Public Employee Press

Media Beat: Book Review
Book says loss of union power since the 1970s can be reversed

As we search for ways to reverse the union decline of recent years, Sheila Cohen’s new book reminds us of the period from 1968 through the mid-1970s, when a wave of militant strikes won important gains in Britain and the United States.

Remember the 1965 welfare strike here in New York, the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike or the U.S. postal workers strike in 1970? In these public sector strikes, workers fought in unconventional ways and emerged victorious.

Powerful picket line unity let the welfare workers break the mold of limited bargaining for public employees and negotiate on a range of public policy issues.

In Memphis, the workers allied with the African American community, and the strike became part of the city’s civil rights movement.

In the postal strike, a local wildcat spread nationwide in defiance of federal law and leadership desires. National rank-and-file-opposition caucuses, community ties and grassroots militancy propelled this broad labor offensive.

In England, thousands of Birmingham workers walked off their jobs in 1972 to join a coal miners’ picket line at Saltley Gates. Britain’s huge strike wave ofthe early ’70s convinced even Conservative Party pundits that a revolution was coming.

Instead, the workers got a Labor Party government that some argue was not much better than the Conservatives.

Then came Reagan here and Thatcher in Britain, making union-busting into government policy. They beat down the working class until concessionary bargaining became the norm and the right to strike seemed like the right to commit suicide.

In “Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back,” Cohen surveys this dismal landscape. The $24.95 paperback, which is in the DC 37 Education Fund Library in Room 211, analyzes the few victories, such as the United Parcel Service strike, and the long line of defeats, including the LocalP-9 strike at the Hormel Co., the Caterpillar and Staley strikes in Decatur, Illinois, and the Detroit newspaper strike.

Cohen argues that many defeats came not only because of the fierce and unrelenting employer offensive, but also because the workers’ national unions and the rest of the labor movement failed to organize effective solidarity. By this she means solidarity beyond words and money such as militant and even law-breaking actions that can make a real difference.

— Ken Nash