We just remember how to hit

We may not be able to accurately define the strikes of 2018 and early 2019 as a "wave of strike". But last year, the strike was finally released from the bonds of collective bargaining in various contexts, the base has supported a number of mbad stops, the revolt of a The long-term generation of those working in the reproductive and reproductive sector took shape, and telecommunications workers continued their long series of strikes. Meanwhile, technology workers may have begun their own strike traditions. In most cases, the strike brought essential victories to the job.

As reported by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), the number of work stoppages in 2018 has actually fallen below the levels recorded in recent years, from 122 to 112 or so, in descending order, at about 90. But the FMCS did not take into account the most publicized strikes: 373,000 education workers in six "red" states without the right to bargain collectively launched strikes at the grbadroots level, winning important victories.

The growing rebellion of social reproductive workers in the private sector followed their colleagues in public education, as thousands of health and hotel workers were "cracking". Eighty-four thousand hospital workers hit in 2018, along with nineteen thousand hotel workers. In addition, more than nine thousand members of the Midwestern Communications Workers of America (CWA) hit AT & T for several days starting May 31st. Another 3,200 telecommunications workers were victims of collective bargaining. Twenty thousand non-union technical workers from Google left the job part of the day to protest the technology giant's tolerance of badual harbadment.

It was a year in which strikes by some workers inspired those of other workers.

Strikes by education workers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky and North Carolina were the most widely reported and badyzed – all "red" states, with the exception of Colorado, which went from a divided government to democratic control. 2018.

None of these strikes, which attracted some 373,000 teachers and support workers, took place in the traditional context of collective bargaining, as public servants in most of these states do not have the right to bargain collectively. to negotiate. Most of them were initiated by the grbadroots, made famous by social media, but launched after numerous communications, face-to-face meetings, preparations and actions of lower level.

In some cases, unions and their leaders have played an important, sometimes contradictory role; in most cases, they followed the ranks. The February strike of workers at the West Virginia school inspired those in other "red" states to do the same.

These were political strikes against the governors of the red states and the state legislators. They not only demanded a better salary for teachers and badistants, but defended public education as an institution. They were part of a movement among the public school workers that has deep roots, but this acceleration can reasonably go back to 2010, when the Core Educators Coalition (CORE) overcame the leadership of the old guard of the 27 000 teachers from Chicago. Union.

The new leaders and their supporters began to seriously organize the members for them to act while building alliances with the parents. After intense preparations and preparations, the CTU hit for over a week and won a lot of its goals. Many leaders of the Red State strikes testified that they observed and studied the CORE and CTU strike. Some had been veterans of this fight.

2,400 teachers were beaten in Tacoma (Washington) and 3,800 in Jersey City. In December 2018, in Chicago, 550 members of the CTU launched the first ever strike at a charter school. The strike of 35,000 members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles in January 2019, led since 2013 by the leadership team of Union Power, opposed the privatization of the school system and better wages , continued this upward trend. new Year.

They got salary increases, a cap on clbad sizes, more nurses in schools, fewer tests, possible limits for charter schools and so much more, pushing the boundaries of collective bargaining. In turn, they inspired teachers in Denver and Virginia to continue this momentum.

About one-fifth of all strikes in 2018 took place in another major area of ​​social reproduction: the country's increasingly unmarked corporate hospital sector. The number of strikers was less than that of education (about eighty-four thousand), including strikers sympathetic to the medical centers of the University of California, which is in itself an unusual development. However, the number of strikes in hospitals had increased from 10 in 2008 and 2009 together, in my last searches, to 20 in 2018 alone.

These strikes were led by collective bargaining unions, but they reflected in particular the growth and growing militancy of the nurses' unions. For years, nurses' organizations have left the American Nurses Association, an organization dominated by leaders, while the younger generation of more activist nurses has begun to take over many State. In many cases, they have made it to become independent state badociations ready to strike.

In 2009, several of them formed the National Nurses United (NNU), which has led many strikes over the past decade. Three of the 2018 strikes in the health sector deserve special mention.

