Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1188730
18 C I N E M O N T A G E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D younger and "temporary" employees to permanently second-class status. They're fighting, too, an ethos in which a fantastically profitable corporation demands further austerity from the employees whose tough sacrifices helped b a i l o u t t h e co m p a ny a d e ca d e a go. Their cause resonates well beyond GM's assembly lines because it represents a challenge to the heads-I-win-tails-you- lose logic that has come to define working folks' relationships with their employers throughout our economy. The UAW's strike will hopefully have been settled by the time this column sees print. But additional show- downs are likely to follow close behind. Eighty thousand work- ers at the national healthcare consortium Kaiser Permanente were prepared to walk off the j o b i n O c to b e r. T h e y a s s e r t that the putatively non-profit behemoth has in fact been pri- oritizing profits and executive pay over the welfare of patients and workers. And approximate- ly 25,000 educators in Chicago called a work stoppage in the nation's third-largest school district. Their bargaining priorities, like those of other #RedForEd activists, combine b r e a d - a n d - b u t t e r c o n t r a c t i s s u e s w i t h c a l l s f o r s o c i a l j u s t i c e i n o u r public schools. These fights, of course, have plenty of recent antecedents. Hotel workers in San Francisco, schoolteachers in Los Angeles, telephone technicians in Miami, nurses in Tucson — all sorts of workers have been walking out in a dizzying slew of strikes in recent months. Still others have plausibly threatened crippling work stoppages, stoppages averted only when previously recalcitrant employers gav e g ro u n d . S o u t h e r n C a l i fo r n i a's grocery workers, for instance, beat back management's push for a concessionary deal this summer by demonstrating their readiness to paralyze supermarkets throughout the region. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that nearly half a million workers inter- rupted work in large walkouts (defined as strikes involving a thousand or more em- ployees) at some point in 2018. This year appears on track to post similar numbers. Such levels of strike activity haven't been seen in the U.S. since the mid-1980s. What's going on with the strike wave washing over the nation? It's probably instructive to look to our past for some clues about our present, and to look specifically at how strikes came to be virtually eradicated from the political and economic life of our country. The labor movement's mythic past is full of strikes, many of them epic showdowns celebrated in labor's lore and traditions. Maybe you've heard the tradi- tional labor anthem "Solidarity Forever," a century-old song in praise of workers' exercise of power (set to the even more superannuated tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"). You may have even sung it yourself at a union rally. (There's no shame in mumble-humming through some of the more obscure verses, such as the one that asks, "Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite / Who would lash us in to serfdom and would crush us with his might?") The song's sixth stanza extols labor's most potent weapon in the struggle against exploitative bosses: They have taken untold millions that What's going on with the strike wave washing over the nation? they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn that the union makes us strong. That ditty dates back to 1915. Flash forward 66 years to 1981. I was in fifth grade at the time, and Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" then had more currency than "Solidar- ity Forever" as an anthem of on-the-job malaise. More significantly, that was the year in which more than 10,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job, confident that without their brain and muscle not a single plane could fly. To their surprise, a charismatic, carefully-coifed anti-communist from California — himself an erst- while labor leader and a veteran of strikes in the entertainment indus- try — decisively and devastatingly crushed their union. President Reagan's breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Control- lers Organization (PATCO) strike is widely regarded as a major inflec- tion point in organized labor's late 20th-century trajectory of decline. Unions had problems aplenty predating PATCO, but the air traffic controllers' disastrous stand put the movement into a tailspin. Emboldened executives followed Reagan's example and took hardline positions in subsequent pri- vate-sector labor disputes, breaking high-profile strikes in several industries. After the air traffic controller's strike, Reagan made it viable and acceptable to unabashedly bust unions. And thus the following years were ones in which so- called Big Labor got cut down to size. In the decade after the PATCO debacle, the annual average of large private-sector strikes in the U.S. dropped to less than one-fifth of what it had been in the de- cade prior to PATCO's ill-fated stand. As a result, Americans of several generations — mine included — have grown up in an era in which work stop-