Picket Line Research Articles

From plaster casts to picket lines: Public support for industrial action in the National Health Service in England.

This paper explores public sentiment towards strike action among healthcare workers, as a result of their perceived inadequate pay. By analysing survey data collected in England between 2022 and 2023, the study focuses on NHS nurses and junior doctors, due to their critical role in delivering essential public services. Results indicate higher public support for strikes by nurses and junior doctors compared to other professions such as postal workers, teachers, rail workers, airport workers, civil servantsand university lecturers. However, variation in support for strikes by healthcare workers is observed across societal segments. Significant disparities in support are linked to individual political affiliations, left-right ideological positionsand trust in the NHS. In short, nonconservative voters, individuals leaning towards left-wing politicsand those with greater trust in the NHS demonstrate higher likelihoods of supporting strikes by health workers. These findings carry implications for future strike decisions and highlight specific target groups for enhanced communication efforts to garner increased public support.

Saintly Protest: Women Religious, Religious Women, and the Early United Farm Worker Movement

Abstract: While the image of César Chávez graces the face of U.S. postal stamps, less recognized are the women of the United Farm Worker Movement. Yet Catholic women, from the better-known Dolores Huerta to regional organizers like Lupe Anguiano, were critical to the union’s early victories. This article begins the work of excavating the lives and labor of the women religious and religious women of the union, with an emphasis on the activism of Catholic Latinas. When structural changes within the Catholic Church of the mid-to-late twentieth century prompted women to reexamine their faith, they responded by supporting movements, such as the grape strike of 1965–1970, on picket lines, with fasts, and for some, with full-time labor. “Saintly Protest” turns to the grape strike and explores how Catholic women, including women religious, came to support the union, and the dynamic relationship between la cotidiana , their activism, and their faith.

Tension and Syndicalism: Atmospheres of the Strike

Vibrant ideology is a resonant, reverberating, electrifying set of ideas that are produced by (and producing of) the affective intensity of a strike. From the fraught atmospheres of conflict at the picket line to joyful imbricating solidarities in social spaces of organisation, the strike is affectively intense. Vibrant ideology names a form of ideology that emerges from these shared experiences, and which organises and amplifies these shared experiences. To understand this sense of ideology, the article deploys a Bergsonian line of thinking in Georges Sorel, which is heavy on the affective vibrance, and light on the ideology; and the generative workerist analysis of labour refusal in Nanni Balestriniâ–™s fiction, which rebalances matters somewhat. In each, we see a turning towards the self-generative power of the workers in strike which reorients them ideologically.

Assessing the Right to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly in Post-Pandemic, Post-Brexit Britain through the Lens of the 2022–2023 Public Sector Strikes

Abstract Britain is currently seeing the most coordinated public sector strike action since the 1970s. In a post-pandemic, post-Brexit Britain, the general public are going through a cost-of-living crisis, with the rate of inflation rising and real-term pay cuts. This, paired with growing restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly through the passing of oppressive policing bills, means that people are increasingly turning to unions and striking to get their voices heard. This article highlights the push-factors leading to the 2022–2023 Public Sector Strikes through a socio-political analysis of democracy and power in post-pandemic, post-Brexit Britain, whilst capturing the voices of those striking and on picket lines.

‘People look at you like you’re mad if you say good things about academia’: Collective Negativity, Anti-neoliberalism, and Hostility to Institutions in UK Higher Education – The Dark Side of Solidarity?

Abstract Contemporary UK academia is riven with discontent: academics perform dissatisfaction on picket lines and social media, critiquing the so-called “neoliberal” university. This article draws on interviews with academic staff across England to consider the implications of this turn to complaint, arguing that belief in the toxicity of neoliberal academia and a corresponding romanticised investment in a “golden age” of HE has become required thinking. Focusing on the perception that university management, as a metonym for the institution, are suspect, I conclude that the prevalence of this belief, and its normative status, may promote solidarity between academics, but at a cost. If there is space for solidarity, the common ground upon which it is built appears to be dissatisfaction, negativity, and vocal disavowal of contemporary trends. However, every collective act also contains tensions, contradictions, and exclusions, which may go unexamined, especially if the prevailing ideology is believed to be progressive.

