Strike!: Why Mothballing Labor's Key Weapon Is Wrong

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.

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."¹ 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 1952.² 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.³

While organizing is vital, basic labor economics dictate that the strategy will not be successful unless accompanied by a powerful strike. To attract members, unions must be able to provide economic benefits to potential members. Despite employer repression against union organizing, one must assume workers are rational economic actors who, if they believed the benefits of joining a union outweighed the possible negative or threatened consequences, would still join unions. In an era of union weakness and decline, workers have little incentive to join unions. But when unions are on the march and demonstrate an ability to win improvements, history shows workers flock to them.

Rather than addressing the economic basis of the inability to organize, many in the labor movement assume that the failure of the strategy is due solely to employer repression. Clearly, employer repression is a major problem. According to Cornell University's Kate Bronfenbrenner, "employers threatened to close the plant in 57 percent of elections, discharged workers in 34 percent, and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent of elections."⁴ However, this raises some important questions: Is the main problem that employers threaten these actions or that they have the power to make good on such threats? Is the main problem that employers tell workers that unions are weak or is the problem that unions are weak? Indeed, the key arguments of union-busting employers draw upon the weakness of unions under the prevailing system of labor control.

As noted by Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin in Solidarity Divided, "Proponents of the organizing model focused, for either tactical or ideological reasons, on the symptoms of the larger problem—lack of organizing and the corresponding union decline—rather than on the problem itself: the existing structure and function of U.S. trade unionism ...."⁵ Advocates of organizing the unorganized fail to explain how the strategy, even if successful, represents the key to reviving union power. Stephen Lerner, a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) staffer, advanced the most developed argument for increasing union density as labor's key strategy. Lerner argued "since union wages and benefits won't make them noncompetitive, non-union employers have less 'rational' business reasons to resist unionization if their competitors are unionized."⁶ However, this argument fails to articulate how unions, even with greater density, will extract bargaining concessions from employers...