Workers who follow news stories about labor relations have probably noticed a disturbing trend in recent years. In workplace after workplace, when the union’s contract has expired and negotiations for a new contract are going nowhere fast, the union “leaders” call for a strike authorization vote, not an actual strike vote. The workers overwhelmingly vote in favor of it, but mysteriously, no strike ever materializes. When asked, the union officials explain that the results of the vote will be used as a tool to extract concessions from management in the ongoing negotiations.

The bargaining team then returns from the latest round of talks with the sad news that despite the “threat” posed by the strike authorization vote, management’s offer has not improved very much, if at all. “This is the best we could get,” say the union bureaucrats who are handling the negotiations. “You’d better approve it, because there’s nothing more we can do.” Sometimes, if the negotiations drag on long enough, the union calls for a token walkout, lasting a few days at most. Despite the overwhelming sentiment of the workers, as expressed in the strike authorization vote, at no point in this process do the “leaders” even prepare for a serious strike, much less actually call one. No wonder workers have lost faith in the ability of what are supposed to be “their” unions to defend them against the bosses’ attacks!

The measures taken by bourgeois politicians to force California public workers to bear the brunt of the burden of budget crisis have precipitated several overwhelming strike authorization votes – none of which has been followed by an actual strike. The results for workers have been predictable: ratification by sold-out BART workers of a contract they all knew was a defeat; imposition on state employees of mandatory furloughs amounting to a 15% pay cut, with no meaningful fightback by their unions (SEIU Local 1000, CAPS, PEGS, AFSCME, IUOE Local 39); and a prolonged stalemate in the negotiations between the United Teachers of Richmond and the West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD).

In July 2009, after the teachers in the WCCUSD had been working without a contract for about a year, the district imposed a contract that required the teachers to pay for their dependents’ health coverage. In August, the teachers overwhelmingly approved a strike authoritzation vote. During the fall, while the WCCUSD spent thousands of dollars to recruit and train prospective scabs, the union – despite the best efforts of its progressive rank-and-file caucus – did nothing whatsoever to prepare for a strike. Finally, in early November, the UTR presented its members with a tentative contract that, among other things, required teachers to pay for a portion of their health insurance for the first time, without any offsetting salary increase; raised class sizes; instituted furlough days in the second and third years of the contract’s duration, effectively cutting salaries by 2.5%; and cut training time for some teachers, while imposing additional furlough days for the other teachers and staff.

Understandably concerned at how the teachers would react to this outrage, the UTR presented them with a ratification ballot that offered only two options: “Yes, I vote to ratify the tentative agreement,” or “No, I vote to go on strike.” After an initial vote count indicated that the agreement had been ratified by a nine-vote margin, the rank-and-file succeeded in pressuring the executive board for a recount. The revised count revealed that the contract had actually been rejected by a vote of 705 to 671 – almost four times the margin in the original tally, and in the opposite direction.

Stunningly, the UTR president reacted by saying that, “I’m not sure what our choices are” – as if the UTR membership had not already told her exactly what it believed to be the appropriate course of action. She did not explain was why the UTR had not taken militant action to confront the abysmal budget situation in California and try to change it. Instead of joining with other public education workers, as well as other public and private workers under attack, to take to the streets and demand adequate funding for our children’s education instead of Wall Street bailouts and wars, the UTR leadership tried to force a contract down its members’ throats. Finally, after another round of “negotiations,” the workers were forced to accept a contract that increased class sizes and imposed furlough days – a loss for both teachers and students.

Things are not much different – and no better – in the private sector. A typical example  transpired between the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and AT&T earlier in 2009. Despite the union members’ 88% approval of a strike authorization vote earlier in the year, no strikes ensued. Instead, the union encouraged rank-and-filers and their supporters to engage in symbolic protests such as wearing red on Thursdays as a symbol of solidarity, and to sign petitions and seek support from their representatives in Congress. In the end, bargaining unit after bargaining unit reached agreements with management that were reluctantly ratified by the membership after they were told by “their” negotiating teams that this was the best they could do.

Another tactic being employed by union bureaucrats is to substitute symbolic short-term walkouts for real strikes. In late October 2009, the hotel workers represented by Unite HERE Local 2 in San Francisco voted overwhelmingly, by 92%, to authorize a strike. The union, however, is staging only brief walkouts at individual hotels (three days at the Grand Hyatt, then three days at the Palace, and so on). What the union has not told the workers is that this tactic is doomed to failure. The struck hotels will simply transfer their guests to other hotels for the brief duration of the strike. The other hotels, in turn, will return the favor when it is their workers’ turn to walk out. If only one hotel at a time is closed, even visitors who honor picket lines have little reason to stay away from San Francisco. As a result, in the long run the hotels will lose little or no revenue. In short, the rolling walkout tactic gives the hotels no meaningful incentive to sweeten their contract offer. As a New York Times report succinctly put it: “Authorizing the union to strike … is very different from actually striking. … Hotel managers said the outcome of the strike vote will not affect their negotiating strategy.”

