Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
Civics 101 host Hannah McCarthy joins Julia to talk about labor strikes, what protections workers have and the changing relationship between employers and strikers.
Transcript
So, Hannah, what is a strike and what does it take to go on one?
So very simply, Julia, a strike is when workers [or] employees refuse to work until they get what they are asking for. So they're withholding their labor—the thing that they were hired to do and are getting paid to do—until the thing they want from their employers is granted to them.
Reasons for a strike include, getting your employer to recognize your union, unsafe working conditions that your employer is not addressing, collectively asking for higher pay or better benefits and not receiving them, requesting better shift scheduling or hours and not receiving them.
And if we're talking about violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which provides for safe working conditions, fair wages, protection from things like discrimination, your employer is also legally compelled to follow the law and provide those safe conditions for you.
So what makes a strike legal and what makes it illegal?
I'm going to start with the illegal here because employers are pretty well protected when it comes to strikes. It is illegal to engage in violence or destruction while striking. It's illegal to prevent people from entering or leaving a workplace during a strike. [It’s] illegal to stage a sit-down, meaning you show up to work and just sit there not working. That is because your workplace is your employer's property. It's illegal to stage a slowdown, meaning you do your work, but very slowly. It is, depending on the state and the situation, illegal to stage a sickout meaning tons of people call in sick. It is also illegal to force your employer to stop doing business with another organization.
And then Julia, there's who is allowed to strike. About 80% of public sector workers — so that's federal employees, state employees— they are legally prohibited from striking. That doesn't necessarily stop them from striking, but it often means something like a massive fine for every day they are on an illegal strike. You may also have a no-strike provision in your union contract, meaning you won't refuse to work regardless of negotiation issues. The huge exceptions, even to that provision, are unsafe working conditions, unfair labor practices, violations of an existing contract.
What makes a strike legal is significantly limited to what we were talking about earlier when it comes to employees actually deciding to stage a strike.
Hannah, how has the way employers respond to strikes changed over time. Where are we today?
So very broadly, until 1937, there was a very real risk you could be killed for either unionizing or striking. Employers would bring in the police. The president might call in the military. So in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was passed to protect the right to organize and strike. But it wasn't until 1937 when a steelworker march resulted in ten deaths [and] dozens of injuries at the hands of the police that Americans started to pay attention.
Then a combination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, a shift in the courts, World War II, and more employers allowing for unions as long as workers kept working through the war, all led to safer conditions for unionized employees. Protections feel real for people who strike.
And then the 1960s brings the perceived threat of communism that makes organized labor a dirty word in the United States. Then the big one, the 1980s, Ronald Reagan fires air traffic control employees who are on strike to try to get better working conditions. He's totally within his rights to do so, but what that did was project to employers that they didn't have to play so nice with unions. Now we have incredibly wealthy corporations who find ways to skirt the law, who do not blink at paying massive fines when they violate the National Labor Relations Act.
So right now we are at a point wherein you do have rights. You do have protections, especially if you're in the private sector. But strikes are the nuclear option. They’re a risk. Retaliation is both illegal and does happen. So if employees are striking, it probably means they are at the end of their rope in terms of securing what they believe to be fair and safe employment.
