Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle by Robert Ovetz;

Author:Robert Ovetz;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

CONCLUSION

The rising number of strike threats made by workers in the US may be an indicator of the emerging recomposition of working-class power. However, the story is incomplete as long as we don’t know whether these strike threats had sufficient organizational, positional, and disruptive power to convince employers of the higher cost of a strike than conceding to some or all of the workers’ demands. We do not yet know whether strike threats are merely a strategy for avoiding a strike that the workers demand but that the union is unprepared for, unwilling to organize, and expects to lose. There is great uncertainty as to whether strike threats are a potentially powerful new strategy to bypass the paralyzing harness of labor law to achieve workers’ objectives.

However, the larger number of strike threats than actual strikes might point to a rumbling from below by workers anxious to recompose their power and apply their leverage against the disciplinary role of both contract unionism and capitalism. The 2018–19 teacher strikes were mostly carried out by self-organized workers who didn’t belong to unions. Their strikes were made all the more possible because if there are no unions then there are no rules and no limits. As capital and the state depart from the tripartite relationship with unions that characterized the Fordist era, self-organized workers are no longer restrained or harnessed to CBAs and labor law. Carrying out strike threats may be a way for workers to test and expand their own organizational, positional, and disruptive power.

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