It should be clear just from these few examples that a strike authorization vote, even when coupled with a brief walkout, is not an effective negotiating tactic. This is especially true when the bosses know that there is little or no chance that the union bureaucrats will actually follow through with their empty threat and conduct a genuine, militant, all-out strike. So why do the bureaucrats keep holding these useless strike authorization votes? What is going on here?

Not only has overall union membership declined, but there has also been a change in what kinds of jobs union members do. The percentage of union workers in manufacturing has declined sharply, while the fraction of union workers who hold public sector (government) jobs has risen from just over a third in 1983 to nearly half today. In the public sector, strikes are sometimes illegal, and even where they are permitted, they are less likely to draw public sympathy and support, because of the widespread misconception that public workers are overpaid and underworked, and because public worker strikes, such as those by transit workers or teachers, are more likely than manufacturing strikes to result in direct inconvenience or even hardship to the community – a sentiment that is fueled by negative news coverage in the so-called “mainstream” media. These obstacles can be overcome, but only by hard work, creativity, and boldness – not attributes commonly associated with union bureaucrats, and for good reason.

Combine this trend with the recent economic meltdown, and the result is that major work stoppages dropped 95 percent in 2009 compared with 2008, and are at their lowest level since the government began keeping a tally in the 1940s. As the AFL-CIO’s director of collective bargaining was quoted as saying in November 2009, “I think you can say that everybody’s anxious to keep labor peace right now with the economy being where it is and employment where it is.”

This could not be more wrongheaded. As the experience of workers in the 1930s demonstrates, economic hard times are precisely when workers need – and are motivated – to fight hardest in order to avoid being victimized and forced to bear the entire burden. The enormous margins by which the strike authorization votes are passing is a clear signal that workers are angry, and want to fight back. But the union bureaucrats, acting as de facto agents of the bosses and Wall Street, have no perspective to win. All they can think about is maintaining “labor peace” so they can avoid waging the hard, sometimes dangerous militant workers’ struggle that presents our only hope of victory. Hence the strike authorization vote tactic, which allows the bureaucrats to save face by creating the illusion that they are responding to the membership’s anger and militance, while at the same time defusing that anger and sidetracking it into useless symbolic actions like wearing union colors, signing petitions, or at the most, staging short-term walkouts.

A real strike is not an empty threat; it is an actual walkout that totally stops the employer from conducting business. And experience shows that only real strikes produce results. What stands in the way? Employers often respond to strike votes by threatening to replace the striking workers with temporary or even permanent scabs, or to close down the business or move it overseas. As already mentioned, workers – especially those in the public sector – also face media-fueled hostility and accusations of greed and selfishness when they threaten to strike. And in difficult economic times, workers may be reluctant to face the loss of income that will come from walking off the job.

In order to overcome these obstacles, workers need to prepare in advance for a strike, and if possible, force their union to use its resources to help them do so. For example, public hostility can be countered by mobilizing an effective campaign to explain the facts to the community, and point out that a maintaining a strong labor movement helps all working people fight back against the bosses’ attacks on their wages, benefits, and standard of living. In some cases, workers can also offer to serve the public in other ways while the strike is in progress. For example, striking teachers can work with the community to set up strike schools and day care centers so that working parents will have a safe place to take their children and continue their education while the schools are closed.

To help striking workers survive financially, workers should band together in advance of the strike to take measures to protect themselves. Such measures could include forcing their union to amass a meaningful strike benefits fund instead of using members’ dues for other purposes. Community solidarity can be mobilized to organize strike kitchens, food pantries, and other resources to help striking workers feed themselves and their families.

When the bosses say that they cannot come up with a better contract offer because the money simply is not there, workers in the private sector should demand that the company open its books and let the workers’ representatives determine for themselves how much the company is taking in, and where the money is going. Public sector workers who are asked to “share the pain” should demand that the money used to bail out Wall Street bankers and bomb civilian women and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan be used instead to pay government workers decent wages to deliver public services.

Finally, when the bosses try to bring in scabs so that they can continue to operate during a strike, workers must organize effective, militant picket lines to keep the scabs out. If a private sector company tries to lock out the workers or close down the plant, workers should occupy the plant until either their demands are met, or the plant is turned over to them to run, without compensation to the stockholders.

Tactics such as these are what built the labor movement from the late 19th Century through the 1930s, making it strong enough to force the bosses to share the benefits of the post-World War II economic boom with US workers, raising their standard of living to the highest in the world. In the intervening years, workers have forgotten the lessons learned during those early years of struggle, and the unions have degenerated from fighting organs of workers’ defense to bloated, parasitic bureaucracies. Today, many workers see unions as doing little more than funneling their dues money to the bureaucrats’ own inflated salaries, and then soliciting even more of their money for PAC contributions, which the union bosses then hand over to political candidates, usually Democrats, who do nothing, once elected, to fight for workers’ rights.

The lessons of the militant labor union struggles of the prewar era must be relearned, and soon. If the union officials will not lead such struggles, they must be replaced by democratically elected workers’ councils, populated by rank-and-filers and committed to take the struggle for their members’ rights as far as it needs to go.

 Note: An expanded version of this article will be published shortly in the premiere issue of Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism's journal, International Trotskyist, which will be posted on our website in PDF format.