by Mike Elk
Mike Elk
A number of months ago, Ezra Klein and I got in an argument about former SEIU labor organizer Stephen Lerner’s notion of a mass strategic default on mortgages, in which numerous Americans whose mortgages are “underwater” would default on their mortgages in order to hurt massive banks and force them to deal with the foreclosure crisis. Klein wrote: “It’s unlikely that the union movement would truly adopt Lerner’s plans, or that they’d even have the power to make great on them if they needed to adopt them.”
Aside from radical farmers in the Dust Bowl in the course of the 1930s, a a strategic mortgage default campaign is practically unheard of in American background. Unions have in no way attempted this, and it would be unlikely they could trigger adequate defaults to hurt the banks. Unions rarely are successful in significantly hurting the earnings of key corporations when they threaten boycotts against corporations. But the threat of a boycott (rather than the real boycott) can be a effective tool in forcing a corporate executive to negotiate due to the fact of the negative publicity boycotts can create, and the nervousness an unpredictable corporate campaign of escalation can produce for executives.
In other words, corporate campaigns are usually about affecting corporate executives’ physcologically as a lot as they are about affecting corporate executives economically. As labor journalist Josh Eidelson is fond of saying, “You win in a labor fight when you break the will of an employer to resist.”
The essential to that type of victory, even though, is for escalating actions against a corporation to implicitly threaten an ultimate “big action” that wreak havoc on the company. The procedure of ecalating action really should both construct help amongst unionists and the public for such a last action, and make the management so fearful of the action that it decides to concede to workers’ demands.
But a lot of militant unionists prefer to go for the large action appropriate way—as we saw in the struggle of a Longshoreman union local in Longview, Wash., and the attempted boycott of the Huffington Post by the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union this year. By employing significant confrontational tactics at the begin of a struggle, trade unionists danger turning out to be isolated with no any further way to rachet up pressure if the tactics prove ineffective in breaking the will of an employer to resist.
In Longview, longshoremen have employed a militant campaign of civil disobedience to quit the operation of a not too long ago opened largely nonunion, port. Longshoreman and their households also physically blocked grain trains from entering the port by standing on railway tracks. In July, many hundred longshoremen invaded the port, cut the brake lines to a grain train, and dumped out numerous tons of grain. 100 longshoremen were arrested.
While the action obviously showed longshoreman were willing to get difficult, it also may have undermined their cause. First media reports, which remain disputed by longshoremen, recommended the unionists have been wielding baseball bats and threatening the physical safety of railroad operators. The business used these reports to seek pricey federal injunctions against the union that stop long term actions attempting to block access to the nonunion port. It was quite difficult for a judge not to concern a difficult injunction against the union in the face of this kind of apparent proof.
Likewise, it’s tough to develop neighborhood support for a union struggle when violence has grow to be involved. While a hard action like busting up a grain train might inspire and harden a hardcore group of union activists, it can also turn off much less militant allies in the neighborhood, like tiny businessman and other citizens, who are weary of obtaining involved in a violent struggle. A lack of violent action and vandalism would have created it easier for the union to argue against hard injunctions against the union in federal court.
Instead of constructing an escalating corporate campaign of nervousness, the longshoremen deployed their “big threat” of vandalism—and the business has been capable to resume their typical operations with out issues. The railroad organizations responded by hiring armed guards to assist them enter the nonunion port. With the armed guards and additional police protection, the trains now enter the port of Longview routinely without difficulties. The longshoremen in Longview have no way to escalate the campaign.
Similarly, one more large-profile labor struggle, unions’ boycott of the Huffington Post (known as in March because Huffington doesn’t spend its bloggers, even though profiting immensely off of their labor) has floundered. Right after the sale of Huffington Post to AOL this year, the Newspaper Guild and National Writers Union known as off the boycott.
Instead of running a enormous corporate campaign of leafleting outdoors of Ariana Huffington’s speaking engagements and lining up supporters amid prominent writers of the boycott, the two unions began creating excellent on their massive risk of boycotting the site. Soon after the boycott, newspaper guild organizers scrambled to draw up lists of prominent writers supporting the boycott, but still have nevertheless to generate such a list of men and women in help of the action. Number of occasions or actions were held to assistance the boycott, which has largely been ignored by prominent progressives, including several high-profile labor-funded progressives. No deal has been reached amongst the Huffington Post and the writers union and tiny help stays for the deal. [Mike Elk wrote this before today's announcement by the NWU.]
The lesson in all of this is big bold actions are not often the very best answer for winning a labor struggle. Even if a union does pull off dramatic actions this kind of as boycotts or civil disobedience that temporarily stops the functioning of a targeted organization, as in Longview, the actions could not result in breaking the will of a organization to resist. As labor seeks to use the momentum of Occupy Wall Street to take on massive corporations, it ought to bear in mind that bold is not constantly the very best way to beat a corporation—a cautious strategy of escalation is frequently critical.
Mike Elk writes for In These Occasions, exactly where this post initially appeared.
Harold Meyerson is a columnist with the Washington Post.
AFSCME members from the Washington location and across the country will join thousands of other individuals from the labor, civil rights and faith communities tomorrow on the National Mall. Activists will celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy as a civil rights leader, and assess America’s progress – or lack of it – considering that his assassination in 1968.
