Wayne O'Leary

Return of the Wildcat

A spectre from organized labor’s storied past suddenly reappeared recently in the form of the successful “wildcat” strike by West Virginia’s exasperated public school teachers. Long without decent compensation, beleaguered by rising health-insurance premiums, and offered no legal recourse to adequately address their situation, put-upon teachers took the only route open to them that promised results; they ignored a union leadership anxious to accept official pay-raise assurances and refused en masse to return to work without contract commitments in writing, defying state law and state authorities in the process.

Nothing like this has been seen in years, especially in the public sector, where strikes are often illegal, as in West Virginia, and collective-bargaining rights, if they’ve been granted at all (they were not in the Mountain State), are increasingly being taken away — most recently in Tennessee (2011) and Scott Walker’s Wisconsin (2012). Spontaneous, unauthorized job actions led by rank-and-file workers (the definition of a wildcat strike) are not only rare, but a historical throwback. In employing such an extralegal remedy, which may soon be replicated by underpaid Oklahoma teachers, whose last raise was a decade ago, by Arizona educators, and also by those in Kentucky, whose state pensions are at risk, the West Virginians tapped into an American labor tradition of long standing.

The first wildcat strike of size and significance was the famous Pullman strike of 1894 against the Pullman Palace Car Company of Chicago by members of Eugene V. Debs’ American Railway Union. At issue was the company’s decision to actually cut workers’ wages in the midst of a depression. Debs’ ARU subsequently endorsed the worker-led walkout, and although the strike was eventually lost, it made enough of a retrospective impression on a youthful future presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, to help make Debs one of Sanders’ historical heroes.

The wildcat’s next prominent appearance was in the mid-1930s, when the impromptu “sit-down” strike became a signature tactic in the gradual organizing of the auto and affiliated tire and rubber industries under the aegis of John L. Lewis’ CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

While this particular form of wildcat work stoppage (occupying the job site without working and preventing replacement strikebreakers from entering the premises) was later declared illegal by the US Supreme Court in NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. (1939), it changed the industrial landscape of the time.

Between 1936 and 1938, according to labor historian Irving Bernstein, there were nearly 600 sit-down strikes involving more than 500,000 workers, variously aimed at rectifying hours and wages, working conditions, union recognition, and the right to collectively bargain. Most were subsequently endorsed by union leadership, but initially they were genuine wildcat strikes. The sit-downs led to some of labor’s most iconic moments, such as the pivotal and heroic 44-day job action against General Motors plants in early 1937.

This points up one of the seldom-acknowledged facts about work in America: the historical prevalence of labor strikes. Today, strikes of any kind, whether unauthorized and worker-initiated or planned and union-led, are an anomaly, something considered almost un-American. But this is a relatively recent development. At the height of the Great Depression in 1937, there were over 4,700 strikes idling two million workers. Throughout the Depression decade, 2,000 annual work stoppages was considered normal; the full-employment war years saw that increase to roughly 5,000 annually.

America’s Greatest Generation walked off the job a total of 14,731 times between December 8, 1941 and August 14, 1945, and many of the 6.7 million workers taking part were participants in wildcat strikes held in defiance of union leaders and the government. Little changed in the postwar period. From 1945 to 1960, the year of John F. Kennedy’s election, there were 4,000 strikes per year on average, representing two to three million workers — between 5 and 10 percent of the industrial workforce. The all-time high was in 1946, when 4.6 million withheld their labor in search of better wages.

All this is by way of saying that public school teachers are in good company and the inheritors of a long tradition. There are obvious workplace differences, of course. Because of the reduced density of unionization in the private sector (barely 6%), potential job actions are now likelier to originate with more highly organized (percentagewise) public workers, one-third of whom remain in unions.

For another thing, the bosses are different. Rather than dealing with the likes of Debs’ antagonist, George Pullman, or the autoworkers’ nemesis, GM President Alfred Sloan, contemporary public employees must deal with state governments. That generally means hard-right Republican governors and legislatures presently in control of most states in the heartland — Republicans who, for ideological reasons, won’t raise state salaries and benefits or increase state taxes, and who viscerally hate labor unions of any kind. This is what faced educators in West Virginia, and it’s what those in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky are up against.

They’re up against something more. In June, the Supreme Court, with His Illegitimacy Justice Neil Gorsuch casting the probable deciding vote, will almost certainly put an end to agency, or “fair-share,” fees for public-sector unions, in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

The expected decision means nonunion public employees in 22 states will no longer have to contribute compensatory fees in lieu of union dues for the expenses associated with collective-bargaining activities that benefit them; they will become “free-riders.” It’s a legal step frankly aimed at undermining what remains of public-sector collective bargaining, the GOP destruction of which in Wisconsin, combined with a state right-to-work law, has cut union membership in half.

Nevertheless, the circumstance that led to the establishment of unions in the first place, economic inequality, has not gone away. American wages, as measured by median weekly earnings, have risen only 3% in real terms since the year 2000, according to a recent New York Times analysis.

Labor experts agree that the wildcat strike, with its associated militancy, instability, and social unrest, is not the ideal answer, but the evident commitment of Republicans to abolish traditional unionism altogether may make it labor’s only answer. When people are pushed to the wall long enough and hard enough, they inevitably push back — and damn the consequences.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2018

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