How Strikes Win

It pays to be militant. It just does. Look at the maintenance workers at the end of the 1960s who won 22% pay increases with flying pickets and with grassroots organisation of the strike.

What are the key things to remember if you want to win a strike?

Every strike is different - you could be on strike over wages, redundancy, to prevent closure, but there are certain key things to keep in mind that we’ve learned over years of strikes.

This isn’t about developing a theory of strikes; it’s about summarizing the experience of our class and looking at what works and what fails. Every strike is a battle. It’s about you making your boss believe they can’t afford to ignore you.

That’s the key thing to remember. Make it so they can’t afford to ignore you.

Let’s say you’re asking for a pay rise. If the pay rise would cost the boss €500 grand but the strike looks like it might only upset business for a few weeks and cost €10 grand, then the boss might just sit in their fancy gaff and wait it out.

The bosses have money in the bank and workers don’t. They can wait out a strike if it doesn’t look like it’s going to cost them. Business trade unionism, the philosophy of the big unions these days, says you can “embarrass” the boss with public protests and moral pressure.

Of course solidarity protests are important - but c’mon, bosses can’t be “morally” pressured unless customers start defecting - they don’t give in unless action hits them in their pockets.

We’ve got to keep that in mind: how are we actually costing this boss cash? How are we making them hurt? What will bring them to the table?

Every successful strike by workers is an exercise of power, it’s not just a different form of protest. There is something you want, and there’s a boss or manager who could give it to you, but they don’t want to. The point of the strike is to make it harder for them to keep saying no—and easier for them to stop the pain by just saying yes to your demands.

ICTU would have you believe that a token picket and some lobbying of politicians will do the trick. Most bosses just laugh at that behind the scenes, then go do what they want. They don’t feel threatened - and why would they, with the courts, the cops, most TDs and even union leaders on their side?

For a private-sector boss the main way a strike exerts power is by hurting their profits. Hit them in the pocket, they’ll eventually fold. You do that by shutting down production, disrupting supply chains or preventing customers from shopping with them.

Refuse to hit them in the pockets? They’ll just wait you out. They’ll stick injunction after injunction on your picket, drag out the strike and watch strikers’ morale fall bit by bit until you’re worn out and give in to some shite deal.

For a public-sector employer you win by interfering with the normal functions of the public service and creating a political crisis they must respond to. Wildcat strikes by bus drivers successfully shut down garages. It grabbed headlines.

In December 2016 the Irish Independent ran with: “copycat strikes lead to big pays rises!” They were talking about teachers’ actions across the country. That year saw strikes by Luas drivers, teachers and the bus workers.

The union heads hoped to head off rank-and-file anger with the Lansdowne Road agreement but workers had had enough after years of austerity. The government said the economy was doing well. But workers were asking: where’s our share?

Luas workers set the ball rolling with 12 days of strike action - despite massive media backlash which tried to turn the public against the strike - the workers stood strong and won. Drivers were promised wage increases of between 15.6% and 18.3% which would run up to September 2020, as well as a €750 payment.

Bus workers followed the example set by the Luas drivers and were rewarded for their militancy with pay rises of 3.75% per year. There was talk of a generalised transport strike but union leaders worked to prevent it.

The mainstream media were panicking by the end of the year talking about “a winter of discontent” - the teachers decided to come out on strike. ASTI was involved in three days of industrial action, and further strikes were suspended to allow for talks.

In the strikes by public sector workers, like the teachers, there was a furious battle to win over the parents of kids. While teachers appealed to parents as parents and as workers, the government tried to put moral pressure on the teachers to give in.

The government was able to contain workers’ demand with help from the union leaders and a promise of further talks on pay and conditions. But the threat of further strike action had changed the context of those talks, despite poor outcomes for workers in general from those deals.

It’s essential to carefully appraise all the forms of power, or leverage, the union can muster. Don’t hit the picket line without assessing what it will take to win? Do your research beforehand. You need to know who’s who on the board, where the money comes from and who controls it.