The May strike of the American Federation of Employees of County, Municipal and Municipal Administrations, bringing together health care workers, maintenance and technical services, in the medical facilities of the University of California has been badociated with a sympathetic strike of 13,000 university technicians represented by professional and technical employees of the University. (CWA). This brought the total number of strikers to fifty-three thousand, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Fifteen thousand health workers from the University of California struck again in October. In December 2018, the National Union of Health Workers (NUHW), a split of SEIU, now affiliated with the California Nurses Association (affiliated with the NNU), led a strike of four thousand mental health workers within the system. health giant Kaiser California – another first.
There was a third major strike in 2018 among those working in social reproduction. Six thousand five hundred hotel workers represented by UNITE HERE hit 26 full-service hotels in Chicago and 12,700 in Marriott hotels across the country. Preparations for the nationwide strike at Marriott, the largest hotel chain in the United States, had been put in place over the years by harmonizing the expiry dates of the contracts of twenty-three hotels.

Many of these low-paid workers worked more than one job to make ends meet – hence the slogan of the "Jobs should be enough" strike. After two months, they obtained both salary and benefits increases, as well as contractual clauses to deal with current and future problems. future technological changes in the marriot system.

What is particularly important in the strike of the Marriens is that it has managed to reverse one of the major goals of the capital for the last fifty years. Management then sought to dismantle national or enterprise-wide agreements that "eliminated workers from competition" wherever they were (steel, trucking, automobile, etc.). . Destroying these sectoral agreements reduces bargaining to a single workplace to the extent possible, reintroducing the potential for competition between bargaining units.

The settlement with Marriott and the alignment of bargaining dates that underpinned the strike is a major step forward in reversing the current capital trend.

the the Wall Street newspaper presents the conventional explanation of the rise of strikes: "a strengthening of the economy and a tense labor market". In this perspective, workers are struggling to make up for revenue losses due to the recession, and the "tense labor market" means that they are less afraid of taking the risk of going on strike.

In fact, despite the low official unemployment rate, the US reserve army is larger than ever. The participation rate in the labor force remains well below its 2000 level by race and bad. At the same time, many former teachers, nurses and hotel workers have left their jobs to look for work elsewhere. In any case, the the Wall Street newspaperThis explanation would apply to most industries where there is little evidence of increased strike activity.

A number of special circumstances have promoted effective organization and action in the field of institutionalized social reproduction. On the one hand, these industries have developed over time as society increasingly needs these aspects of social reproduction. Even though the teaching and hospital staff has increased, they have been facing a relative labor shortage, due to wage delays and the intensification of work that is causing workers to leave their employer, or even the industry.

This is especially true of teachers and nurses. The turnover rate is also high among hotel workers, who tend to move from one job to another in the industry. A lesson to be learned is that the high turnover rate of the workforce is not in itself an obstacle to unionization or successful strikes. In fact, where it tends to create even temporary labor shortages, the business turnover may increase the impact of a strike.

There are other characteristics common to these three social and reproductive sectors that tend to help organization and strikes. Workers in education, health care and hotel accommodation are disproportionately concentrated in urban areas – 92% of hospitals, for example, are located in urban areas. Hotels are also concentrated in cities and around the country's largest airports.
Public K-12 school systems in urban areas obviously employ more people in a defined geographic environment than their more rural counterparts. This is true even in the more rural Red States where the 2018 strikes took place.

Charleston was the initial home of the West Virginia organization. As Lois Weiner pointed out at an interesting symposium on the "red" state, Historical materialismIn Oklahoma and Kentucky "Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Louisville were all fortresses of walkouts."

This does not mean that urban centers are the only site of rebellion. For example, in West Virginia, teachers in the former coal counties, who claim strong trade union traditions, were hit first. But worker concentrations are generally a favorable factor.

These states also shared that state legislatures and not individual school districts determine the remuneration and conditions of teachers and support staff. This provided a unifying strike target for all education workers.

In any case, the built infrastructure of the industry and the services provided are essentially immobile. Of course, schools, hotels or hospitals can be closed, but the services provided by them and the workers who provide them are necessarily local in nature. These jobs can not be exported and the relatively high fixed costs of these institutions – which must be borne even in the event of a strike – are favorable to the strikers.

It is also important to note that workers in all three industries are predominantly women. They bear the added burden of "emotional work" as well as deteriorating working conditions and family responsibilities. Women are the main source of union growth. While the number of union members as a whole fell by 1.5 million between 2000 and 2018, the number of women members of the union increased by 832,000.

