It figures that it would take the United Electrical Workers union to try to rally the fighting spirit in America’s battered working class with a sit-down strike at a shuttered factory in Illinois. The UE have a proud history of daring and desperate fighting stands that culminated in their expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations early in the Cold War for refusing to purge their ranks of Communists. That fight resulted in the loss of over a hundred thousand members and the union’s relegation to the sidelines of the labor movement. The UE that survived those terrible fights of the 40’s and 50’s remained a leaner, meaner fighting machine; a union that prized democratic rank-and-file control, labor education, the long haul struggle and the value of a symbolic fight.
The tactic of the sit-down strike was expelled from the labor movement long before the Communists who perfected it. The great wave of sit-down strikes that formed the United Autoworkers, United Steelworkers and other mass production industrial unions of the CIO-era were contemporaneous with the legal fight over the constitutionality of a new law that enshrined labor’s legal right to organize. Many employers, declaring that the National Labor Relations Act overreached Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce, simply decided to ignore the law and continue to fire union activists in spite of government orders to recognize and negotiate with the duly-authorized unions they chose to represent them. The workers compelled the employers to recognize them and the unions they formed by taking control of the factories until the employers relented and began negotiating for good contracts.
The Supreme Court, in some respects, merely recognized the fact of this de-facto truce when they declared the NLRA constitutional in 1938, and ordered the reinstatement of all terminated union activists. However, the court attempted a balancing act by declaring that employees terminated for engaging in illegal activities in the course of their union activity were not entitled to reinstatement. Sit-downers – trespassers and thieves, all – could thus be fired for engaging in such a strike. Having won the legal right of a union recognition process in the NLRA, therefore, most unions abandoned the sit-down strike tactic and reached a tacit understanding with management that most employers respected until they resumed open warfare with the labor movement in the late 1970’s.
While management has spent the past thirty years firing union activists and shuttering factory gates as legitimate labor relations strategies, most unions have continued to respect the earlier understanding with management, to follow the rules of the National Labor Relations Act and to get their asses kicked. The UE has changed that, but, really, what did they have to lose?
What did they have to gain, you might be asking? Well, first of all, federal law requires a company to provide at least 60 days advance notice to its workers before closing a factory. Republic Windows only provided three. Fifty-seven days’ pay is not chump change when you’re facing unemployment. The UE’s contract with Republic further called for severance of a certain number of days paid for each year of service, which would provide a badly needed cushion to those workers at a time like this. And, finally, there’s the possibility that the layoffs and factory closing may not be necessary at all, that Republic may be preparing to open a new (non-union) factory, with new (non-union) employees a few states away.
By sit-downing in the factory the union has made it impossible for Republic to sell it. Would you buy a building that was infested with 200 angry union members? By focusing their wrath and the media glare on Bank of America, the bailed-out bank that initially refused Republic Windows the loan that would have kept it afloat, the union has harnessed the public rage over a $700 billion Congressional bail-out that has protected the interests of the rich investors who created this recession while screwing the rest of us. Desperate people who might otherwise have been portrayed as greedy union members are instead valorized as aggrieved community members.
Win or lose, the United Electrical Workers have provided a shining example of the potential of resistance to cut-backs in these lean times. I hope that my own union, which is formulating a public campaign to resist disinvestment in public spending, can galvanize the public with the fights we pick and the way we fight them.