Combating Union Solidarity Arguments

As part of a union's typical campaign, organizers often attempt to raise employee esprit de corps and convince them that the union will be able to mobilize a potent force against the employer to win a first contract. Persuading employees that a first contract is attainable is one of the union organizer's most difficult tasks. To accomplish this, organizers will often indicate that operations can be forcibly closed down by pickets, and that deliveries would be cut off because union truckers would not cross the union's picket line. To combat this approach, some companies tell employees that operations will continue if a strike occurs and counteract union statements with the following types of communications.

The Experience of Faculty Strikers: Factors that Could Impact Higher Education Strikes

Higher education is being challenged as is the unionization of faculty. This combination could create a climate where faculty may need to strike. The purpose of this research is to describe the lived experiences of striking faculty to bring a greater understanding of what faculty may incur. This research utilized a phenomenological approach with a combination of composite narratives and in vivo coding to describe the lived experiences of striking. With the number of layoffs, strikes and threats of striking, this research is timely in understanding what striking entails and how it can best be navigated for the benefit of the faculty. There were 333 striking faculty of which twenty-seven were interviewed. Three themes developed and will be discussed. First, how the faculty's perception of the Union can influence their experience and willingness to remain on the picket line. Second, realizing a striker's experience is not monolithic, as realized in the differing experiences of the two campuses of Wright State. Lastly, surprising themes emerged, such as mental health issues surrounding financial, work and family struggles throughout the duration of the strike.

Healthcare Justice, Medicare, and the Racial Desegregation of Hospitals in the South

This article explores the advent of Medicare, the process of desegregation of hospitals in the South, and the resistance to this governmental oversight. Events at the Medical College Hospital of South Carolina are described as an exemplar to illustrate the struggle for healthcare justice for Black Americans where the struggle for racially integrated healthcare ended in a hospital workers strike. Four hundred Black women walked off their jobs and marched in picket lines for 113 days without pay before the economic and human rights issues were resolved. As the cause for racial justice continues in America, an understanding of this story which represents the beginning of the long struggle for health equity which impacts our profession, and our patients, can benefit all nurses. This article reviews this important exemplar in its time period and offers a description of current efforts and implications for the profession of nursing.

Challenging Stereotypes: Prosocial Racial Humor in Luís Valdez’s Actos

ABSTRACT This article examines how Luís Valdez uses prosocial racial humor in his collection of short plays to challenge the anti-Mexican racism directed against the strikers during the 1965–1970 Delano, California, grape strike as well as to address many of the other social issues faced by the Chicano community during this period. Drawing on social psychology research on the dynamics of racial group identification and focusing on the acto entitled Los Vendidos, the article analyzes how Valdez and his Teatro Campesino created the set of conditions that allowed audience members to confront and overcome the negative effects of the racial stereotyping and ethnic slurs they were experiencing on the picket lines and elsewhere and in the process to raise their Chicano cultural and political consciousness.

Under pressure: Why casualised university workers are on the picket line

Under pressure: Why casualised university workers are on the picket line

Injustice, deindustrialisation and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in Scotland

ABSTRACT The transition out of coal production in Scotland was managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s, prioritising workforce voice and communal security. Under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments in the 1980s, the position changed abruptly. Colliery closures and redundancies accelerated; miners and coal communities were subject to political attack. The criminalisation and victimisation of union officials and activists during the 1984–1985 strike against pit closures was disproportionately greater in Scotland than in England and Wales. The oral history testimony of strike veterans provides a powerful narrative of historical unfairness, imposed by a hostile anti-union government, National Coal Board officials, police officers and sheriffs. Their stories of injustice on picket lines and in communities nevertheless qualify a tendency in oral histories of deindustrialisation to pessimism and loss. Strike veterans spoke positively about the strike and its political meaning. Their memories constitute a usable past, present in subsequent campaigning. The Miners’ Strike (Pardons) Act, passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2022, was an important outcome, making provision for the collective and posthumous pardon of people with strike-related convictions from 1984–1985.