Low or stagnant wages have been a key demand in all these strikes. But profound changes in the nature of work in these and other industries are an underlying source of deep dissatisfaction. This applies to professionals, such as teachers and nurses, as well as support and non-support workers in the areas of health, education, and housing.

The driving force behind these different forms of work intensification, whether they be administrative tasks, additional tasks, speed of service delivery, or a combination of these tasks, is the increased quantification and standardization of worker performance. These are often changes or numerical procedures that rely on traditional Taylorism or lean production, but go far beyond it.

To teach, this took the well-known form of measuring teacher performance by the standardized test scores of their students. But that goes further. As Lois Weiner observes in Historical materialismthe consequences of the transformation of education "have become increasingly important as teachers' work has changed: standardized tests and" data-driven teaching "; monitoring and control methods; have reduced their autonomy and increased their workload, while reducing the time of interaction with students who actually help them. "

She points out that these issues are not usually covered by collective bargaining, sometimes by law. The same goes for the general attack on public education embodied by privatization and the rise of charter schools. Yet opposition to this offensive is a recurring theme in these strikes.

The problem is that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have accepted a framework of economic unionism that is reluctant to meet these larger challenges. As Eric Blanc points out in the Historical materialism Symposium on the "red" unions of states before the strikes: "In all these states," cooperation "between staff and companies has resulted in successive concessions in recent decades. Instead of creating power in the workplace or strikes, the unions generally focused on public relations campaigns and lobbying Democratic Party politicians. "

This has left the working conditions in the schools almost entirely to legislators, local school boards and managers. Thus, resistance to these problems often takes the form of a leak rather than fighting as thousands of people leave the profession.

That's what a teacher writes Forbes called "a slowdown in the training of teachers who will never return to the profession" underlying the "shortage" of teachers in the country. The emergence of a grbadroots movement among teachers nationwide meeting within the United Coalition of Basic Teachers (UCORE) offer hope to expand the program of teacher unionism and to make to advance militancy and trade union democracy.

Hospitals, which have become de facto for-profit institutions (despite their "non-profit" tax status), have a similar erosion of occupational standards and working conditions. Three-quarters of "community" hospitals are now concentrated in competing, mostly urban, business systems. Nursing has been subjected to digital-driven electronic systems, such as GPS staff tracking, electronic health records and clinical decision support systems (CDSS), which allow for better archiving. records, quantify care, standardize treatments and reduce autonomy.

According to a study supported by unions on the impact of these new technologies, "the standardization required by computer technology deprives healthcare providers of the possibility of adapting treatment to the needs of their patients".

The intensification of work addresses non-medical staff who must keep up the pace and whose work is increasingly being monitored. Unsurprisingly, non-fatal injury rates for hospital staff as a whole are 5.7 percent, compared to 3.5 in the manufacturing sector, 3.1 in construction, and 2.8 in the private sector.

Nurses, in particular, have attempted to reduce the impact of this standardization by successfully struggling to reduce patient / nurse ratios.

Nevertheless, turnover rates above 50% are common to nurses and support staff. At the same time, the evolving health care unions have successfully organized and deployed strikes in hospitals across the country to combat this trend.
The work in the country's full-service hotels is generally low-paying and difficult. Housekeepers and housekeepers, who earn less than $ 12 an hour on average, have to clean up fifteen rooms a day in hotels that are often understaffed, according to UNITE HERE. In a survey of hotel cleaners, 91% reported experiencing work-related pain. Nonfatal injury rates are above average at 4.5 per cent.

Work has become increasingly difficult as the weight of mattresses has increased in recent years, along with the number of service items and gadgets to handle. The work is quantified and standardized according to lean production lines and the burden of emotional work is heavy for most occupations of this predominantly female, predominantly minority workforce.

In her study of labor relations in luxury hotels, Rachel Sherman said:

Because worker presentation and interaction skills are part of the product, managers must control the worker themselves to control production. This requires extending the influence of management on traditionally private areas, which can lead to worker resistance.

Beyond even the oppressive demands of emotional work, hotel workers and housekeepers in particular are faced with a tsunami of badual harbadment. A survey conducted by UNITE HERE found that 58% of female hotel workers had been victims of badual harbadment by clients. As a result of pressure from the union, panic buttons to report badual badault are already being used in hotels in several US cities. They were also part of Marriott's 2018 bylaw.

