Wildcat Strikes Research Articles

Race, jobs, and the war: the FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46

The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) was established by Franklin Roosevelt in response to an intense lobbying campaign led by black leaders who challenged his administration to eliminate racial discrimination in U.S. defense plants. In this rigorous and thoroughly documented examination of the FEPC's work, focusing on the pivotal Midwest, Andrew Edmund Kersten shows how this tiny government agency influenced the course of civil rights reform and moved the United States closer to a national fair employment policy. Race, Jobs, and the War looks across the Midwest at the accomplishments and failures of a New Deal organization that laid the foundation for today's contested affirmative action practices. Rejecting claims that black advancement during the war was due primarily to shortages of labor, Kersten contends that the FEPC made significant strides in allaying discrimination, especially when local authorities cooperated.Efforts to foster racial equality in the southern region of the Midwest suffered from managerial stonewalling and white hostility, Kersten finds, while areas farther north saw more support from government officials and community and union activists and correspondingly greater success in reversing discriminatory patterns. Events such as the infamous Cincinnati 'D-Day' Strike - a wildcat strike by nine thousand white UAW-CIO workers in protest of the upgrading of seven black machinists - signal the depth of racial animosity on the home front. Fighting an uphill battle to dismantle such deep-seated and virulent racism, the FEPC succeeded in breaking some racial barriers, settling complaints, and pursuing a vigorous education campaign to foster more harmonious industrial relations between white and minority workers. The FEPC also acted as a catalyst, inspiring midwestern local communities to rejuvenate and transform their own fights against employment discrimination.

Discrete Poisson kernel density estimation-with an application to wildcat coal strikes

This paper proposes a nonparametric Poisson kernel density estimation technique for discrete distributions. Economists have been using continuous kernels to approximate discrete distributions. This work introduces a discrete kernel as more appropriate for approximating discrete distributions. Simulation results are presented to compare with standard parametric approaches. We apply our discrete Poisson kernel estimator to approximate the distribution of coal mine wildcat strikes in the United States.

The Emergence of Collective Bargaining in the Guatemalan Public Sector: A Case of “Union Boulwarism”?

This paper analyzes the collective bargaining process in the Guatemalan public sector through data collected in governmental documents and interviews with key participants in that process. The results reveal a model of “Union Boulwarism” in which public employee unions dominate collective bargaining through tactics of whipsawing, wildcat strikes and the emplazamiento. The paper concludes with recommendations for developing a model to encourage bargaining in good faith.

Bureaucratic Strikes and the Rationalization of Factory Conflict: The Case of the U.S. Automobile Industry, 1962-1979

This article examines a form of strike action that has been neglected in the literature—the authorized, plant-level strike, as it was manifest in the U.S. automobile industry from 1962 through 1979. In contrast to the wildcat strike, this type of strike was bureaucratically regulated. Signaling mechanisms were built into its mobilization process that enabled management to control strike incidence, timing, and outcome. The results of logistic regression analyses support this hypothesis. In contrast to other strike forms, the likelihood of such strikes increased significantly when workers' potential power was weakest and when managements were most interested in increasing productivity in response to market pressures. I suggest that the legitimization of this peculiar strike form played a significant role in securing management's postwar hegemony.

The Growth of an Industrial Labour Force and the Decline of Poverty in Indonesia

a worker at PT Industri Karet Deli), and the right toj?in a free labour union. There were also demands for compensation for some 380 workers of PT Industri Korek Api who were illegally dismissed, and improvements in safety standards and working conditions. Whereas strikes were not allowed to take place before 1990, in the more industrialized areas along Java's north coast wildcat strikes had erupted frequently during the 1990s. Though news of such strikes is usually suppressed by the censors of the local press, the rape and murder of Marsinah, a 25-year

Work Organization and Wildcat Strikes in the U.S. Automobile Industry, 1946 to 1963

After World War II, U.S. auto workers waged wildcat strikes within an institutional structure that outlawed such strikes and mobilized considerable resources to crush them. I specify and test a theory that locates the source of these wildcat strikes in a distinctive type of labor process. This labor process forced workers to coordinate their moment-by-moment activities to accomplish immediate work tasks. It generated group-level commitment to common work goals and created workgroup solidarity. This pre-existing solidarity enabled workers to mobilize effectively a commitment to wildcat action. I use logistic regression models to test this workgroup-solidarity thesis against hypotheses derived from alternative theoretical frameworks. Results strongly support the workgroup-solidarity thesis

"To Put One's Fingers in the Bleeding Wound": Palestinian Theatre under Israeli Censorship

It is said to have begun on 8 December 1987 when four Palestinians were killed and seven injured by an Israeli driver in Gaza Strip. Masses of Palestinians in nearby Jabaliya refugee camp demonstrated against Israeli troops during funerals to protest random, senseless loss of life. Details of what appears to have been bizarre road accident were quickly lost sight of in upheaval known as intifidia, word whose literal meaning, a shaking off, came to denote what is occurring in Israel's Occupied Territories: Palestinian uprising, accompanied by cultural revolution within Palestinian society. Old forms of social organization dependent upon traditional hierarchies such as clan and family, preeminence of notables, and absence of women, have been supplanted by proliferating popular committees that organize and direct spontaneous political upheaval of men and women, old and young.1 Not just Israeli intelligence community but even Yasir Arafat and leaders of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were taken by surprise (Schiff and Ya'ari 1990:67-68). Certainly intifada had been preceded by years of similar Arab-Israeli conflicts in which wildcat strikes, mass demonstrations, and ad hoc boycotts were met with deportations and arrests, imprisonment and censorship. But since beginning of intifada, familiar rhythm of terrorism and counterterrorism has intensified in much same way that Palestinian political graffiti, whitewashed or written over by Israelis, now reappear incised on walls only to be chiselled away by Israeli soldiers and, finally, published in collection of graffiti, edited by Palestinian journalist, which Israeli censors promptly banned (Peretz 1990:II4). Terms used to describe techniques for surviving in everyday life under Israeli occupation include muqdwama, resistance, and sumud, the state of perseverence and hanging on. They apply with equal accuracy to

The Ambiguities of Protest in South Africa: Rural Politics and the Press during the 1920s

The 1920s were a time of ferment in South Africa, and the African nationalist press played an important role in communicating the issues and events of this decade to their audiences. The images of reality projected by these newspapers and magazines were necessarily contradictory, but they differed substantially from those projected by the established white press a crucial distinction, since African experiences were rarely represented in these publications. The African nationalist press represented the African petty bourgeoisie in South Africa, but as a number of scholars have noted, class boundaries in African society were neither rigid nor clearly defined. The petty bourgeoisie was fragmenting downward at an accelerated pace after Union in 1910, and alliances were frequent between class fractions that might otherwise have been differentially placed in the social relations of capitalist production.1 As discrimination and oppression at all levels intensified, more and more Africans in occupational categories that were on the fringes of the lower middle class descended into the ranks of the proletariat. Salaried white-collar workers fared little better: wage scales were so low that the more educated had little opportunity to emulate the lifestyles of their white counterparts. Hence it is not surprising that especially in periods of hegemonic crisis alienated fractions of the African petty bourgeoisie would find common cause with unorganized industrial workers and peasants in openly defying the status quo. Such a crisis occurred in the years immediately following World War I. Soaring food prices, low wages, and job discrimination temporarily galvanized African workers, especially on the Witwatersrand, where a wave of wildcat strikes and boycotts appeared to threaten civil order. Nationalists within the South African Native National Congress (renamed the African National Congress in 1923) were divided over the most appropriate response to take towards industrial strife, and mobilizing workers briefly radicalized African politics in the Transvaal. In the countryside, fluctuating grain prices, prolonged drought, and plant and animal diseases posed an immediate threat to food and

Strikes, Dispute Procedures, and Arbitration: Essays on Labor Law

This penetrating essay collection focuses on the development of dispute procedures in the United States and the legal rules surrounding them. Considered are such enduring matters as unauthorized and wildcat strikes, enforcement of the no-strike obligation, and strikes involving government and industries with an emergency potential. Many of the problems that have perplexed the Supreme Court in recent years, such as sympathy and political strikes, are also examined. Other issues that have not yet been fully confronted by the Supreme Court are also discussed, including the right of labor organizations to limit a union member's right to resign during strikes or other economic conflict. Throughout the volume, the author embraces the fundamental right of the individual to withhold labor and engage in economic pressure. At the same time, he stresses the importance of developing peaceful negotiating procedures, alternatives to the strike, and law which is supportive of such policies.

Wildcat strikes in U.S. manufacturing, 1960–1977

Using data from theBureau of Labor Statistics: Historical File, a model of wildcat strike incidence is estimated. The model supports the hypothesis that the incidence of wildcat strikes is related to the underlying relationship between the parties. In addition, national economic and political trends, industry-specific factors, and firm-specific factors have an impact on strike activity.

The wildcat strike and industrial relations*

Institutionalised collective bargaining can be seen as a limited vehicle for the promotion of workers' demands. This detailed participantobserver case study in a plant in northern New Jersey describes the process of a wildcat strike and evaluates its efficacy as a means of advancing important aspects of workers' interests outside the conventional, institutional channels.