Disruption and Control: Contesting Mobilities through the Picket Line

By exploring the relationship between picket lines and drivers in 1970s Britain, this article considers how mobility and the spatial practices of trade unionsm shape labor geographies. Focusing on issues raised by work on logistics and blockades, it argues that too much emphasis has been placed on tactics of interruption. Drawing on Toscano's writings, I suggest that paying attention to the complex entanglement of disruption and control enables a more sophisticated account of workers’ agency. The article explores three key moments in the relationship between picketing and mobility: the 1972 miners’ strike, debates over picketing legislation in the mid-1970s, and the road haulage dispute in 1979. In doing so, it makes a number of contributions to labor geography. First, it foregrounds the picket line as a key site for understanding the spatialities of working-class organization. Second, it highlights how struggles for control are shaped by competing conceptions of rights and moral economies. Third, it develops thinking on the relationship between mobility and agency by exploring how workers’ power became entangled with the control of movement.

The Future of Unions and Worker Representation: The Digital Picket Line

The Future of Unions and Worker Representation, written by Professor Anthony Forsyth, thoroughly examines four countries and industrial relations systems—Australia, the UK, the USA, and Italy—to assess and contrast their similarities and differences. The choice of these systems is not accidental. The author compares three industrial relations systems that are rooted in the common law and currently share a very fragmented collective bargaining structure with that of a civil law-based system that, despite recent attempts at decentralization, still maintains a more centralized structure. The interest of Anglophone scholars towards industrialized non-English speaking countries is relatively uncommon, making this element of the study original and valuable in itself in recent labour and industrial relations scholarship. In the book, Professor Forsyth offers a detailed and insightful description of the trends and developments in unionization and labour regulation in all four countries. His comparative analysis shows a deep understanding of the structures of their systems, their recent historical evolution, and the challenges they currently face, both shared and unique.

The Ethics of Industrial Action by Doctors

The traditional and majoritarian view of medicine as a vocation rather than a job remains the basic principle that motivates doctors. Nevertheless, over the last two decades, there has been an erosion of their authority and an inability to fulfil the best care they can provide with successive cuts to the NHS and a relative salary reduction. That festering discontentment likely spurred many doctors to seek a route to express their feelings by taking IA. Nevertheless, for many, the ethical turmoil of potentially causing harm to patients from withdrawing services cannot be overemphasised. The conflict between professional duty and personal gain is at its acutest at such times. 
 It remains to be seen how this will be reflected in campaign turnouts and on the picket line. Ultimately, full-blown strike action is neither in doctors' nor the government's interest. Patients have long memories, especially as many are still reeling from the injustices of the pandemic, albeit doctors and others on the front line were celebrated as heroes. The media has little regard for the legal case of strikes or any ethical basis. They will record events for posterity, ensuring that stories on both sides are personalised and sensationalised. The real casualty in this could be the NHS, which is yet again at the forefront for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, the doctors’ strike actions and those of others in healthcare might, in part, hope that these would wake the public to defend an institution at the highest risk in its 75 years since Aneurin Bevan gave birth to it.

How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State? A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore

How Do We Grow Grassroots Critiques of the State?A Close Reading of Triple Jeopardy from East Baltimore Lenora R. Knowles (bio) When I sit with the images, concepts, and community voices of the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) in their Triple Jeopardy newspaper, I am struck by how this movement publication served as a key mechanism for the New York City chapter of the TWWA to grow leadership and critical consciousness of the racial capitalist U.S. state among their base of Third World women and Third World people more generally. In this first issue, the TWWA elucidates how members were teaching and circulating Third World political analysis and movement strategy, along with the meanings and values of Third World movement leadership. As a revised organic intellectual, organizer, and nepantlera,1 I find joy and possibility in the complex process of growing grassroots movement leaders struggling for broadscale social transformation. From its first issue through its last, Triple Jeopardy offers important considerations for doing the relational and processual work of political education and leadership development today. Below, I explore how writers of Triple Jeopardy utilized the rhetorical device of the question as a method for critical inquiry and political education. Moreover, I trace how they mobilized radical critiques of the state at multiple scales, ranging from global regimes of violence to everyday trauma, in order to build political unity. I suggest that these approaches provide invaluable tools for the grassroots base-building and leadership development that I attempt to practice while organizing in East Baltimore. To better understand some of what this first issue teaches us about leadership development, I provide a bit of context for the TWWA (see Springer 2005; Farmer 2017), the stakes of their organizing and theorizing within a Cold War context, and how they conceptualized the role of their [End Page 191] grassroots publication. The TWWA was a radical women of color organizing collective that first took shape in New York through the leadership of Black women organizers Frances Beal and Gwendolyn Patton. The organizational life of the New York–based TWWA spanned roughly from 1969 to 1977; during this time, they created an organizing program and collectivist organizational structure that centered a Third World woman of color politics that was anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-sexist. The collective's effort to develop a united front of Third World women necessitated multimodal work that was deeply personal, epistemic, collective, analytical, and embodied in nature. Their writings and organizing articulated a Third World women's consciousness among working-class women of color. They mobilized members around key local and international campaigns that promoted reproductive justice, opposed the Vietnam War, and resisted police and carceral violence. Their growing numbers demonstrated the resonance of the organization's intersectional analysis and its strategies for organizing among Third World women. In addition, their thriving base spoke to their increased organizational capacity. Thus, we might think about the TWWA's increased grassroots power in terms of its potential threat to the U.S. nation-state's stability and working-class women's allegiance to a U.S. status quo. By 1971 the organization expanded into the West Coast with the formation of the Bay Area and Seattle chapters. The national membership has been estimated to be somewhere around two hundred members. While the NYC chapter mostly organized among Black diasporic and Puerto Rican women, the West Coast chapter expanded the membership of Chicana and Asian American and Pacific Islander women alongside African American women. The NYC chapter mobilized women for the annual International Women's Day and supported local workers' picket lines, as well as protests spearheaded by groups like the Black Panther Party, La Union Latina, and the Campaign to Free Angela Davis. One of their first actions as a collective was participating in the 1970 New York women's strike, during which members publicly delivered a critique of the hegemonic white feminist organizations of the time (TWWA [1974?], 2). The organization challenged state and corporate violence domestically and abroad, most notably in their work to end the country's imperial intervention in Vietnam, state discipline of Black activists, and attacks on Third World Women's reproductive capacity...

Writing the History of Legal Abortion.

