At General Motors, the UAW struck for 113 days, shutting down 80 plants around the country, and eventually winning an 18.5 cent per hour wage increase as a result. In 1955, the union fought for a guaranteed annual wage. With a $125 million strike fund in hand, the UAW again targeted Ford, eventually winning supplemental unemployment benefits to address the lack of year-round employment.
In industry after industry, the power of the strike transformed the lives of countless numbers of working class Americans during the middle of the twentieth century. Truck drivers, grocery workers, carpenters and steelworkers all improved their working conditions through collective bargaining backed by a strike. Historian Jack Metzgar, the son of a steelworker, describes how the strike changed his familys life:
From the time my father joined the union in 1936 until the 1959 strike, the average real wage of steelworkers increased 110 percent, with the bulk of the increase coming after the war. Think of that a minute. Think what it does for a familys well-being to have more real spending power year after year, to experience a steady relentless improvement in its standard of living for more than two decades.
However, such improvements did not come easily. Through ten sets of negotiations and five strikes from 1946 to 1956, Metzger recalled, the steel companies fought every advance the union soughtand did so in a highly public way.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE STRIKE
For most of the history of the United States, the strike has been the main weapon for working people seeking to improve their conditions of employment. There have been an estimated 300,000 strikes throughout U.S. history, These strikes encountered hostility from the judicial system, which considered such efforts to be a restraint of trade. Yet even in the face of government repression, workers persevered, forming national labor organizations to give form and structure to their strike efforts.
