Flâneur

Gustave Baumann

Doug Henwood | February 9, 2017

The strike—labor’s most powerful weapon against capital, except maybe sabotage—is disappearing even more rapidly than unions, which is saying a lot. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that there were 15 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers in 2016. That’s 1 above the average of the past five years, and down 96% from the average of the late 1940 and 1950s.

(Stoppages include both strikes and lockouts—the data series doesn’t distinguish between the two. The overwhelming majority are strikes. Notable exceptions in recent years have been in professional sports, but in a bizarrely hostile and destructive move, Long Island University locked out its employees in September 2016. From here on, I’m using the word “strike” rather than stoppage because it sounds far better with only a minor loss of accuracy.)

Get your Latest News From The Leftist Front on LeftPress.tk → Help Us Gather News (Click for Details) ←

Cleaners, call centre operators, fast food employees, and so on, these are many of the workers of today. Unlike the factory worker, these workers often work on a smaller workforce where they meet a few dozen comrades at most, and a strike is difficult to organize, while picketing and preventing scabs from reaching the work place is near impossible.

And the point of a strike is that it is not symbolic, it creates a real physical inconvenience for the company resulting in a real financial loss and that is what forces the company to accept the terms of the workers. 

The problem that spread out workers face is about more than communication and awareness, it is about how to physically impact the profits of your employer in a spread-out workplace situation. 

Traditionally, a strike requires:

A general walk out of all workers on at least one factory department, leaving at least one vital job that isn’t being done in the production process. (So for example if all the tire producers in a dar factory went on strike, the company would not have tires and would thus stop being able to produce complete cars)

A commitment by other factory workers not to interfere with the strike (so if you make car doors, do not make tires during the strike no matter how big the raise your boss offers you for making tires)

A picket line blocking access to the factory so that any worker who might come to replace the strikers (commonly known as ’scabs’) knows that they are working against a strike, and knows just what a horrible person that makes them. 

A strike fund that feeds the workers while they are on strike. Because it’s not reasonable or realistic to expect workers to starve for the fight. 

With these ingredients, a strike is a battle of endurance: who can hold out the longest? the strikers living of a finite strike fund? or the bosses who are losing money because they can not sell their products? Who will give in first? That battle is the essence of a strike. 

Modern strikes need to win this same battle but they need to do it differently. When you work in a call centre spread out across small offices in the city, or in fast food chains, or you clean offices, it becomes difficult to organize a clear picket line because the work place is not in one place. It becomes much, much easier for the boss to just hire some other desperate workers to do your job.

Since most workers in these places are not unionized they also lack access to a strike fund, and as a result they lack another key ingredient in the fight.  

When the national Dutch union FNV organized the Dutch Cleaners strike in 2012-2013 dealt with these struggles in a couple of ways:

They approached all cleaners, regardless of whether they were union members, and offered to support them in a strike. Of course they hoped that these cleaners would join the union after the strike, but for the moment they supported them no matter what. So the cleaners had a significant strike fund because the biggest union in the country had their back. 

Since many of the cleaners being exploited are immigrants, they also invested in a shitload of translators to make sure every part of the strike process, every meeting at every level, was accessible to all cleaners. 

They abandoned the traditional picket line, grouped all cleaners together and went to every single strike location together. This meant that no matter whether you had 10 cleaners or 100 cleaners at your office, you would have over 3000 angry striking cleaners on your doorstep calling you out. Not every day, but massive enough to be noticed by everyone still working for you. 

They only allowed cleaners to go on strike if they could get a significant percentage of the cleaners in their company to join them. A lone cleaner looking to strike would be told to organize their workplace first (and given help to do so). This way they protected cleaners from being fired on the spot. (after all, if 1 in 10 cleaners goes on strike the company can simply fire them, if 7 in 10 cleaners go on strike the company can not do the same thing without finding replacements). And this means they protected the cleaners even if it came at the expense of the strike. This is significant. 

They identified key large employers like the national railway system and invested a lot of time in talking to scabs there, persuading them to stop cleaning for the railway system and join the strike instead. The result was very dirty trains and train stations, which could be seen by every person who used public transport. This brought national awareness to the strike. Everyone could see every day that the strike was on-going. Dirty trains became the billboards that showed just how valuable and usually invisible cleaners are in our daily lives.

They used famous imagery from the history of the unions and reworked it to create heroic images of striking cleaners, creating among their community a sense of working class pride as cleaners. And they made sure these images reflected the diversity of ages, races and genders of the real workers.  

No doubt the internet helped reach the widely distributed cleaners and maybe if FNV hadn’t already made a significant strike fund available, crowd funding could have contributed there. 

But that was not what made the strike a success. Real on-the-ground organizing did that. A union prepared to re-create the image of the working class to build a truly inclusive working class movement did that.