Strike Wave Research Articles

Measuring the 2022–2023 strike wave in Britain: ballots, participation and methodological implications

Measuring the 2022–2023 strike wave in Britain: ballots, participation and methodological implications

A broad battle: public opinion and the 1945–1946 General Motors strike

ABSTRACT This article explores the 1945–1946 strike at General Motors, a massive dispute involving 320,000 workers. The 113-day walkout was the longest of the 1945–1946 strike wave, which saw over three million U.S. workers mobilize. A key feature of the strike – and one particularly overlooked – is public reaction. The strike secured widespread press coverage, and much of the United Automobile Workers’ (UAW) strategy revolved around appealing for public support. Drawing on under-utilized strike records, this article argues that reaction to the dispute highlights why labour would be on the defensive in succeeding decades. While many citizens were supportive, seeing this as an emblematic dispute, opponents were vociferous. In a rich body of letters, they outlined key arguments that were used later to justify attacks on unions – that their demands were selfish and excessive, that they caused strikes and violence, that they hurt business competitiveness, and that their leaders were ‘union bosses’ and ‘racketeers’.’ Opponents particularly opposed UAW calls for GM to ‘open its books’ to prove they could not afford big wage increases. Overall, the strike set the stage for post-war labour relations, where unions made economic gains but were unable to impinge on executives’ ‘right to manage’.

Revitalizing the role of relative deprivation: An analysis of contemporary teacher protest strike emergence

This article examines the role of relative deprivation in contemporary teacher protest strikes. I specifically focus on the 2018–2019 unprecedented U.S. K-12 teacher strike wave. Through data generated from analyses of 35 semi-structured interviews with teachers who were also leaders of their local protest strike, I find that the role of relative deprivation in these strikes is complex. Specifically, I find that only relative deprivation experienced with nearby reference groups was described as leading to protest strike emergence but that all types of relative deprivation were used as an effective framing strategy to garner support and bring more teachers on board once the activism was underway. This paper revitalizes a consideration of relative deprivation as an important theory in understanding protest strike emergence and gives a better understanding of the impetus of this wave of teacher activism.

Class mobilisation and class consciousness in the British strike wave of 2022–23

For a brief period, the British strike wave of 2022-23, which broke out during the inflationary surge and subsequent ‘cost of living crisis’, both reflected and enabled the articulation of a heightened level of class consciousness, given expression by the left of the trade union movement. The widespread collapse in living standards interacted with the longerterm weakening of consumption-based identities in the wake of the financial crash, and the manifest profiteering of big business, to create a moment where it was possible for union leaderships to describe the strike wave and the plight of working people in terms of a class struggle. The longer-term legacy of this moment is yet to become clear.

Examining the recent strike wave in the UK: The problem with official statistics.

In the UK, there has been a significant increase in strike activity since the summer of 2022. Due to these increased levels of strike activity, it is logical for academics and policy makers to turn to the official data on labour disputes to help us understand what has been happening. Strikes remain of core sociological interest, yet are under researched in this journal. This research note briefly examines the recent strike wave in the UK drawing on data from the Office for National Statistics. The limitations of these data are outlined before consideration is given to other potential sources of data on labour disputes.

In Honor of Khader Adnan: The Hungry Revolutionary

This essay honors Khader Adnan’s life and martyrdom in May 2023 following eighty-seven days of hunger strike in protest against his illegal administrative detention by the Israeli regime. Adnan is an important figure of Palestinian resistance who, in 2012, revived waves of mass Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons. Through these hunger strikes, Adnan aspired to a life of dignity, and sacrificing his body was not about death as much as it was about life and freedom. As Adnan’s story shows, through the embodied praxis of hunger striking, Palestinian prisoners assert ownership over their bodies and fates, deciding when and how to die in the face of the Israeli carceral regime that keeps them confined indefinitely.

