The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History

Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, Immanuel Ness

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765613301
• eBook ISBN: 9781317457060
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Business

Strikes have been part of American labor relations from colonial days to the present, reflecting the widespread class conflict that has run throughout the nation's history. Against employers and their goons, against the police, the National Guard, local, state, and national officials, against racist vigilantes, against their union leaders, and against each other, American workers have walked off the job for higher wages, better benefits, bargaining rights, legislation, job control, and just plain dignity. At times, their actions have motivated groundbreaking legislation, defining new rights for all citizens; at other times they have led to loss of workers' lives. This comprehensive encyclopedia is the first detailed collection of historical research on strikes in America. To provide the analytical tools for understanding strikes, the volume includes two types of essays - those focused on an industry or economic sector, and those focused on a theme. Each industry essay introduces a group of workers and their employers and places them in their economic, political, and community contexts. The essay then describes the industry's various strikes, including the main issues involved and outcomes achieved, and assesses the impact of the strikes on the industry over time. Thematic essays address questions that can only be answered by looking at a variety of strikes across industries, groups of workers, and time, such as, why the number of strikes has declined since the 1970s, or why there was a strike wave in 1946. The contributors include historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, as well as current and past activists from unions and other social movement organizations. Photos, a Topic Finder, a bibliography, and name and subject indexes add to the works appeal.

PART I
STRIKES: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Introduction by Aaron Brenner

Strikes are multifaceted events involving complex interactions between workers, unions, employers, governments, and other members of the community. By walking off the job, workers try to restrict the revenue going to their employer, thereby pressuring the employer into improving the terms and conditions of their work. In this sense, a strike is an economic act. However, walking off the job has other implications. In doing so, workers implicitly or explicitly challenge their employer’s unfettered control over his or her property. In this sense, a strike is a political act, a contest for power over how production will take place. But a strike can be even more. For some workers, participation in a strike can be transformative, because it involves them in a collective project that changes the way they understand society and their position in it. In this sense, strikes can be mechanisms for the creation of class consciousness, a moment when workers come to see themselves not only as individuals but as members of a working class in opposition to the employer class and its government allies. Or, strikes can do the opposite, convincing workers and others of the futility of collective action.

This section tries to comprehend the multiple meanings of strikes by looking at them in theory and practice. The essays have no single theme, but they deal with issues common to many strikes in American history. Why do workers go on strike? What can they accomplish? How have employers resisted? How have outside observers, including the media, understood strikes? What explains the rising and falling prevalence of strikes? What lessons can be learned from strikes?

Two of the essays, by Gerald Friedman and Christopher Phelps, review how various observers have understood strikes. Given that conflict is inherent in every work stoppage, it is not surprising that there is considerable disagreement about the causes, nature, and value of strikes. Are they manifestations of individual workers’ pursuit of economic goals, the inevitable result of unavoidable class conflict, the outcome of failed interest group negotiation, the consequence of unscrupulous manipulation by union leaders, or something else altogether? In assessing the purposes and outcome of strikes, observers have differed along political lines. Those on the conservative end of the spectrum have argued that strikes are coercive, trample employers’ property rights, disrupt the economy, and reward lawlessness. More liberal observers prefer to avoid strikes but recognize that they are legitimate expressions of workers’ collective economic interests, as long as they are contained within manageable legal and economic boundaries. By contrast, radicals see in strikes the potential to educate workers about their exploitation, challenge the foundations of capitalist labor relations, and, in the extreme case, create the nascent arrangements of a socialized economy. Hopefully, by reviewing what others have had to say about strikes, readers can develop their own methods for analyzing strikes.

From a more practical perspective, essays by Robert Smith and Kim Phillips-Fein trace the methods bosses have used to prevent and defeat strikes. The repertoire has been extensive and includes the employment of scabs (replacement workers), racist or sexist propaganda to divide the strikers, creation of anti-strike committees composed of workers and community members, appeals to the legal system for injunctions against strikers and their unions, requests of the executive branch to arrest strikers, physical attacks on pickets, eviction of strikers and their families from company housing or property, formation of employer groups to spread the cost of lost production, declaration of bankruptcy to reopen without a union contract, and simply waiting out the workers. Since the formation of the United States, employer anti-strike rhetoric has consistently naturalized market relations and characterized the employment relationship as the result of impersonal economic force rather than the result of conscious choice by real people with power over others. Because this market ideology is so prevalent and carries a grain of truth, employers have had not only resources but rhetoric on their side in many strikes.

