By Sir Charles
-- Homer
Historically speaking, the past few months have been unusual in that a couple of strikes by labor unions not only generated headlines, but also, for a moment at least, permeated the consciousness of the country. Or perhaps more accurately, that of the mass media, which serves as its stand in. Strikes by the United Auto Workers over the summer against General Motors and Chrysler and by the Writers Guild of America in recent weeks had a sort of glowing nostalgia about them, vestiges of the past (proud or otherwise) that they are.
As someone who represents unions for a living and has done so for more years than I care to count, this raises large philosophical questions and concrete day-to-day issues alike. What does it say about the times in which we live that the very notion of a strike has become anachronistic, if not obsolete? What is lost in such a world? And, beyond economics, what are the political ramifications of this phenomenon?
I've been involved in only a handful of strikes over the course of more than twenty years of working in a practice that's almost exclusively devoted to representing unions. At least half of those strikes were deliberately provoked by management in an attempt to abnegate relationships with unions. In other words, few cases could be described as workers asserting themselves to better their lot – rather, the strikes were essentially defensive and reactive in nature.
Concrete statistics bear this out more profoundly than do my impressions and anecdotal experience. Since 1990, the United States, in sum, experienced fewer than fifty strikes each year. And after George W. Bush took office, that statistic fell even lower--to just over twenty strikes per year, with only 545,000 workers involved collectively in the period from January 1, 2001 through December 31, 2005. By contrast, if one looks at the data for years prior to 1981 (when a certain B movie actor became president), the norm was to have in excess of 200 strikes per year; in many years, double that amount. It was par for the course to have over a million workers strike in a typical year during the period 1947 to 1981, and in several years, there were twice that many Americans on strike.
My heartfelt conviction is that the threatened, nearly-extinct status of the strike is a bad thing--in terms of its implications for working people, of course, but a bad thing, too, for the culture writ large. Strikes, in purely economic terms and from a cost benefit perspective, are often unsuccessful. It takes a long time to make up for the earnings lost, especially when work stoppage is prolonged. But a strike represents a collective No to the excesses of ownership, to the commodification of labor, to the tyranny of capital. It is the cri de couer of employees everywhere, asserting that they’ve taken all they can stand, and they can’t stand no more. The strike is, in a word, an assertion of a very democratic ideal: the fundamental notion that I surrender my freedom for eight or so hours a day--but just to a limited extent--and that I can be pushed only so far.
Part of what I hope to explore and express in this blog is my sense that as a culture, as a society, we need to rediscover this powerful, collective No; that it is an essential part of our common humanity; and that the idolic worshipping of the market that has taken hold of our consciousness over the last quarter-century is inimical to the notions of true democracy and a happy citizenry.
So let’s have at it, shall we?
