Sometimes You Either Strike or Accept Death

"Fair? Ugatz fair!"

Mar 14, 2024

The 50th anniversary of the Memphis sanitation workers strike. This isn’t new. (Photo: Getty)

The beautiful state of Louisiana recently replaced its moderate Democratic governor with a right wing Republican governor. Therefore the already-red state legislature has been unleashed to do whatever it pleases. What it pleases to do, most recently, is to set about the task of decimating the state’s public sector unions. As Verite News reports, the upcoming legislative session will feature bills that would squeeze public sector unions by preventing them from automatically deducting dues from members’ checks, forcing them to constantly hold elections to “recertify” themselves, and, most drastically, banning their ability to engage in meaningful collective bargaining altogether.

This is a familiar package of “reforms,” a word I use to mean “devastating attacks.” With minor variations, this is the formula that has long been advanced in every Republican-controlled state. The entire South is already “right to work,” making it more difficult to build and sustain private sector unions, and the entire public sector nationally is “right to work” thanks to a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, and the next steps, in red states, are to meticulously dismantle the ability of public sector unions to bargain and take in dues and engage in political action and generally to act like organizations that have any useful purpose whatsoever. Part of the reason that Republicans do this is because they are the faithful servants of capital and undermining the power of labor is forever one of their central goals. And another part of the reason they do it is because public sector unions—particularly teachers unions—are often one of the few strong and well organized sources of support for the Democratic Party in red states, and weakening these unions thereby weakens the Democrats and allows Republicans to further cement their own legislative majorities. (I am currently reading a new book by Jesse Chanin about the history of the once-mighty United Teachers of New Orleans, a union that was wiped out after the New Orleans school system was privatized by reckless neoliberal zealots in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Let the past be a warning.)

Different states are at different stages in terms of passing this package of union-killing laws. Some have fully restricted collective bargaining rights for public employees, some have partially restricted them, some are still aspiring to restrict them further. But it is important to understand that this is where we are headed: A solid bloc of red states, including the entire South, where public employees have been completely deprived of their union rights and their ability to exercise collective power, leaving public sector unions as a hollow and meaningless shell. (Police unions, almost always, are exempted from these laws, because they are a Republican constituency. The fact that police unions do not stand up with their fellow unions against these assaults on labor rights is one very good reason that police unions should be cast out of the labor movement entirely.) That is the end point of the road that we are on. In some states getting to this point will take a little longer than in other states, but as long as our political polarization remains entrenched, all the red states will get there. There are a number of smug and well-paid policy experts employed by groups like ALEC whose job it is to ensure that these laws get passed. And they will.

Florida, for example, passed a set of these laws last year. As McKenna Schueler recently reported, thousands of public sector workers there have already completely lost their unions, after those unions were automatically decertified when their portion of dues-paying membership fell below 60%. (This, of course, is by design: “right to work” laws make it impossible to mandate that members pay dues, then they pass laws saying unions can’t automatically deduct dues from paychecks, and then they decertify when the dues-payers inevitably dwindle.) when I have a chapter in my book about South Carolina, the state with the lowest union density in America. There, 2.3% of workers are union members. If you want to visualize where these policies lead, look to South Carolina.

What I want to discuss here is: What should workers do about this? If you think in terms of electoral political power, the situation is grim. There is no practical hope for Democrats to seize control of the state legislatures or governor’s office in many of these states. Louisiana is, like many, a red state with a blue city, and the red’s goal is to render the blue powerless. Public sector unions have long been engaged in political and lobbying fights to stop or slow down these bills in red states, and in some places, where Democratic power is still real, they can be defeated. But long-term, absent much broader electoral reforms, this is a losing battle in the statehouse in most places.

The answer is that public sector workers need to strike. They need to strike for their lives. In particular they need to strike in places like Louisiana, where these bills are still being considered, and have not yet been passed. They need to establish that if politicians try to break their unions, and to deprive workers of the fundamental right to collectively negotiate their pay and working conditions, they will strike. A baseline principle of being in a union is “we work under a union contract or not at all.” Politicians are, under a transparently thin legalistic veneer, attempting to force you to work without the benefit of a union or a fairly negotiated contract. Therefore you must not work. If you allow them to take away your rights while continuing to receive the benefits of your labor, you demonstrate to them that they need not have respected those rights in the first place.

