Strike action

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Striking Teamsters defend themselves with pipes against armed police in the streets of Minneapolis, 1934.
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Striking Teamsters defend themselves with pipes against armed police in the streets of Minneapolis, 1934.

Strike action (or simply a strike) is the mass refusal by employees to perform work.If an agreement could not be reached, workers could strike, or refuse to work until certain demands were met. Strikes first became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became important in factories and mines. In most countries they were quickly made illegal as factory owners had far more political power than the workers. Most western countries legalized striking partially in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Strikes have also been used to force governments to change policies or even to bring down a government. A notable example is the Gdańsk shipyard strike led by Lech Wałęsa. This strike was signifigant in the struggle for political change in Poland, and was an important milestone along the way to the fall of Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe.

Sometimes the term "caught the blue flu" is used to refer to individuals who are on strike.

The strike tactic has a very long history. Towards the end of the 20th dynasty, under Pharaoh Ramses III in Egypt, i.e. about 3,500 years ago, the workers of the royal necropolis organized the first known strike or workers' uprising in history. The event was reported in detail on a papyrus at the time, which has been preserved, and is currently located in Turin (source: François Daumas, Ägyptische Kultur im Zeitalter der Pharaonen. Munich: Knaur Verlag, 1969, p. 309).

Contents

Categories of strikes

Most strikes involve actions by labor unions during collective bargaining with an employer. Generally, such actions are rare: 98% of union contracts are settled without a strike. Occasionally, workers decide to strike without the sanction of a labor union, either because the union refuses to endorse such a tactic, or because the workers concerned are not unionized. Such strikes are often described as unofficial. Strikes without formal union authorization are also known as wildcat strikes.

In many countries, wildcat strikes do not enjoy the same legal protections as standard union strikes, and may result in penalties for the union members who participate or their union. The same often applies in the case of strikes conducted without an official ballot of the union membership, as is required in some countries, such as the United Kingdom.

A strike may consist of workers refusing to attend work or picketing outside the workplace so as to prevent or dissuade other people from working in their place or conducting business with their employer. Less frequently workers may occupy the workplace, but refuse either to do their jobs or to leave. This is known as a sit-down strike.

Another unconventional tactic is work-to-rule, in which workers perform their tasks exactly as they are required to but no better. For example, workers might follow all safety regulations in such a way that it impedes their productivity or they might refuse to work any overtime. Such strikes may in some cases be a form of "partial strike" or "slowdown", which is "unprotected" in some circumstances under United States labor law, meaning that while the tactic itself is not unlawful, the employer may fire the employees who engage in it.

During the development boom of the 1970s in Australia the Green ban was developed by certain socially more conscious unions. This is a form of strike action taken by a trade union or other organised labour group for environmentalist or conservationist purposes. This developed from the black ban, strike action taken against a particular job or employer in order to protect the economic interests of the strikers.

United States labor law also draws a distinction, in the case of private sector employers covered by the National Labor Relations Act, between "economic" and "unfair labor practice" strikes. An employer may not fire, but may permanently replace, workers who engage in a strike over economic issues. On the other hand, employers charged with committing unfair labor practices (ULPs) may not replace employees who strike over ULPs, and must fire any strikebreakers they have hired as replacements in order to reinstate the striking workers.

Strikes may be specific to a particular workplace, employer, or unit within a workplace, or they may encompass an entire industry, or every worker within a city or country. Strikes that involve all workers, or a number of large and important groups of workers, in a particular community or region are known as general strikes. Under some circumstances, strikes may take place in order to put pressure on the State or other authorities or may be a response to unsafe conditions in the workplace.

A sympathy strike is, in a way, a small scale version of a general strike in which one group of workers refuses to cross a picket line established by another as a means of supporting the striking workers. Sympathy strikes, once the norm in the construction industry in the United States, have been made much more difficult to conduct due to decisions of the National Labor Relations Board permitting employers to establish separate or "reserved" gates for particular trades, making it an unlawful secondary boycott for a union to establish a picket line at any gate other than the one reserved for the employer it is picketing. Sympathy strikes may be undertaken by a union as an organization or by individual union members choosing not to cross a picketline.