China’s Transition to Collective Labor Relations: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mechanisms

Abstract The article analyzes the development, characteristics, and tendency of China’s labor relations and the labor movement in recent years. It points out that China has begun the transition from individual labor relations to collective labor relations with the strike wave in the summer of 2010 as the main turning point. In the process of transformation, there are two kinds of forces and two ways to accomplish the labor movement. One is the top-down labor union movement led by the authorities within the system; the other is the bottom-up labor movement formed spontaneously by workers outside the system. The article particularly analyzes the emergence of, and mutual relationship between these two types of transition, as well as their influence and significance on China’s labor relations.

Crossing the Rubicon: The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 as an Authoritarian Crucible

Abstract In the 1980s and 1990s, Conservative Governments contemplated but ultimately refused direct interventions in strikes in essential services as unenforceable and ineffective. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 crosses this Rubicon. It does so not by a participatory framework but by granting Ministers and employers virtually unrestrained powers to restrict (and effectively prohibit by neutralising the impact of) industrial action by imposing minimum service levels. This article offers a critical account of the Act based on three main claims. First, it argues that the Act is shaped by what is termed ‘coercive dual unilateralism’, an authoritarian crucible of three elements: (i) executive unilateralism, (ii) employer unilateralism and (iii) coercion (severe sanctions compounded by chilling legal uncertainty of ill-defined duties). Secondly, it challenges the Government’s claim of the Act’s compliance with ILO standards and Article 11 ECHR as a misconstruction. Thirdly, it finds that the Act satisfies all three authoritarian markers (stifling of dissent, direct state coercion, elevation of social order as an external justification for restrictions) identified in Bogg’s seminal account of the TUA 2016 as a shift away from neo-liberalism to authoritarianism. But it resists a ‘beyond neo-liberalism’ conclusion. Instead, it argues that the Act should be seen as the product of a ‘strong-weak' state (strong in power, weak in securing consent) that seeks to fortify neo-liberalism against a sharpened contestation reflected in the current strike wave.

Economic Long Waves and Long Waves of Strikes in South Africa (1886–2022)

ABSTRACT Despite the resurgence internationally of strikes in recent years, studies on the temporality of strike waves within a long-wave perspective has been marked by silence in the literature. This paper revisits the debate on the veracity of long-wave theory to explain the temporality of upsurges in strike activity and the disputes on the measurement of strike waves from an international perspective. The paper applies long-wave theory to South Africa, which is a new contribution and proposes a new quantitative approach to examine the long-term patterning of strikes. This study finds that the predictive power of long-wave theory—that an escalation of the class struggle unfolds around the peaks and troughs of economic long waves—holds throughout the period 1886–2022. This paper makes a new finding that long waves of strikes display a countercyclical patterning to long waves of capitalist development, providing proof of the relative autonomy of the class struggle from long waves.

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

Unions, Strikes, Shaw (Unions, Strikes, Shaw: “The Capitalism of the Proletariat.”)

On the current strike wave

Emerging from global economic shutdown in 2021, some of Britain’s largest employers embarked on radical restructuring of workers’ wages and conditions by exploiting the lack of protection for workers in UK legislation to impose ‘fire and rehire’ and wage cuts. As inflation and interest rates rose sharply, trade unions resisted attacks on their members’ living standards by organising the largest strike wave for over 30 years. The current strike wave has developed from defensive strikes against attacks on jobs and wages into a broad united front of organised labour across both private and public sectors. The political resistance of the organised working class poses the real question of who runs Britain.

Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry, by Michael Hillard (Ithaca: Cornell, 2021).

Michael Hillard’s Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry is both a labor history of the paper industry and a political economy of corporate governance and class struggle in the United States. As a labor historian, Hillard has compiled thousands of hours of interviews with paper-industry workers and managers. As a political economist, he persuasively argues that contests over the distribution of surplus from the 1960s forward and shifts in paper-industry ownership led to the strike wave that began in the '60s and spread to every paper mill in Maine by the late 1980s. Rapacious practices by out-of-state owners challenged workers’ moral compass as much as their material existence. Responding, paper workers developed a folk political economy and even a folk Marxism, creating the foundation for challenging working-class support for regressive economics. This review provides context for Hillard’s claim while partially challenging it in a different context, the United States steel industry.