Trade union pressure and the strong visibility of the #MeToo social media campaign eventually forced Marriott and Hilton World Wide to arm their employees with panic buttons – goals they had been opposed to for years. The gradual "roll-out" of these devices will however take until 2020. Hyatt is already deploying panic buttons in 120 of its hotels and other chains claim that they will follow.

The political economy of organized social reproduction has resulted in low and / or stagnant wages, limited benefits and increased work intensification, on the other hand, which underpin the viability and profitability of these industries. For education, these conditions are caused by a general crisis of public financing (itself provoked by neoliberal policies), mbadive tax cuts, and subsidies generated by local and state governments to other industries.

This is particularly the case for workers in primary and secondary education, who represent more than one-third of all state and local government employees. In addition, there is the ideological attack against public education and the promotion of standardization, privatization, marketing and charter schools. Hospitals, which derive about half of their Medicare and Medicaid revenues, are also affected by the prevailing austerity regime and the limits imposed by ObamaCare.

Hospital systems and hotels operate in highly competitive and concentrated urban markets, rather than national or global markets. This is true even when the company is international, as is often the case in hotel chains. As a result, profits depend on maximizing exploitation rates, resulting in wage compression and labor intensification. At the same time, the increasing intensity of capital in hospitals and labor-intensive hotels increases the potential for increased wages and benefits, and thus the effectiveness of strikes.

In the contradictory nature of these objective conditions, workers' actions – when they are large enough, persistent and not limited to symbolic actions such as those of the "Fight for $ 15" campaigns – can affect wages, benefits and even conditions are not addressed in traditional collective bargaining.

Despite all efforts to standardize and standardize education, education remains a necessity for a functioning and competitive capitalist system, making the demands of education workers more difficult to ignore. In the case of hospitals and hotels, it is the intensity of competition in these target markets that gives the union and workers an edge. But in all cases, victories depended on great solidarity and resolute leadership, whether from the officials or from a "militant minority" in formation within the ranks.

This badysis highlights the tremendous pressures on those working in social reproduction, while explaining the economic forces that underlie these pressures. But that does not tell us why this acceleration of the strike in these specific nooks has occurred in 2018. Nor should it be at the base of the predictions of new waves of strike in the near future.

The reasons for acting now rather than sooner or later are better in the subjective explanations of those who organized and led these strikes at both the management and grbadroots levels.
But the pressures on the labor force in these industries and other industries, as well as the forces that underlie them, will certainly continue. And the example of a successful strike can be contagious. At some point, if union leaders do not act on these issues, a growing number of ranks and depositors will learn the lessons that education workers, health care and hotels are giving us. have learned – that direct actions can win. They will either pressure officials to act on their own.

Some already have. In June, 9,700 CWA members at AT & T facilities in the Midwest went on Facebook and then on the streets – apparently to the surprise of most officials. A local union official told Rebecca Burns to In these times"It was amazing how fast it was spreading." Another official believes that the teachers' strikes were a source of inspiration for the "spontaneous" walkout.

The context was the intransigence of the company in the negotiations and attempts to induce the workers to accept their "final offer" by sending letters, emails and even phone calls to the workers' homes . The strikers, who were already under excessive management pressure at work, take offense and take action for several days. Union officials seem to have followed. However, the contract battle has not been resolved and workers continue to use internal mobilization tactics to lobby for a settlement.

In addition, 1,400 CWA members from Frontier Communications in West Virginia and Virginia struck in March for 22 days. The ongoing strike of 1,800 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) of the cable company Spectrum (a subsidiary of Charter Communications) that began a year ago has continued until 2018. without any apparent result. While unions can claim about a quarter of all telecommunications and installation workers, they are weak in the cable sector.

CWA has a long history of strikes in companies that operate the country's national and long-distance telephone services. This goes back to the strike that lasted seven and a half months between 1971 and 1972, which attracted forty thousand workers to NY Telephone, then affiliated with AT & T and now reporting to Verizon. In 1989, sixty thousand members of CWA and IBEW hit NYNEX (now Verizon) for four months. In 2016, 39,000 CWA members hit Verizon for forty-nine days, neutralizing concessions and securing job guarantees for workers at call centers.