What leverage do we have? What leverage does the other side have? In the case of the above bus workers’ strikes, their power was to shut down transport, hit the wider economy and turn employers against the government when the government didn’t give into the workers’ demands.

You need to know exactly how money flows through the company - particularly where companies have complex ownership arrangements. In the example of the Debenhams strike, the company was owned by many other companies including Bank of Ireland - which was bailed out by workers!

You have to decide on the key points of leverage based on that research. For the Debenhams workers it was keeping the stock in the stores to prevent the company just selling it off and disappearing into the night with their redundancy payments.

Your own union will often ask you to fight with one hand tied behind your back - only rank-and-file organisation and mass meetings can take the initiative out of their hands and put the strike in the hands of the grassroots.

The quicker the control of the strike passes to grassroots workers, the stronger the dispute will be. Go through the expected government and media counter- attacks and have every worker on strike ready to tackle them.

A poorly-organised strike can leave resentments that will take a long time to heal. A well-organised strike, on the other hand, can bring workers much closer together. Strikes build union muscle. That has been true since the time of Larkin and Connolly - strikes build union muscle.

Whatever else they might think, the company should never be given a reason to believe the workers are just bluffing. Your strike threat must be a real threat or they’ll dismiss your demands. In the weeks leading up to any strike, you need to prepare.

A well-prepared threat of action can score victory from a worried boss without the need for pickets. Sometimes they surrender to prevent the action from taking place. Dunnes Stores workers got 10% wage rises on the back of a campaign by workers in Mandate.

You need to have answers to all the questions the strike will throw up:

What will the boss say when the strike starts? What arguments will they use to split the workers? What contact do you have with other branches of your union? What communication mechanism are strikers going to use on a day-to-day basis?

Who’s going to do our press releases? Are workers prepared for the Guards to show up? Do they know their rights? Are we going to break injunctions or not? If we’re going to break injunctions, how far are we willing to go?

To really hurt profit strikers must stop the production or distribution of goods or services. You will need to make sure that all union members have withdrawn their labour—and that no one else is doing the work either.

That last bit is something our unions have abandoned “no one else is doing the work” – we have to stop scabs. We have to. There’s no point to a picket line unless you try to stop scabs. The 1990 Industrial Relations Act puts limits on how far you can go to stop scab labour.

I remember on the Greyhound strike there were workers who passed the picket line. We tried to reason with them but many of the white-collar office workers passed the picket line with pride in being a scab. The striking workers got supporters to put on more militant pickets.

We made it hard for the scabs to get in and out. The company called the cops. But in the end the scabs shot themselves in the foot because once the company had done with the strikers they eventually sacked the scabs.

First thing to do is to appeal to the workers going in to do your work. Maybe they don’t know what’s going on? On the Debenhams picket line in Blackrock one morning we were there when part-time workers were on their way in to pack up the stock.

Workers explained to those passing the picket that the stock was their redundancy payments and the company was selling it off. One guy turned around and said he wouldn’t come back. The others, who ignored the workers and decided to scab, faced chants and protests by supporters.

The workers were nervous about stopping the scabs but when trucks came to take stock away, Debenhams workers in other locations lay down in front of the trucks and slowed down the process of taking the stock.

By breaking the law they made national headlines and scandalised the political establishment into reacting. That wouldn’t have happened if they’d let the stock out without a fight.

Historically unions have used mass picketing, striking suppliers, and even sit-down strikes. They have used solidarity to strike entire industries or to call secondary boycotts of the employer’s allies. Most of these tactics are now outlawed. That’s because they work.

To win, we have to ignore those laws.

That doesn’t mean being reckless. Every striker should be aware the 1990 Act and what an injunction means. They should be clear that the Gardaí aren’t their mates and will clear a picket when asked to.

But once aware of all the implications of defying the law, workers should be encouraged to do it. The choice is sometimes to obey the law and lose, or break it and win. That’s it in a nutshell. The Thatcherite 1990 Act was brought in to weaken the workers’ movement.