Public employees perform public services. They teach in the schools. They pick up the trash. Two things that the general public very much wants are schools that are open, and trash that is picked up. It is within the power of the workers and their unions to say: If you pass unjust laws that deprive us of our union rights, the schools are going to close, and the trash is going to pile up, because we will be on strike. Establish that consequence now, before the laws are passed. Make clear to politicians and to the public the stakes here. There must be a consequence. Otherwise, sure as hell, these Republicans will gleefully pass these laws, and your unions will wither, and your contractual protections will disappear, and the things that generations of union members have fought for will be gone, and those that come after you will have nothing.

I know that I may sound flip here. Saying “strike” is very easy, while actually planning and organizing and conducting a strike is hard. Strikes impose a terrible economic burden on the workers who are forced to strike. It is completely unjust that these particular workers, many of whom are not very well paid at all, should have to carry such a burden. But that is the reality of the situation. There is no use lying about it. If someone runs up to you in the street and attacks you with a knife, you might protest: Hey, why me? I’m tired. I’m busy. I have other things to do. I have poor health. I don’t need this drama. I shouldn’t be forced to fight for my life here. All of that is true. Nevertheless, you will fight for your life, or you will be killed. That’s all. That is where public sector unions in red states find themselves, right now.

A century ago, when there were no legal protections for organized labor, workers went on strike to win their unions, because that was their only tool. There was nothing they could appeal to except their own collective labor power. The teachers strikes that swept the nation beginning in 2018 were no different. Those public sector workers were mistreated and underpaid and oppressed and ignored and finally they realized that their only choices were to either strike or accept their fate, and so they struck. Those strikes were illegal, but it didn’t matter. Strikes are stronger than laws.

For the labor movement as a whole, the question is: What can we do to make it easier for these oppressed workers to strike? If we accept the fact that strikes are the only real barrier that workers can build in the face of this legislative campaign against the very existence of their unions, the thing to do is not to fret over whether they should strike, but to plan out how we can make those strikes strong. One idea that I have written about before is to build a big national strike fund, which all unions contribute to, that can be deployed to support strikes of strategic importance. These sorts of red state public sector strikes certainly qualify as strategically important to the entire labor movement. The public sector is currently the largest base of union power in America. Allow it to be gutted by anti-union laws, and all of organized labor’s power will suffer. At the same time that we tell these workers that it is necessary for them to strike, we should also be able to offer them economic support. They are striking not just for themselves, but for unions everywhere.

You may be surprised to learn that Lee Saunders, the head of AFSCME, one of the largest public sector unions in America, is on the record as saying he would rather that his members have binding arbitration than have the right to strike. It can be difficult to build strike power when your own union leaders are not in favor of strikes. That is something that members might want to think about as well.

Beyond a strike fund, what could help this situation is for every union, including those in the public sector, to spend more money on organizing. Higher union density in these states means stronger unions, which means stronger strikes, which means strikes are likely to be shorter and easier on the workers involved. Organize more unions, and when the strikes happen, more services will shut down, and the impact will be felt by the public more quickly. Do not wait until the crisis is here to cast about for solutions. Organized! New! Unions! Now! Whatever unions are currently budgeting for new organizing (and internal organizing, to keep current members mobilized and ready to strike) is not enough. Organize more. As much as the anti-union laws in Florida are meant to set unions up to fail, the fact remains that a union that is decertified because it cannot get 60% of its members to pay dues has, by definition, not done enough internal organizing. Many of these smaller red state public sector unions do not have great resources to pull all of this organizing together. They are a strategic sector that needs help from all of the rest of us.

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Nobody really likes to be told, “you need to strike.” It’s a pain in the ass. I sometimes think about the citizens of, you know, Ukraine, who were just living normal lives and doing normal jobs and then suddenly were told, “it’s time to pick up guns and go fight for your lives.” Imagine how much that would suck! They probably had fun plans that weekend! What a damn bummer. Still, we all recognize that in certain situations, life imposes a demand for struggle that must be met, even when that demand is unfair. That is the situation that the public sector employees of Louisiana and similar states find themselves in now. You can start planning your strikes, or you can have your heads cut off. I am very sorry to report that there are not any other real options.

There is a scene in The Sopranos where Tony Soprano goes to inform his therapist that she must flee town, because his enemies have found out about her, and she is not safe. “That’s not fair!” she protests. Tony gets a look of disbelief and says, “What are you talking about fair? Ugatz fair! They don’t give a shit about fair!”

Republican legislators, fair? Ugatz fair! Strike or die, my friends. Sometimes it’s just that way.

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