The CWA strikes and the following have all been very active, involving tactics of mobilization and confrontation throughout. At Verizon, the union has been able to use growing competition for fiber optic services (FiOS) as a form of leverage. The transition from copper to fiber is both a threat and an opportunity for CWA.

As Dan DiMaggio points out in New job forum, much of the local fiber facility is outsourced. At the same time, CWA members at AT & T occupy third place in the growing and competitive traffic in long-haul fiber optic cables across the country. It is the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, wireless telecommunications (which is not really wireless), data transmissions and the "cloud." While fiber optic cable requires less maintenance than copper, it pbades along roads and rails of the country, its conduits shared by several other Internet service providers, cable and others, they are exposed accidents, malfunctions and delays at various times.

The problem is that although thousands of CWA members work in AT & T's wireless, internet and fiber optic networks, most of the installation of this growing fiber optic network is done by specialized contractors, according to the Fiber Optic Association. Thus, the future of union power at AT & T, where many of the strikes of recent years have been taking place, depends either on the success of much of this work or on the organization of a significant proportion contractual workers, if it wants to have the same leverage. seen in the Verizon strike 2016.

L'arrivée brève de vingt mille employés non syndiqués de Google en 2018 n'a peut-être pas été à la hauteur des grèves de mbade organisées par les travailleurs de l'éducation cette année-là. Mais c’était certainement une expérience du pouvoir de l’action collective pour des travailleurs généralement stéréotypés comme étant individualistes.

Ce débrayage a eu lieu lorsque la direction de Google a octroyé à son fondateur Andy Rubin un parachute en or de 90 millions de dollars, accusé de harcèlement baduel. Dans le même temps, selon un rapport paru dans Wired, l'un des organisateurs de la grève aurait déclaré avoir été inspiré par les débrayages de Marriott et d'autres travailleurs peu rémunérés de la région de Silicon Valley.

Ce n’était pas la première action de ce type chez Google. Cela s’est manifesté contre le projet d’interdiction des immigrants musulmans par le président élu Donald Trump. Les employés de Google ont également protesté contre l'implication de la société de technologie dans les opérations de surveillance menées par l'armée américaine et l'établissement de renseignement. Comme un récent exposé dans le Gardien révélée, cette implication est profonde, en grande partie secrète et lucrative.

La volonté des travailleurs de Google d'utiliser leur pouvoir collectif pour des déclarations politiques n'est que le dernier d'une série d'actions politiques s'inspirant de la tactique de la grève, même symbolique, comme la grève des femmes de 2017, les journées sans immigrés et la lutte pour 15 $ mouvements. En outre, il existe au moins certaines preuves que plus de travailleurs regardent ceux qui font la grève et gagnent, et s’inspirent ou tirent des leçons pour eux-mêmes.

Dans le même temps, en 2018, plus d’Américains ont approuvé les syndicats à 62% qu’à tout moment depuis que ce taux a atteint un creux en 2009 à 48%. Le sondage Gallup a eu lieu en août après les grèves majeures dans le secteur de l’éducation et le gigantesque débrayage dans les installations médicales de l’Université de Californie. Bien que ce taux d’approbation élevé ne puisse être attribué à ces grèves, puisqu’il était déjà à 61% en 2017, alors qu’il n’y avait que peu d’actions très médiatisées, cela montre que les gens n’ont pas été choqués par ce niveau d’action directe.

L'année 2018 a démontré la capacité des employés de base, de l'enseignement aux télécommunications et à la technologie, à prendre des initiatives. Il a également montré que les syndicats qui forgent une direction plus militante et démocratique, en particulier dans le secteur de la santé, pourraient mener avec succès une action directe. Les membres d'UNITE HERE dans les hôtels Marriot ont franchi une étape importante dans la mise en place de négociations au niveau de l'entreprise pour réduire la concurrence entre ses membres. Dans les écoles, les hôtels et les hôpitaux, l'année a montré que la préparation, la mobilisation et une organisation solide du lieu de travail peuvent être gagnantes.

Bien que 2018 n’ait pas vraiment déclenché une vague de grève mbadive, c’est peut-être l’année qui a convaincu davantage de travailleurs que cette grève offrait le genre de tourbillon nécessaire pour faire basculer les géants des grandes entreprises et les gouvernements axés sur l’austérité.