In private sector strikes, the strike has to be made into a national issue and be brought to public attention so that there’s a light on any subsequent repression by the state.

In a teachers’ strike getting the parents on your side is crucial—the inconvenience to them is what generates the political crisis you need, but only if they blame the government and not the union.

In a retail workers’ strike, your leverage is the sales your employer is losing—which depend on your strong picket lines and customers’ unwillingness to cross them. The union needs to take a hard look at its place in the employer’s overall business and to use smart tactics that exploit that to the union’s advantage.

Workers at seven Verizon Wireless retail stores in Brooklyn and Massachusetts USA would have been out on a limb if they had struck by themselves. But they leaned on 39,000 fellow Communications Workers in the company’s landline sector.

The global economy depends on goods flowing seamlessly over oceans and across borders. They’ll tell you that weakens workers - but it also gives us power. Look at the disruption to global supply chains when a ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. We need to be like that ship!

Factories and retailers no longer store inventory for weeks in big warehouses but count on parts and goods delivered “just in time” using ships, terminal yards and trucks as their mobile warehouses.

That means that any strike can potentially bring a much larger system to a halt. This is true for both supplier workers and logistics workers who deliver the parts. Understanding those chains gives you power. Globalisation isn’t some magical castle in the air.

Is your workplace part of a system that depends on all parts working smoothly together? Do you have relationships with the workers at the most crucial nodes? Chokepoints also exist within workplaces. Which department in your workplace is the “bottleneck”? Are the members there aware of their power? Has the union made a special effort to develop leaders there? Are they on side?

For years, transit workers in New York City had a contract that expired in December, when shoppers were jamming the buses and trains. They knew when to negotiate or strike when need be.

Farmworkers, even without a union, have made gains by laying down their buckets just when the produce is ripe on the vines. The bosses panic because their profits are about to turn to mush. The same applies to public workers like teachers - no point striking in summer, when the kids are at home.

Based on the lessons above, here are the class war trade unionists’ rules for winning a strike:

ONE: Call a mass meeting of all workers involved in the strike straight away. Listen, we all know the union leaders will let you down. Every single time. Yeah, sometimes they get a deal, sometimes they go into talks and come out with something decent, but generally I’ve seen them scupper dozens of strikes even when they don’t intend to.

So, you need to get the strike into the hands of the strikers as soon as possible. That means informing the union that the strikers have called a mass meeting and that the mass meeting has elected people to play certain roles.

Your union rep has to report to that mass meeting of all workers and any talks that take place between the union and the boss should have your union and reps from that mass meeting at it. Your union will try to resist this. Ask them why?

They’ll say you need experience to negotiate. Grand so – we’ll come along and observe and make sure you say what we wanted you to say. That’s what we want and that’s that. Get endorsement for this strategy at the meeting of all workers.

Every decision made on the strike should be referred back for approval by a majority vote of all workers involved in the strike at an open meeting of all workers.

Call a mass meeting and the initiative in your strike will pass from the union bureaucracy to the rank-and-file. Don’t call a meeting? You’ll end up like striking cleaners outside the Custom House in 2009 - left in the dark by your union HQ and miserable because you’re waiting for them to tell you what to do next. Morale is as important as organisation.

That initial mass meeting, to organise the strike, is not just about technical or organisational issues, as important as they are. It must also deal with the question of “morale”.

Napoleon once said that the mood or morale of troops going into a battle was a huge factor in victory. He said French troops could be outnumbered 3 to 1 and still win because they believed in the ideals of the French revolution and fought with pride. They had good morale.

This means that everyone must be convinced of the strike beforehand. Having done your research and outlined a clear campaign plan, you must convince all other workers of the plan.

You have to prepare people beforehand for the backlash from the company, the media or the government. Sometimes you’ll be caught on the hop and a strike will happen because your company suddenly lays you off.

But you still have to quickly do your research, plan a series of actions, organise pickets and everything else. It’s more difficult to do it on the hop, but that’s why mass meetings of everyone involved in the strike are really important.

Nowadays we have WhatsApp chats and online Google forms to organise pickets and keep everyone in the loop. Those means of communication are vital additions to calling regular meetings.

Bosses often use injunctions to drag strikes out and hope that morale will fall. How many times have strikes started strong, faced resistance and then pickets slowly fall off until there’s just a token presence?

The boss sits out in his or her big mansion somewhere sipping cocktails by the pool while we have to march up and down on a picket all hours in all weathers. They know this and they know it zaps morale. Expect it. Don’t let them win.

That’s why you need regular actions to supplement picket duty and regular mass meetings of every worker involved so that there is “buy in” and strikers don’t drift off. One example: big lunchtime mass pickets where everyone turns up and breaks injunctions or blocks scabs.

In the case of the MTL dock strike we had a mass invasion of the yard by dozens of locals and a massive picket that blocked all entrances - we broke the 1990 Act but no one could say the union officially supported the action because it was “volunteers” joining the strikers.

These supplementary tactics don’t replace the need for constant pressure on your union to call out other workers in support of you. That’s a mistake workers sometimes make. The unions are so useless that workers rely on direct action outside of the union framework.

Sometimes you have to do that. But if you forced your union to call all their shop stewards out on a massive day of action to support you, like with Irish Ferries - that’d make for a much more effective strategy.

Try to force the bureaucracy to fight, never let them off the hook. They control massive numbers of workers and have huge resources, including full time staff. But when they won’t move don’t be afraid to use supplementary tactics.

Everything that happens needs to be communicated clearly to every striker. Don’t let the union do anything behind the scenes without the approval of your mass meeting. Being in the dark will weaken your morale.

If a union official wants to address the mass meeting with a call to give in - or they bring in a lawyer to frighten you with legal terms and the prospect of fines - then you have to maintain morale by bringing in someone to counter that.

Let them address the meeting but say you’re going to allow a socialist trade union militant to give a counter point of view and then the meeting will vote by a show of hands which policy the majority want to act on.

In the 4th week of the October 2019 General Motors strike in the USA some workers were starting to lose morale as GM stalled at the bargaining table. Many workers were relying on savings, with only $250 a week in strike pay, food bank donations, and sometimes needing to use community services and charities to pay bills.

Michael Gerndon says that the support of many other workers and working class community members kept him going in his darkest days:

“We had teachers and the trades showing up on our picket lines with pizzas and bagels and water,” says Gerndon. “Just random people not even part of an organisation just saying, you know what, we appreciate what you are doing, and we support you, here is food. You know, they would grab a sign and walk with us. It was an incredible morale booster,” says Gerndon. “I can’t stress enough what that meant to us.”

A union organiser added: “We are working to keep morale up, make sure everyone is communicating about what’s going on with rallies, with the [strike pay] distribution. If someone is starting to fail, we need to know that quick.”

The 3-year-old dog, Hamish, became the mascot for Ninewells Hospital porters’ strike and never missed a day of the industrial action that was in its 12th week. The 117 workers were wrongly graded and were due millions of pounds in back pay from Dundee Hospital.

62-year-old worker Margaret Robinson said: “Disputes like this bring out the best in people. I’ve got to know some of my colleagues, who I normally only saw briefly in the corridors, really well.” Never be frightened to go on strike because you are afraid other workers won’t support you, they will.

Hamish’s owner, 57-year-old, Allan Glen, worked as a porter for 20 years and said: “We have received over £30,000 in donations including from a pensioner couple, who drop £50 in our bucket at 
the same time every week. The public have been incredible and are fully behind what we are doing.”

Unite shop steward Paul Maher said: “Striking is all about keeping the faith and believing in what we are trying to achieve.” They united 3 pickets to boost their morale and show they were all part of a bigger fight.

I remember on the Debenhams picket, at the back of the Henry Street shop, a local old woman would come along every Saturday to check on the strikers. She’d bring her shopping trolley stocked up with biscuits for everyone. She even joked: “If yez are still here on Christmas I’ll bring yez a turkey!”

Working class people will support a strike and help maintain your morale if they know about the strike.

TWO: Elect a strike committee from the mass meeting.

You need to get organised and the best way to get workers behind the strike is to elect workers to a strike committee from the mass meeting. The strike committee can have someone in charge of picket rosters, someone in charge of collections, someone in charge of press releases.

You can elect strikers to deal with worker outreach and talking to other workers. I remember the Debenhams workers went around Dublin talking to other retail workers and were given donations of blankets, food and lots of biscuits!

The strike committee should be open to recall by a vote at the regular mass meetings in case the mood on the strike changes - for example if a shop steward is put on the strike committee because they were always the shop steward, but once on the committee they don’t have the stomach for the fight or are too close to the union leaders and that doesn’t reflect the mood of the rank and file. The mass meeting needs to have the ability to replace that strike committee member.

The strike committee should meet to discuss issues arising on the picket line. Don’t let anything fester. Long days and nights on a picket are tough on the nervous system and small disputes can turn into big problems if they aren’t nipped in the bud before they grow.

The strike committee role is both organisational and about maintaining morale. You have to stay on top of both to keep the show on the road. If someone doesn’t show up for picket duty you need to make sure they’re OK and still on board.

THREE: Get in touch with socialists and establish a “solidarity committee”.

You need to contact the socialists, like the Red Network, to form a solidarity committee that can help you to plan actions that the union don’t have the stomach for like breaking injunctions. We’re willing to break the law if you need it done.

My wife Madeleine Johansson was on the solidarity committee for the MTL dock strike and working with other left wingers like Joe Mooney from East Wall, workers and local Ringsend residents, we were able to help workers break injunctions and block the entrances to the company.

A solidarity committee can also raise funds. Morale breaks down when you’re broke and often workers have too much pride to ask anyone for money. But money is part and parcel of keeping morale up.

A petition of support with an option to donate can generate funds to supplement strike pay - which you must demand from your union. I remember outside the Thomas Cook sit-in dozens of workers were throwing notes into a collection bucket.

That money could help pay for posters, flyers for the local area and legal fees, if necessary. A solidarity committee can also help turn the strike into national news headlines by mobilising wider layers of workers, particularly when the union leaders refuse to budge.

Again, don’t give up on hammering your union to act. These actions are always a useful supplement to that. Unions have vast resources and it might be easy to take the path of least resistance and just accept the left’s help and let the union off the hook.

Organise a solidarity campaign and light a constant fire under your own union. You need to do both.

FOUR: Don’t be afraid to take a lead.

We sometimes think leadership is a bad thing because of how useless the union bureaucracy can be. But a strike needs a clear leadership, elected and accountable, that will strive to move things forward.

Momentum is important. You have to keep moving, keep up actions like mass pickets with supporters. Don’t take a back seat. Step up. If you feel uncomfortable with something the union is saying, question it.

Leadership is about making sure the strike is well organised and that morale is high. It’s everyone’s responsibility to step in and step up, not just the strike committee. That’s why you need to elect that committee and have the ability to change it.

Leaders emerge during struggle. Sometimes workers flourish when tested, while others melt under pressure. Don’t be afraid to step up if you feel things aren’t going the way they should.

FIVE: Demand shop stewards lists from your union.

If your union won’t mobilise wider union members to support you, then take the initiative and demand lists from head office so you can contact them directly. Tell the union you need the lists for a collection or to organise a petition of solidarity.

But once you have those contacts convince them to come support you, join the picket unofficially, do a collection in their workplace and be ready to answer your call when you need to break an injunction or defy the Guards.

Your head office will be reluctant to hand these contacts over. Demand it. Take a vote on it in the presence of all workers and tell the union it’s mandated by all the strikers and you as a strike committee member have to answer to other workers. You’ve no choice.

SIX: Be willing to break the law and organise supporters who are willing to help.

The 1990 Industrial Relations Act is a chain around the hands and feet of workers. It outlaws secondary pickets, blocking scabs and real effective class trade union action. You need to break the law to win. That’s a fact. It’s a hard fact, but it’s the truth.

When Debenhams workers in Limerick lay down in front of scab trucks coming to take stock, they broke the law. But they did it with so many workers and supporters that they weren’t arrested for breaking the law.

There were dozens of Guards there but the workers still got away with breaking the law because of numbers. You can be clever about how you break the law - call actions without your official union placards, get supporters to undertake actions or use solidarity “protests” as effective cover for blocking of the site or workplace.

We used solidarity protests at Greyhound to block the gates and stop scabs and the state was forced to call in riot cops - which they were reluctant to use. It’s days of action like that that scare bosses back to the negotiation table.

SEVEN: Don’t trust your union leaders - elect someone to oversee negotiations.

It’s important to remember when you strike. The union leaders want to return to a cosy relationship with your boss, no matter how bitter the dispute. That often puts them at odds with the interests of rank-and-file workers.

You can’t trust them. I remember on the Greyhound strike there were two mass meetings at the gate one day - on one side we were trying to encourage workers to defy the injunctions and block the gates. Shortly after, around the corner, just out of view, a union organiser was scaring workers into obeying the law.

When it came down to it, the union official was interested in demoralising the workers and keeping everything legal, while us socialists were interested in actually winning the strike, whatever it took - and that meant being open and honest about the law.

EIGHT: Use emotion to win the public over – then the courts can’t act against you.

When 100,000 took to the streets over Irish Ferries how could the government do anything other than promise change? They often don’t deliver, but mass protest changes the context and puts limits on what they can or can’t get away with.

The same goes for any strike. You need to personalise the strike and get your message out about how you’re fighting for your family, your community, other workers. Personalise the message, make it emotional.

People don’t respond to cold stats unless they’re packaged in personalised stories. The courts couldn’t jail the Thomas Cook workers, even though they defied the law, because it was in the wake of the bank bailout and it was too politically sensitive to jail workers.

Headlines carried the story of a pregnant worker being carried out of the sit-in and taken off to court. That was too provocative a story for the state to really make an example of those workers.

Mobilise wider layers of workers to support you, win them over with emotive messaging from the picket line. Use anything you can- your family, your kids, your personal life story. I know that might feel uncomfortable - but the bosses will stop at nothing to demonise you.

If you don’t counter that, you’ll lose support and lose the strike. Humanise the strikers. Tell your story. Get it out to other workers.

NINE: Don’t trust the cops! Ever!

The Guards aren’t there to help you. The local cop on the beat might drop over to your picket and ask how you’re all getting on and even bring you tea and coffee. But the same Guard will get the order to remove you and will act on it. That’s their job.

I’ve seen the Guards drag occupying workers out of a shop in the middle of the night after shattering the glass door with a battering ram. They dragged Debenhams workers off their picket lines.

I’ve seen this dozens of times and on each occassion workers thought the Guards would never do that to them. Sure, most workers have never been in a police station and have never been up in court. That’s scary for most workers. Surely a striker can’t be treated like a criminal?

But they do treat us as criminals. All the time. You can’t bullshit workers. The cops are on the other side, the bosses’ side. They are a special caste in the employ of the state that act in the interests of the bosses. On the Debenhams strike the Guards acted as the armed wing of liquidator KPMG.

As socialist Ruth Coppinger tweeted during the strike:

“Gardai deployed around 4am to break up picket at Blanchardstown #Debenhams & allow 4 trucks remove stock in a level 5 lockdown. Women/ men, including myself, were carried off by about 25 gardai. Opted not to use injunction but to physically haul us off & assist strike breaking.”

We can’t just re-learn some of those lessons in the heat of battle and then the next group of workers to come along doesn’t know them and we start from scratch. It weakens us.

Harry DeBoer wrote a pamphlet in 1987 to inspire a new generation of trade union activists with the militant traditions of US labour’s past. As a young man he worked in the Minneapolis coal yards and became caught up and radicalised in the Minneapolis ‘teamster rebellion’ of 1934.

