‘No One Can Strike Now’ Because of So Many Scabs

Labor is passing away, says the author, and has become like a weakened animal or the Italian army in 1918. What does that mean to the United States? An excerpt.

I rarely hear of strikes now, except those that end in disaster. No union I have represented in Chicago has gone on strike in 10 years, and I wonder if any ever will. Until the Eastern Airlines and Pittston strikes in 1989, I thought I might never see a strike again.

Strikes in the United States in 1988 fell to their lowest level in four decades. In 1972, no great year for strikes, there were 443. In 1989, there were just 43--about the same as the number of prison riots.

One day I saw my friend Dan, who’s a lawyer at the United Mineworkers. As labor lawyers, we sit and gasp in horror that no union’s on a strike. Our friends in other professions do not quite see the Orwellian horror of this.

“No strikes? What’s so bad about that?”

The question is so stupid I can hardly deal with it.

Dan and I, being labor lawyers, are different. We’re 40 years old, but we “remember” the 1930s. That was our formative experience: I’ve almost forgotten the ‘60s. I guess we “remember” the 1930s the way even a few years ago little Dondi in the comics could still “remember” World War II.

I’d hoped at the Mineworkers that at least they were still going on strike. “Dan,” I said, “you ever have a strike now?”

He shook his head. “Only in eastern Kentucky.”

That didn’t count. A few scattered miners, up in the hills--like Japanese soldiers who didn’t know the war was over.

“Nowhere else?” I said.

He shook his head. “It’s a bad time,” he said softly.

Most people in labor say it that way, softly, mantra-like, “It’s a bad time.” As if one day it will not be a bad time. But out here, in Chicago, I don’t see how there’ll ever be a “good time” again.

Out here, organized labor is busted. It’s out of the game. Even when the economy in the Midwest came back in the late ‘80s, labor was still flat on its back. No local out here, it seems, can pull off a strike.

No one can strike now because there have never been more scabs. The scabs now are not just the unemployed, but those with jobs, too--people getting $3.75 an hour frying burgers, people who can triple their wages by helping to break a strike. In the old days, if unemployment was 5%, there would be strikes all over a “union” town like Chicago. But now, I hear less about strike than about “lockouts”--when the employer locks out the union after the contract expires, and dares it to strike.

When some people talk about labor’s decline, they mention the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the political climate, etc., but PATCO as a cause pales next to Reaganomics. Reaganomics created a pool of scabs as big as Lake Michigan. The United States in the ‘80s lost one out of three jobs in heavy industry, especially the old high-wage industries like steel and machinery. Reaganomics put these industries in a double bind: the high dollar made foreign imports cheaper and high interest rates made it harder to borrow money for modernization.

It was the Midwest, labor’s stronghold, that really suffered: It was demonic of the Reaganites to do all their wrecking in one place. It was like an earthquake here, for a few years, with a press blackout. The Midwest lost steel, machinery and other industry, while it also lost the big new dollars in defense spending, which went to the South, New England, California. I wanted to write letters to friends back East, get them to start a Marshall Plan, to send us a little money to rebuild the Midwest.

Now the wrecking is over, but in the post-Reagan economy, the scabs are still everywhere. The ex-steelworkers, for one thing, have not gone away. In the Chicago area alone, the union lost over 50,000 members in the 1980s. Under Jimmy Carter, they were union men, and under Ronald Reagan they became boys, such as bellboys or messenger boys running around the Loop, where I still see one or two of them, who seem lost now like Reagan himself, in some post-industrial second-childhood.

Some of them are still in . . . uh, “manufacturing.” They dip their hands in strange chemicals, for $5 an hour, with no health insurance. A few once made $15 an hour and worked for a company that had health insurance, pensions, etc. Back then they were “union.” Now they would scab.

Well, some would. It’s amazing how many don’t.

But there are many, many others, who were never in unions. Younger ones, kids.

We call them “scabs,” but they are just being realists. They read the Chicago Tribune looking for strikes as if they were want ads. In the old days, they wouldn’t scab because they’d hope one day to be in a union, too. But labor’s dying now, or it’s dead--better get what’s left. There’s no sense now to hold back, and to hope one day, like in the old days, to graduate “up.”

And sometimes people apologize. In the football players’ strike a few years ago, the scabs were interviewed on TV, and some even said that the players, the ones they were replacing, were their heroes. Hey, one said, good luck with your strike.

So the unemployment rate may be 5%. But for any union out on strike, it might as well be 50.

I remember Frank Lumpkin telling me about a “job” that paid $4 an hour.

“You call that a job? You call that employment ? Man, that’s unemployment .

The city is full of them, men with “jobs,” begging, praying, salivating for a strike.

As I write this, the Midwest is now regarded as one of the bright spots of the economy.

1991 by Thomas Geoghegan. Reprinted with permission from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

BOOK REVIEW: “Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back,” by Thomas Geoghegan, is reviewed on Page 1 of today’s Book Review section.