Seizing the Moment

Why have progressives been unable to take full advantage of historic opportunities—including the current economic transformation—to build a broad, sustained mass movement and win fundamental social change?

That’s the question provoked by Rebel Rank and File, a collection of essays by left-leaning academics and veteran labor activists. Their analysis concerns the largely forgotten workers’ rebellion that took place in America from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, but many of their thoughts are relevant to the strategic choices activists face today.

Many younger activists know that during what the authors call the “long 1970s” national movements fought for civil rights, women’s liberation, environmental protection, gay rights, and ending the Vietnam War. But few know about the revolt among working people that would make the pro-union protests in Wisconsin this year look like a church picnic by comparison.

As Robert Brenner and Judith Stein explain in their chapters about the economic changes that set the stage for the workers’ revolt, Americans who grew up during the expansion that followed World War II had high expectations for living well and being treated with respect. By the mid-1960s, the economic expansion was slowing, global competition was increasing, and workers’ expectations clashed sharply with a drive by corporations to maintain profits by imposing unreasonable workloads and limiting pay and benefits.

It may be hard for those who didn’t live through it to imagine the long 1970s upsurge illustrated in Rebel Rank and File by countless examples such as these:

• • From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the number of illegal strikes (“wildcat” walkouts not authorized by workers’ unions) more than doubled, to about fourteen hundred per year. In industries such as auto, the increase was even greater. For example, wildcat strikes per year at Chrysler more than quadrupled during that period.

• • In 1970 alone, there were 5,716 strikes (legal and illegal) involving more than three million workers—and one out of six union members in America. Examples include a 197-day strike by twenty-seven thousand construction workers in Kansas City, a sixty-four-day walkout by twenty-three thousand rubber workers, a work stoppage by thirty-five thousand airline employees, and a strike by forty-two thousand taxi drivers in New York.

• • More than two hundred thousand postal workers conducted an eight-day, illegal nationwide wildcat strike in which they had to overcome the deployment of thirty thousand National Guard troops.

• • In 1972, young workers shut down the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio for three weeks over a doubling of assembly-line speed—a struggle that the twenty-nine-year-old local union president called “the Woodstock of the working man.”

• • Farm workers in California struck the major vegetable growers despite a disagreement over strategy with their union president, Cesar Chavez, who wanted them to rely on a boycott campaign among urban liberals instead.

• • Coal miners shut down most of the mines in West Virginia in a political strike protesting rising prices at the gasoline pumps, and independent truckers blockaded major highways throughout the Midwest and East Coast over the same issue.

• • Four thousand nurses in northern California struck forty hospitals and clinics.

• • Longshore workers on the East and Gulf Coasts struck for 116 days. Three years later, their counterparts on the West Coast struck for 123 days.

• • Nearly fifty thousand telephone workers conducted an illegal statewide strike in New York.

During this same period, state and local public employees, who were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act passed in the 1930s, demanded the legal right to collective bargaining, often engaging in illegal strikes to force politicians to act. Young insurgents in the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union (AFSCME) established some of the first public sector collective bargaining precedents that were then built upon by activist teachers. In 1966 alone, there were at least fifty-four illegal strikes involving almost forty-five thousand teachers. As...