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Siła (bez)silnych. Działania opozycji demokratycznej w optyce SB

A wave of strikes which was launched on the 24th of June 1976 by the rise of food prices introduced by the Seym had its culmination in Radom and Ursus. The strikers were brutally pacified. A visible reaction to the events mentioned above was the formation of opposition initiatives. Since the mid-seventies these initiatives have become a matter of interest for the Security Service which treated them as an “anti–socialist element”. The text presented below, entitled: The attacks of organized anti–socialist groups on Security Service and Citizen Militia, comes from the operational files of the case under the code name “Players” which Security Service aimed at infiltration of the people gathered within an oppositional group known as KOR (later named KSS KOR). The infiltration took place between 1976 and 1981. The described report was compiled by major Ryszard Wiązowski from the IX Section of the 3rd Department of the Home Office in December 1977. It summarizes the annual activity of a democratic opposition in a tendentious way, indicating its criminal activities such as creating and distribution of opposition materials, informing western media about the situation in the country or inspiring and persuading people to make complaints about the actions of Security Service and Citizen Militia. In comparison with the whole range of means, methods and forms of operational work which were used by the Security Service against the opposition activists during this period, the report presented above can be considered peculiar, especially if one takes into consideration major Wiązowski’s statement that “Security Service and Citizen Militia are capable of recognizing, counteracting, fighting and exposing the true face of these groups which have always been controlled by the western sabotage centres” - it is a sad recapitulation and at the same time an announcement of future repressions. However, a critical analysis of the above document provides a considerable number of factual information on the opposition movement in 1977, showing its strength and helplessness of Security Service’s actions.

Inflation, wages and equality: cross-disciplinary conversations

Rising inflation and a wave of strikes during 2022 have aroused echoes of the 1970s. In this article, experts from the fields of economics, sociology and social policy consider what has changed, what remains the same, and what the lessons might be � with a notable degree of agreement. Raising wages, particularly for the lower-paid groups in the public sector, is likely to reduce poverty and has a very low risk of generating further price inflation. Giving in on pay will be costly, and may have to be funded by taxes in the short term. In the longer run the only way out of our difficulties will be more effective growth generated through improved productivity.

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

Power resources and workplace collective bargaining: evidence from China

During the strike wave of 2010, S provincial authority began to support trade unions in experimenting with workplace union elections and collective bargaining. Drawing data from union documents and ethnographic research, the variability in workplace collective bargaining in the context of official union reform in Y City in S Province is explained in this article. By comparing multiple enterprise union collective bargaining cases, four models of workplace collective bargaining in practice are identified in the research: moderated mobilization, technical negotiation, collective consultation, and managerial domination. Using the power resources approach to analyze collective bargaining, the author argues that the various practices result from the dynamic interactions between workers’ power configuration and employers’ perception of disruption. Furthermore, the author argues that the variability in workplace collective bargaining is not a transient phenomenon but a semi-institutionalized middle ground.

Andrzej Bobkowski and Józef Czapski

Andrzej Bobkowski and Józef Czapski

The Rationality of Protest: A Foucauldian Analytics of Teacher Activism

 The recent wave of teacher activism and strikes across the United States is unprecedented. While it has been commented upon and understood in various ways, this essay departs from actor-centric modes of analysis that have been taken up. Instead, I read recent teacher activism efforts through a Foucauldian analytics of protest which examines the rationalities used to justify political action in order to understand how, in some ways, teachers paradoxically reified the logics of education reform efforts which they sought to oppose. Following this I offer several examples of protest which exist in much different forms which unveil political possibilities beyond the logics of reform. Through doing so, I invite not only an understanding of past actions but also a future engagement with transformative modes of teacher activism which have become only more necessary since the 2018 strike wave.

Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings