Is the Strike Back?

     The chart that Pulitzer Prize winning-journalist Nancy Cleeland held up showed a decline as precipitous as the recent stock market plunge but instead charted the drop of major strike activity since the '80's in the United States. "Strikes are down, but they're definitely not dead," Cleeland told attendees at a luncheon hosted by the Washington DC Chapter of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (DC LERA), which will celebrate its' 60th anniversary later this year.
     After almost ten years as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, Cleeland recently joined the staff at the Economic Policy Institute, and spoke about recent successes - and failures - of strikes, as well as the challenges of covering labor in a world of corporate media. "What works best is presenting issues in a larger framework," Cleeland said, "showing that strikers are standing up for all workers. What doesn't work is asking people to protect your benefits." Effective strike tactics that Cleeland observed during her stint as the labor reporter at the LA Times included "rolling strikes by janitors, which the union spent over a year preparing for. Every worker could speak about their issues - a piece of the growing economic pie - to reporters, and the worker's bright red t-shirts became a real emblem of their struggle."
     In contrast, Cleeland said, the 2003 Southern California grocery workers strike "was an emotional decision with no preparation, while the employers had prepared well in advance and were able to turn the union's 'Save Our Healthcare' slogan against the workers, portraying the strike as being over a $5 healthcare co-payment that no-one else had." In another successful effort, the longshoremen "decided not to strike, instead slowing down the ports by working to rule and forcing the employers to make an emotional decision to lock out the workers" that backfired in the court of public opinion. "The key is to anticipate, to be prepared and to be able to react quickly," she said. She also hailed the move by hotel workers "who are working to line up contract expiration dates across the country to improve the power of a strike."
     Although Cleeland said that major strikes - those involving more than 1,000 workers - are down drastically since their peak in the late '70's and early '80s - before Ronald Reagan fired air traffic controllers in 1981 - "people are now realizing that the greatest economic problem we have is inequality, which is exactly what unions have been fighting for years."
     Noting that there are just a handful of labor reporters left in the country - her own job at the Times was abolished a few years ago, despite a 2004 series about Walmart's labor policies and sourcing practices that won the Pulitzer, Polk and other prestigious awards - Cleeland said that part of the problem is an increasingly consolidated and corporatized media with little interest in covering unions and the struggles of their workers. When they do cover the workplace, she says editors often say "We want you to write about workers but not unions," which often results in feature stories about worker gripes "instead of real economic issues." Although Cleeland doesn't expect to see expanded or improved labor coverage in the mass media, she said that "the advent of blogs and other alternative publications" may well provide viable forums for reporting on workers and their struggles. – reported by Chris Garlock