He said: “Some unions, fearful of strikes, have resorted to alternative tactics such as public pressure campaigns. Some union leaders have proposed such tactics as a substitute for strikes. But while public pressure campaigns can help, if the employer knows that the union is not prepared to strike, such campaigns have much less chance of success. The employer will squeeze the union dry if he knows the union is not going to strike.”

“The 1934 truck drivers strike in Minneapolis was a model of how to fight and win. We brought truck traffic to a standstill in the city, we drove the scabs off the street and we won a decisive victory. We gained union recognition, won our first contract and came away with wage increases and improved conditions.”

How did they win? He continues:

“There is only one way to win a strike: Shut the operation down. If it is a factory or other business, it cannot operate. If it is a transportation industry, it cannot move. A strike means all work must stop. It means that supervisors cannot be permitted to keep things going. It means scabs must be prevented from taking over the workers’ jobs. Today, a strike cannot be won with a handful of pickets. It requires mass action in the street.”

The 1934 Minneapolis truckers strike was, in reality, three strikes: the coal drivers strike in February, a broader strike in May, and a resumption of the strike in July, which finally achieved victory.

In the coal drivers’ strike, they didn’t have enough pickets at the beginning to successfully close all the yards. They organised what became known as “cruising pickets”. They would picket a gate, and let some trucks go through that were operating out of the coal yards so police would think the trucks were home free.

They’d let the trucks get two or three blocks from the yard, drive up in cars, force the trucks to stop and just pour the coal on the street! It was a bitterly cold winter and businesses needed coal. The companies caved and they won.

They had chosen the timing of the strike well and were willing to do whatever it took to shut down scabs and stop the company, even employing innovative militant tactics like the “cruising pickets”.

In the May strike, the police recruited deputies and even handed them clubs to drive strikers off the street by force. In one incident, some pickets were ambushed and battered. The strikers mobilised local workers and drove the deputies off the streets.

In the July strike, which began after the companies reneged on their agreement with the union, the police opened fire on unarmed strikers. Two workers were killed and nearly 60 strikers were wounded, many of them shot in the back.

This brutal attack backfired. Instead of weakening the union, it strengthened the workers’ resolve, and drew even more public support. Finally, in August 1934, the company accepted a settlement, a giant victory for the unions. The lessons they learned still apply:

“What workers learned in the 1930s was that standing together in large numbers, they could beat back the union busters and win the necessary wage increases and improved conditions. Fifty years later that still applies.

“Workers today must take a militant stance in order to achieve success. Token picket lines are insufficient. Unions must organize mass picketing with hundreds or thousands of workers to stop any possibility of scabbing.”

What about injunctions and the courts? What about the 1990 Industrial Relations Act? The old union man replies:

“In 1934 we papered the wall with injunctions. The employer can always find some anti-union judge to sign a piece of paper. But strikes come down to a relationship of forces. If our forces are bigger and more powerful than theirs, we will win.”

Above all he encouraged striking workers to “think big” to win:

“Think big. Hold one or more mass rallies before the strike deadline with prominent labor speakers, using well-made leaflets and posters. Invite all the labor unions, not just your own. Be conscious of all aspects. Be sure that women and minorities play a big role.

In some of our labor organizations in the 1930s, we sent organizers in among the unemployed and organized them as unemployed contingents of our union to join us on the picket lines. That should be done today. If the unemployed are organized on our side, it is far harder for the boss to use them as scabs.”

We also need to know what we’re fighting for. Union members and strikers need to see themselves not just as the best fighters for the immediate needs of workers, but as champions of socialism.

“The union must be the champion of the underdog, the poor and the suffering. We must be concerned with single-parent families, the child who does not have enough to eat, the disabled, the victims of discrimination. We must speak out for the elderly, many of whom cannot eke out a living on their small pensions and social security.

“Fighting for them, we can restore the union to greatness. Their cause becomes our cause when we stand up for decent wages and conditions for all.”