A jurisdictional strike in United States labor law refers to a concerted refusal to work undertaken by a union to assert its members’ right to particular job assignments and to protest the assignment of disputed work to members of another union or to unorganized workers.

Employers of labor can also go on strike; either through a lock-out of workers (blocking workers from working normally, resulting in loss of wages) or through an investment strike (refusing to commit funds to maintaining or expanding production).

Legal prohibitions on strikes

The Railway Labor Act bars strikes by United States airline and railroad employees except in narrowly defined circumstances. The National Labor Relations Act generally permits strikes, but provides for a mechanism to enjoin strikes in industries in which a strike would create a national emergency. The federal government most recently invoked these statutory provisions to obtain an injunction against a slowdown by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 2002.

Some jurisdictions prohibit all strikes by public employees. Other jurisdictions limit strikes only by certain categories of workers, particularly those regarded as critical to society: police, firefighters, and air traffic controllers are among the groups commonly barred from striking in these jurisdictions. Workers have sometimes circumvented these restrictions by falsely claiming inability to work due to illness — this is sometimes called a "sickout" or "blue flu". The term "red flu" has sometimes been used to describe this action when undertaken by firefighters.

In Communist regimes such as the former USSR or the People's Republic of China, striking is illegal and viewed as counter-revolutionary. Since the government in such systems claims to represent the working class it has been argued that unions and strikes were not necessary.

Most other totalitarian systems of the left and right also ban strikes. In some democratic countries, such as Mexico, strikes are legal but subject to close regulation by the state.

Scabs

People hired to replace striking workers are usually known as scabs. The terms strike-breaker, blackleg, and scab labor are also used. Trade unionists also use the epithet "scab" to refer to workers who are willing to accept terms that union workers have rejected and damage the efficacy of the strike action. The word comes from the idea that the "scabs" are covering a wound.

During Economic Strikes, scabs may be hired as permanent replacements and are normally regarded by trade unionists as obscenely cruel and short-sightedly selfish. Jack London characterized scabs thus:

"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which to make a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water logged brain and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, the scab carries a tumor of rotten principles...There is nothing lower than a scab."

A scab "movement" of sorts has developed in the profession of nursing, claiming an interest in the rights and care of patients during hospital strikes and opposing what they term the selfishness of striking healthcare professionals. Union nurses point to extrordinarily high salaries taken by strikebreaking nurses and accuse them of being "ambulance chasers" that undermine the potential for improved living standards and better staffed and equipped medical facilities for all in the long run.

Strike breakers, Chicago Tribune strike, 1986, Chicago, Illinois
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Strike breakers, Chicago Tribune strike, 1986, Chicago, Illinois

Strikes versus lockouts

The counterpart to a strike is a lockout, in which an employer refuses to allow employees to work. Two of the three employers involved in the Caravan park grocery workers strike of 2003-2004 locked out their employees in response to a strike against the third member of the employer bargaining group. Lockouts are, with certain exceptions, lawful under United States labor law.

Films

  • Statschka [Strike], Director: Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union 1924
  • Brüder [brothers], Director: Werner Hochbaum, Germany 1929 – On the general strike in the port of Hamburg, Germany in 1896/97
  • Salt of the Earth, Director: Herbert J. Biberman, USA 1953 – Fictionalized account of an actual zinc-miners' strike in Silver City, New Mexico, in which women took over the picket line to circumvent an injunction barring "striking miners" from company property
  • La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder, Director: Jacques Willemont France 1968 – A short film on the resumption of work after Mai 68
  • Harlan County, U.S.A., Director: Barbara Kopple, USA 1976 – A film about a very long and bitter strike of coal miners in Kentucky
  • Matewan, Director: John Sayles, USA 1987 – A fictionalized history of one episode in the labour wars between West Virginia coal miners and mineowners during the 1920s
  • American Dream, U.S.A., Director: Barbara Kopple, USA 1991 – A film about the strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota
  • Bread and Roses, Director: Ken Loach(UK), USA 2000 – A film about janitors fighting for the right to unionize in contemporary Los Angeles

See Also

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