The essays by Jeremy Brecher and Steve Early focus on the recent history of strikes. Brecher wants to know why the number of work stoppages has declined so precipitously. Early attempts to draw lessons from recent strike victories and defeats. Both are sympathetic to the labor movement and draw similar conclusions about the challenges facing workers and their unions. They both recognize that globalization of manufacturing makes it easier for employers to shift production away from striking workers. Similarly, restructuring—downsizing, outsourcing, automation, work reorganization—reduces the power workers have over their jobs, while the increased flexibility of corporations gives them additional resources to fight strikes. The government, particularly the courts and the National Labor Relations Board, has grown much less sympathetic to workers, unions, and strikes, and in fact has mobilized its resources on numerous occasions to defeat work stoppages. Compounding the problem, many unions have been unwilling to mount the broad challenges necessary to restore workers’ collective power. That is why both Brecher and Early look first to the things unions can do to make their strikes more successful. These include comprehensive campaigns that target every aspect of a corporation in an effort to find its vulnerabilities. Workers can also exploit some of the changes brought about by restructuring; the use of just-in-time production, for example, makes corporations vulnerable to well-timed and well-placed strikes, if unions are willing to engage in them. Early notes that certain tactics make strikes more likely to win, including widespread community involvement, the advocacy of issues that resonate with the broader public, and the creation of a meaningful strike fund. Thus, despite somber assessments of the labor movement’s recent history, Brecher and Early remain convinced that strikes can work.

Taken together, the essays in this section familiarize readers with general concepts related to strikes and provide them with background for reading the rest of The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History.

STRIKES IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Aaron Brenner

The term strike, in its connotation as work stoppage, derives from a nautical term: to strike sail, which means to lower or fold a ship’s sail. According to historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, as a form of protest, merchant mariners in the eighteenth century would strike sail to prevent a ship from delivering its cargo. Their work stoppages became known as strikes, and the term soon applied to work stoppages on land. Of course, work stoppages are considerably older than the word strike. No doubt, as long as some people have worked for other people, there have been work stoppages. The first recorded, and apparently successful, work stoppage took place in Egypt in the twelfth century BCE, when builders of the royal necropolis of Ramses III laid down their tools to demand their food rations, which they then received. But it should be no surprise that the first modern work stoppages were carried out by merchant mariners, since in many ways they represented the first modern working class: laborers without access to the means of subsistence working for people who brought together capital and labor in profit-seeking endeavors. Their work stoppages, like so many that followed, reflected the conflicts inherent in capitalist production between employers’ pursuit of profit in a competitive market on the one hand, and workers’ desire to control their labor and the fruits thereof on the other. It is to be expected, then, that these first modern workers also generated a new term—strike—for their work stoppages.

Work stoppages in America predate the strikes of merchant mariners. In colonial America, indentured servants often ran away or shirked their duties, but the first organized work stoppage appears to have occurred in 1636, on Richmond Island off the coast of Maine. Fishermen there struck to protest the withholding of their wages, but it is not known if they won. Five years later, carpenters on the same island refused to work when they did not receive meat in their food rations. They had a labor shortage on their side, and won their demand. In 1663, indentured servants in Maryland were not as lucky. They quit work when they, too, were denied meat by their masters. Dragged to court, the servants argued that they were too weak to work without meat, but the judge decided against them. Fortunately, he suspended the sentence of thirty lashes after hearing the servants’ pleas for forgiveness. These early work stoppages involving indentured servants exhibited few of the features of later American strikes.

More characteristic of later work stoppages were strikes in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. In 1786, journeymen printers there went on strike for wages of a dollar a day. Having earlier established a strike fund, they were able to hold out long enough to win their demand. Five years later, the Journeymen Carpenters of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia struck to demand a ten-hour day and overtime pay. During this and other strikes at the time, the union sent “tramping committees” to striking workplaces to prevent “scabs,” or replacement workers, from taking their jobs. Master carpenters who employed the journeymen competed fiercely for the business of the city merchants and landowners who financed building projects. Because the financiers refused to pay the masters more, the masters, in turn, refused to meet the journeymen’s demands. After losing the strike, the journeymen formed a cooperative society and advertised themselves at rates 25 percent below the master carpenters. The next year, journeymen shoemakers formed The Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers and struck against a reduction in the prices they received for the shoes they made. They lost the strike, and their organization fell apart, but reformed the next year and lasted long enough to participate in an 1805 strike during which they were arrested, tried, convicted, and declared by the United States Supreme Court in Commonwealth v. Pullis (1806) to be criminal conspirators for engaging in collective action to set the price of their labor. Their case set a legal precedent branding strikers as criminal conspirators that lasted into the twentieth century.

Despite the Commonwealth decision, over the next two centuries more than 130 million workers engaged in at least 275,000 strikes in the United States. Many of these later strikers used the same tactics and experienced the same consequences as their Philadelphia forebears. Like the strikes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century printers, carpenters, and cordwainers, later work stoppages involved union organization, wage and hour demands, worker and community solidarity, strike funds, tough bargaining, the use of scabs, the squeeze of economic competition, and government intervention on the side of employers. In response to economic change, political development, and workers’ own changing experiences, later strikers expanded the repertoire of strike activities and goals. They invented whole new categories of work stoppage—the general strike, the political strike, the hate strike—and they involved important new groups of workers—the unskilled, women, immigrants, African Americans. The result was a rich and diverse history of striking in the United States that defies easy generalization but nonetheless shaped the American economy, polity, society, and culture in myriad ways.

