I just came across a very insightful essay from Madison Wisconsin's very progressive, pro-labor and anti-Walker Cap Times webpage. The article, entitled,Grass Roots: Studying ‘troublemaker' manual to counter attack on workers, the poor, lays out a strategy for a general strike, a tactic for labor groups and progressives to perhaps eventually adopt so as to counter the Right's class driven assault on our rights.
The article, written by Pat Schneider of The Capital Times (pschneider@madison.com) argues that
Nobody's calling "Strike!" just yet, but as Wisconsin public workers and their allies reel from the Republican majority Legislature's precipitous gutting of organized labor's powers, local labor leaders are strategizing a response.
Schneider links to what she calls a "toolkit" from the Madison based South Central Federation of Labor an organization that has completed a study of the conditions for and strategy entailed in a general strike, focusing on Ontario, Canada as its main example.
She notes the following:
the Ontario scenario shows that broad-based community action using tactics short of job-ending strikes can empower a challenge to government. And the parallels between the political climate in Ontario 15 years ago and the emerging zeitgeist here are striking.
The Days of Action tactic depends on alliances among labor, social movement and community groups, stresses the author of a how-to outline penned by Dan La Botz, a labor and socialist activist based in Ohio.
She further observes that
General strikes grow out of political crisis, not the management-labor impasses that immediately come to mind, La Botz says. The Ontario strikes developed out of a sense of crisis and urgency precipitated by, "a frontal attack on unions and the poor by a Conservative government." Not only unions, but many social movements and community organizations perceived they "were under an unusually fierce attack that required an extraordinary response."
Let me repeat part of this: Not only unions, but many social movements and community organizations perceived they "were under an unusually fierce attack that required an extraordinary response.
Signs of this form of consciousness are everywhere these days and growing stronger.
So, basically, what this boils down to is creating and then sustaining alliances between labor and progressive/peace/justice organizations - something that has been ongoing in past and that continues in the present, aided by the increasing uses of social media like Twitter and Facebook.
And a key here is to remind ourselves the truth of the observation of a general strike - that this is an extraordinary and powerful response by a collective to a political crisis rather than an ordinary labor action. When the time is right and enough people feel themselves pushed up against the wall, then the idea of a general strike begins to seem like a real possibility.
As the article by Schneider concludes, the future is, as Joe Strummer might say, unwritten.
Could something like the Ontario Days of Action happen here? Well, who would have predicted the unprecedented protests we've already seen?
Key to the success of such actions is the endorsement of official labor organizations, La Botz says. That happened here on Feb. 21, when the 45-member SCFL voted to endorse a general strike, President Jim Cavanaugh cautions, though, that such action would be a "trump card" move played when other efforts were exhausted.
Dave Poklinkoski of IBEW Local 2304, who was part of a local labor team that researched the history and how-tos of general strikes, says the "stunning" action by the Legislature in approving a law ending collective bargaining has energized workers. "This is uncharted territory. You know the old saying "Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something? Folks are trying to see what they can do to turn things around. It looks like all options are on the table."