THE IMPORTANCE OF UNION ACCEPTANCE FOR PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH GOAL SETTING

Interviews were conducted with union business agents on conditions necessary for their support of a goal setting program. Subsequent to the interviews, goals were assigned to 39 truck drivers. The results were analyzed using a design that included a comparison group (N= 35). The results showed a significant increase in productivity for the drivers who received specific goals. When the conditions necessary for the union's support of the goal setting program were no longer met, there was a wildcat strike.

Alvin Gouldner's Challenge to Sociology and Marxism: The Problem of Bureaucracy

Aligned with the tradition of Western Marxism, the work of Alvin Gouldner animates a concern with the political implications of social scientific research. The Western Marxian theme of theory and praxis finds its fullest elaboration in his most recent work. This same theme also provides the theoretical impetus to Gouldner's early industrial organization studies—Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy and Wildcat Strike. Vital to Gouldner's work is the notion that sociology must concern itself not only with what is but also with what human society might be. Gouldner's message is clear: The project of a critical social science cannot stop at mere “negativity.” Rather, it must incorporate the insights of empirical sociology. An examination of his earliest work on organizations and bureaucracy shows that Gouldner has superbly woven these two traditions together and significantly advanced the progress toward developing an adequate critical sociology. In order to demonstrate Gouldner's intellectual lineage with Western Marxism, some translation is necessary. One of the goals of this analysis is to show that the tradition of empirical social science is translatable into the dialectical tradition of social analysis. Gouldner's empirical studies share the same “cognitive interests”—although guided by a different style and method of investigation— with Western Marxism. These insights are offered in his empirical analyses of the recurrent dilemmas of power, leadership, organization, and the fate of democratic aspirations in the modern world. Gouldner's work stands as a significant attempt by an American sociologist to rethink the central issues confronting sociology and Marxism.

Union Officers and Wildcat Strikes: Freedom from Discriminatory Discipline

doctrine which prevents the discriminatory discipline of union officers fol lowing wildcat strikes. The Board has held that, absent an express provi sion in the contract, no-strike clauses do no imply an affirmative duty owed the employer by union officers to prevent and/or quell unauthorized job actions. Similarly, union officers do not have an implied higher duty of loyalty to the contract than do other employees. However, the Board has recognized that because of their status in the shop, union officers, by their actions, can more easily give legitimacy to a wildcat strike. Under these circumstances officers, in effect, become leaders of the strike and can be disciplined, just as any other employee who led a strike. Strong criti cism from a Board minority and the courts has failed to grasp the distinc tions between these different approaches to discipline of union officers. Nevertheless, the Board doctrine comports with traditional agency law and with the realities of industrial relations.

Labor Law as Ideology: Toward a New Historiography of Collective Bargaining Law

* © Copyright 1981 by Karl E. Klare. t Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law. This article is a revised text of a paper presented to the Tenth Annual Meetings of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 25, 1980. 1. See generally Atleson, Work Group Behavior and Wildcat Strikes: The Causes and Func tions of Industrial Civil Disobedience, 34 Ohio St. L.J. 750 (1973); Cloke, Political Loyalty, Labor Democracy and the Constitution, 5 San Fern. Valley L. Rev. 159 (1976); Klare, Judicial Deradi calization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937-1941, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 265 (1978) [hereinafter cited as Judicial Deradicalization]; Lynd, Government Without Rights: The Labor Law Vision of Archibald Cox, 4 Indus. Rel. L.J. 483 ( 1981); Lynd, Investment Decisions and the Quid Pro Quo Myth, 29 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 396 (1979) [hereinafter cited as Investment Decisions]; Lynd, Reindustrialization: Brownfield or Greenfield?, Democracy, July 1981, at 22; Lynd, Employee Free Speech in the Private and Public Workplace: Two Doctrines or One?, 1 Indus. Rel. L.J. 711 (1977) [hereinafter Employee Free Speech]-, Lynd, Workers' Control in a Time of Diminished Workers' Rights, Radical America, Sept.-Oct. 1976, at 5; Lynd, The Right to Engage in Concerted Activity After Union Recognition: A Study of Legislative History, 50 Ind. L.J. 720 (1975); Stone, The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law, 90 Yale L.J. 1515 (1981) [hereinafter cited as Stone]; Atleson, Values and Assumptions in Labor Law (forthcoming) [hereinafter cited as Values and Assumptions]; Klare, The Quest for Industrial Democracy and the Struggle Against Racism: Perspectives on Labor Law and Civil Rights Law (forthcoming in Ore. L. Rev. 1981); Klare, The Bitter and the Sweet: Reflections On the Supreme Court's Yeshiva Decision (forthcoming in Socialist Rev. 1981). See also Feinman, The Development of the Employment at Will Rule, 20 Am. J. Legal Hist. 118 (1976); Freeman, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 1049 (1978). In addition to the works cited, I have learned much from discussions with, and the unpub lished work of, James Atleson, Alan Hyde, Howard Lesnick, Staughton Lynd, Theodore Lieverman, Ira Sills and Katherine Stone. In its original conception, this paper was intended to be a report to ASLH on the critical labor jurisprudence, and I wish to acknowledge that some of the ideas and approaches to collective bargaining law presented here derive from the work of the people listed. However, the scholars I have associated with the critical labor law hold a widely divergent spectrum of views on legal and political questions. Readers are therefore advised that I assume sole responsibility for the formulations contained herein, and that the presentation of critical labor law in this paper is heavily oriented toward my own approaches and research priorities.

Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955

In June 1944 the army's Industrial Services Division flew Major A. H. Raskin to Detroit for hurried investigation of the industrial unrest that plagued the very heart of wartime America's arsenal of democracy. Raskin spoke with community, labor, and business leaders, visited the giant production facilities at Ford and Chrysler, and reviewed the records of the War Labor Board and the War Manpower Commission. War workers were unquestionably patriotic, reported Raskin, labor journalist in civilian life, but perplexing, defiant mood of rebellion and irrationality seemed to be sweeping through the million-strong work force of southeastern Michigan. The leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) has found it impossible to adjust the thinking of its rank and file membership to the changed situation created by the war. As wildcat strikes and shop-floor job actions became more frequent, a breakdown of discipline threatened to shatter the usual pattern of factory administration and union authority. ' Militancy of the sort that so puzzled Raskin has increasingly attracted the interest of scholars concerned with the changing pattern of consciousness and activity exhibited by ordinary workers. Much research has been directed at understanding the complex relationship between rank-and-file workers and the production process in factory, mill, and office, especially in the early twentieth century when managers adopted policies of close supervision and rationalized work flow to win greater control of the factory work environment. The rearguard battle waged by skilled workers against this process has received much attention; the resistance or accommodation of the unskilled, relatively less.2 While historians have recently begun to probe the unionization process

Shop Stewards in Great Britain West Germany and France

In recent years a number of European countries have witnessed the breakdown of the centralised framework of industrial relations established in the early post‐war years giving way to a more decentralised system which allowed more room to shop floor movements. The outbreak of the strikes of May and June 1968 in France, and more particularly of the wildcat strikes of 1969 and the early 1970s in West Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy, marked a shift in union power towards the shop floor.

Wildcat Strikes in Bituminous Coal Mining

Tests several hypotheses about the causes of wildcat strikes in bituminous coal mines. Review of related studies; Method; Results and conclusion. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)

Wildcat Strikes in Bituminous Coal Mining

Wildcat Strikes in Bituminous Coal Mining

Labour and trade unionism in Turkey: the Eregli coalminers

The Eregli Coal Basin' is located in the province of Zonguldak, which is in northwestern Turkey bordering the Black Sea; within its boundaries lie virtually all of the known deposits of bituminous coal. This extremely mountainous area is the centre of Turkish heavy industry; besides coal, Turkey's two steel plants are located in this province-one at Karabuk and the other at Eregli. The coal deposits are wholly owned by the state and operated by the Eregli Komiirui Isletmesi (EKI), the Eregli Coal Administration, one of the more important state enterprises. Employing close to 50,000 workers, EKI and the basin itself have in recent years witnessed increasing labour difficulties and violence. The most major event, one with far-reaching implications and consequences, took place in March 1965.2 Beginning as a somewhat localised event and ultimately spreading throughout the region and involving almost the entire labour force, this wildcat strike culminated in several coalminers being shot by Turkish marines in a midnight clash. Since then, the area has been plagued by spontaneous outbursts and demonstrations, wildcat strikes and violence. In most instances it has been directed against both management and the union, but not infrequently against the latter solely. At the centre of these recurring disputes has been the largest local union in the area-for that matter, in Turkey-the Zonguldak Maden IJsileri Sendakasi (ZMWU), the Zonguldak Mine Workers' Union. All of the workers at EKI-some 47,000 are members, and it has exclusive representational rights with respect to collective bargaining for the mine workers. It is one of the most financially sound unions in Turkey, and the pattern which it sets in its collective agreements often serves as a model of demands in other sectors of the economy. The labour movement in the basin is complex, involving as it does a heterogenous labour force in both cultural and educational terms. It comprises, in essence, some 30,000 workers who are not totally committed to an industrial way of life, and some 20,000 who are. It is in many ways a labour force in transition, moving slowly away from its agricultural orientation and increasingly being forced to rely on industrial employment for its livelihood. Caught clearly between two ways of life, the majority of the workers in the coal mines are frustrated and confused, given to emotional and uncontrolled outbursts against those features of their working lives which they feel impinge upon them but which they feel helpless to counter. It is the problems with which the nascent labour movement is beset, when confronted by a culturally and intellectually disparate labour force, with which this article is concerned. While it deals directly with the