Nasty, Brutish, and Long

Strikes in American history have been nasty, brutish, and long. Given the stakes, labor conflict in the United States has usually been heated, with no love lost between the two sides and often fierce rhetoric. In the 1840s, striking New England textile workers drew on prevalent notions of liberty when they denounced their work as “wage slavery” and called their supervisors “slave drivers,” an increasingly powerful insult as free-labor ideology developed in the antebellum North. During the Great Strike of 1877, Peter H. Clark, an African-American leader of the Workingmen’s Party in Cincinnati, called railroad owners “princes,” while his Workingmen’s Party comrade in Chicago, Albert Parsons, denounced them as “tyrants.” Eight years later, a worker complained before Congress that he and a coworker suffered “under insolent, unscrupulous bosses, rapacious foremen, greedy and unsympathetic managers, wealthy and avaricious contractors, brutal and egotistical capitalists.” Because they most directly confronted strikers, scabs—justly or unjustly—usually received more than their fair share of contempt. Most famously, a poem, “The Scab,” generally attributed to Jack London, summed up strikers’ attitude toward their replacements:

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful stuff left with which he made a SCAB.

A SCAB is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a waterlogged brain, and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts he carries a tumor of rotten principles. …

A strike breaker is a traitor to his god, his country, his family and the working class.

Employer rhetoric has rarely been as colorful, but it has been just as derogatory. The prosecution in the 1806 journeymen cordwainers’ case labeled the strikers criminal conspirators. Later, employers regularly called strikers “anarchists,” “Communists,” and “hooligans.” More recently, employers and their government allies have adopted a new lexicon to describe strikers. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said striking transit workers in 2005 had “thuggishly turned their backs on New York” and “hijacked” the city, managing to combine a racist slur (“thugs”) against the largely African-American and Latino workers with an obvious allusion to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the city (“hijackers”). Likewise, in 2004, United States Secretary of Education Rodney Paige called the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.” Two years earlier, Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge warned International Longshore and Warehouse Union leader James Spinosa that a strike by dockworkers would threaten national security. Though often little more than a tactic in the public relations contest between the two sides, heated rhetoric can also reflect deeply held antagonisms between employers and workers, fueling lingering conflict and preventing reconciliation.

The hostility of strikers and employers has led to relatively long strikes in the United States, compared to, for example, Europe, as PK. Edwards has shown. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, over the last seventy-five years of the twentieth century, strikes averaged slightly more than three weeks in duration, with the duration getting longer toward the end of the period. The only years when strikes averaged less than two weeks long were during World War II, when union officials adopted a no-strike pledge and the federal government moved quickly to suppress strikes in war industries. Outside wartime, the superior economic and political power of corporations meant that responsibility for lengthy strikes generally lay with employers’ hostility to labor organizations. While there are many reasons for this, one is simply that workers preferred shorter strikes, since they were more likely to win. Edwards presents data “which shows a very marked tendency for the proportion of successes to decline, and of failures to rise, as the length of stoppages increases.” Where workers could, they imposed their will as quickly as possible, knowing that their organizational strength would likely ebb over time as their resources dwindled. By contrast, employers could wait out strikers; they could entice or force workers back to work with the carrot of pay or the stick of law and violence; or they could hire scabs and restart production. The exceptions to this pattern occurred when the particularities of production favored workers, as when farm workers timed their strikes to coincide with the harvest, threatening employers with the loss of their perishable crops, or when hotel workers struck during high tourism season, threatening to drive away the most profitable customers.

The brutish part of American strike history is the violence endemic on both sides. But again, due to the unequal distribution of power, employers bear greater liability for the deaths, injury, and destruction. The examples are legend: more than 100 killed, most by police, the National Guard, and U.S. army troops, during the Great Strike of 1877; three Pinkerton security guards and seven workers dead in a shootout at the Carnegie steel works in Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892; forty-eight men, women, and children killed, most by National Guard troops, during the United Mine Workers strike at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914; ten demonstrators shot in the back and sixty wounded by Chicago police at Republic Steel in 1937; the forced deportation of 1,185 Industrial Workers of the World strikers and their sympathizers in Bisbee, Arizona in 1917; or four unionists killed by a sheriff’s posse in Bogalu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Topic Finder
• Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Strikes in cBrenner
• Types of Strikes: Aaron Brenner
• Part I. Strikes: Theory and Practice
• Part II. Strikes and Working-Class Culture
• Part III. Strike Waves
• Part IV. Public Sector Strikes
• Part V Strikes in the Private Sector
• Section 1: Manufacturing, Mining, and Agriculture Strikes
• Section 2: Infrastructure Industry Strikes
• Section 3: Service Industry Strikes
• Additional Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index