Omaha Steve's Labor Group

Omaha Steve

(105,289 posts) Sat Apr 12, 2025, 02:08 PM Apr 12

Unions Without Strikes

Today’s labor movement has been built to rely on forms of power that are all going away.

By Hamilton Nolan April 10, 2025

You can spend a lifetime studying the rich history of the labor movement. While you are doing that, new union battles and campaigns will constantly arise. Laws will change, the economy will change, industries will rise and fall. New technologies will challenge workers in previously unimagined ways. Yet the fact remains that the more you study all of the complexities of the past, present, and future, you are left with one central truth: The power of organized labor is the power of the strike. Without the strike, the labor movement’s claim to power falls apart.

This fundamental and unalterable truth — the basic insight that led workers to form unions in the first place — has been echoing in my mind as I have watched the Trump administration carry out the most naked assault on organized labor since World War II. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired about 12,000 striking air traffic controllers during the infamous PATCO Strike — an action long considered to be the worst thing the U.S. government has done to labor unions in my lifetime. For Donald Trump, that would hardly constitute a single day’s work.

Trump has illegally fired hundreds of thousands of federal government workers; tossed out the active union contract covering nearly 50,000 TSA workers; and, most staggeringly, declared that more than 700,000 unionized workers at a slew of federal agencies are just not allowed to have unions. Using the laughably flimsy pretext of “national security,” Trump’s March 27 executive order purports to tell all of those union members, working under union contracts, that they are no longer union members working under union contracts after all. It is the boldest and most grotesque example of union-busting the modern labor movement has seen from an American president.

So what will the labor movement do about it?

FULL story: https://inthesetimes.com/article/unions-labor-strikes-afge-doge-trump-federal-workers

2 replies

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Highlight:

Unions Without Strikes (Original Post) Omaha Steve Apr 12 OP

Kick SheltieLover Apr 12 #1

Postal unions under binding arbitration PATRICK Apr 12 #2

SheltieLover

(66,761 posts)

1. Kick

Reply to Omaha Steve (Original post)

Sat Apr 12, 2025, 02:12 PM

Apr 12

PATRICK

(12,267 posts)

2. Postal unions under binding arbitration

Reply to Omaha Steve (Original post)

Sat Apr 12, 2025, 03:51 PM

Apr 12

working under old contract. The "early outs" are over and sure they can reduce the "non-career" employees- though they prefer them to anyone vested higher on the pay scale. DOGE is in there and ready to screw anything, possibly killing the golden goose before they sell it as a package only cash cow. Despite the law, despite the popularity of the institution, despite logic and all. And we had our "illegal" strike at a time when we had tons more power over the economy(the only one recognized, the banking industry). It's a potential mess, but even the most optimistic will see a contract degradation someway or other and a continuation of "new" supercenters that might be kind of doomed from past performance. At least I have not seen this many scenarios for failure packed into one super-river of constant mail flow before. I don't think our union has made people appreciate the results of even a few more supercenters swallowing up whole regions.

My father was a union leader during this strike and when they met with Nixon. It was our high water mark and genuinely modest in its stand for justice, in dealing with the Man. Years later, when discussing the downward trajectory and growing evil of the GOP, he stood by the inherent strength of the standoff between labor and the owners. I didn't see, and he couldn't respond about: yes they would go extremely far because they had to by their nature and their goals. I assumed it might be by military dictatorship, before the rise of the rich man monarchs. We still might get there by default.

I will only breathe tiny bit easier IF the rule of law gets reasserted somewhere. It certainly doesn't seem to concern corporate echelons.

As it is, kiss your Post Office good-bye and pay what you can to get what you need. The privatization example of other countries are tame, non-applicable comparisons to what will happen here. I doubt any postal unions will survive this in any form.

Just a few Stock Market scams, then poof.

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