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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.)
It is important to note in this context that part of the reason the unions have been unable to get peole to strike is because they failed to understand the situations of many the most exploited workers.
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.
There have been succesful strikes in this kind of work, like the highly succesful Cleaners Strike in the Netherlands in 2012-2013, but they required a lot of reinventing the art of a successful strike.