Writing the History of Legal Abortion Johanna Schoen (bio) I started to research the history of legal abortion in the early 2000s, when the papers of a North Carolina abortion provider, Dr. Takey Crist, fell into my lap. Crist had wanted to donate his papers to an archive, and I volunteered to help him. Indeed, I ended up organizing his entire collection and, following that, the collections of a number of other abortion providers.1 When I began this work, I could not conceive of a world in which the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade. The providers I met, by that time all in their sixties and seventies, were full of passion and fervor about the 1970s, when they had taken the political moment to open the first legal abortion clinics. They were strong believers in a woman’s right to choose, to control her body, to determine her future. In addition, politics looked different twenty years ago. One of the first abortion providers Crist introduced me to was his friend Susan Hill, who owned the National Women’s Health Organization (NWHO), the largest group of free-standing abortion clinics after Planned Parenthood. As a twenty-four-year-old social worker, Susan had helped to open an abortion clinic in Florida two weeks after the Roe decision. Even the judges appointed by Republican presidents, she told me in the early 2000s, tended to be fair when she met them in court. By the late 1970s, she had founded the NWHO and was opening clinics in some of the most under-served areas in this country, including, in the early 1990s, the “Pink Clinic” in Jackson, Mississippi, which became the defendant in the Dobbs case.2 To open her clinics and to keep them open and services unobstructed, she had spent her life in court.3 I could not imagine a Republican Party interested in alienating a large voting block and losing abortion as the easy political rallying point [End Page 22] it had been since the 1980s. Clearly, I was wrong—which just shows that you should never ask a historian to predict the future. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court did overturn Roe with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, I was no longer surprised. I was also twenty years older and more cynical. When I first began to research legal abortion, I was fascinated with the stories of young feminists who, in the early 1970s, had had no doubt about their ability to open abortion clinics and offer health care to women across the country. Their political commitment and compassion were deeply moving; they believed that their actions could change the world. Of course, sometimes their political convictions were also didactic and funny. For a few years, while I taught at the University of Iowa, I sat on the board of the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City, the longest running feminist health collective in the country. When I confessed to one of the directors that I had never seen my cervix—in the world of women’s health clinics this was seen as a prerequisite on the path to a feminist consciousness—she assured me that I could call on their services any time. I never took her up on this offer. As a historian, I was interested in the fault lines that existed in the world of abortion care. I wanted to tell the heroic stories of young women activists who had overcome sexism and patriarchy to establish women’s health clinics and the stories of young male doctors committed to legal abortion care who had dared their colleagues to integrate abortion into their OB-GYN clinics. I also wanted to know what decades of harassment had done to the abortion provider community and how members coped with it. Had the relentless antiabortion propaganda changed their feelings about their work? And if so, how had they responded to these changes? Learning about antiabortion politics and harassment was easy. The papers of Takey Crist and Susan Hill were full of antiabortion materials—pamphlets and leaflets handed out on picket lines, letters by antiabortion activists to convert or threaten...

Capitalism, Class Struggle and/in Academia

Class struggle is a necessary aspect of society. While ordinary people engage in struggles to improve their conditions, economically powerful people engage in struggles to defend their privileges. Thus, class struggle is from below and from above. And, class struggle occurs over interests and over ideas. To reproduce capitalism, it is not enough that resources be in the hands of the top 1%–10% thus economically forcing the vast majority to rely on wage work, or that police be used against their picket lines. It is also necessary that a large number of common people must possess ideas that make them accept the existing mechanisms of society as natural or as inherently good for all. But, these ideas are challenged too, which is how ideological class struggle from below happens. Academia is a major site of ideological struggle. Generally, professors propagate ideas that justify the reproduction of capitalism as it is or in slightly modified forms. These ideas can be challenged by students. The main aim of this article is to briefly discuss the nature of ideological class struggle in academia and to present a series of questions from the standpoint of the students who can oppose many of the ideas circulating in academia.

Nursing strikes: read between the picket lines

Claire Osborne, Paediatric Advanced Practitioner, Oxford University Hospitals (Claire.Osborne@ouh.nhs.uk), reflects on the reasons behind the nursing strikes and the level of support for action.

Pride on the picket line as nurses strike

Pride on the picket line as nurses strike

Picketing Against Porn in Mesquite: Community Values vs. "Satan's Library"

Abstract: In the spring of 1993 the opening of Pure Pleasure Book Store in Mesquite, Nevada, met with protests from many of the citizens of Virgin Valley in southeast Nevada. The conservative and church-going community rallied around members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) who objected to what they saw as an affront to the moral standards of the community and the dangers that pornography presented to children and families. The Mesquite Chamber of Commerce formed an organization with the acronym HOME, Help Our Moral Environment, to fight for the closure of the bookstore. HOME attracted support from the citizens of the valley and neighboring communities in Utah who volunteered to serve on picket lines near the store with signs denouncing pornography. Store owners asserted their right to free speech and kept the doors open while challenging a zoning ordinance in the courts that was passed by the City of Mesquite which prohibited such businesses. As the courts deliberated, picketing continued for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for two and a half years. On March 27, 1996, in Las Vegas Federal District Court, Judge Phillip Pro ruled in favor of the City of Mesquite to close the offending business under the authority of its zoning ordinance.