does this really help anyone ?????

   read this and tell me u got an insight ...





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Three years ago in Boston, downtown streets and office
buildings were the scene of inspiring immigrant worker
activism during an unprecedented strike by local
janitors.  Their walk-out was backed by other union
members, community activists, students and professors,
public officials, religious leaders, and even a few
"socially-minded" businessmen.  The janitors had long
been invisible, mistreated by management and, until
recently, ignored by their own SEIU local union. Simply
by making their strike such a popular social cause,
they achieved what many regarded as a major victory.

On the same day that the janitors' dispute was settled,
a much larger strike -- at Overnite Transportation --
ended quite differently in 2002.   Faced with mounting
legal setbacks and dwindling picket line support, the
Teamsters were forced to call off their nationwide
walk-out against America's leading non-union trucker.
The four thousand Overnite workers involved were not
able to win a first contract.  And, since their three-
year strike was suspended, all have lost their
bargaining rights in a series of "decertification"
elections.

The contrast between these two struggles -- one hopeful
and high-profile, the other tragic and now-almost-
forgotten -- raises important questions about the state
of the strike and the future of labor in America.
Maintaining "strike capacity" is no less important than
shifting greater resources into organizing new members
-- and just as essential to union revitalization and
growth.  Unfortunately, developing new ways to walk out
and win has not been a big part of recent debates about
"changing to win."

Labor's strike effectiveness and organizational
strength have long been connected.  Throughout history,
work stoppages have been used for economic and
political purposes, to alter the balance of power
between labor and capital within single workplaces,
entire industries, or nationwide.  Strikes have won
shorter hours and safer conditions, through legislation
or contract negotiation.  They've fostered new forms of
worker organization -- like industrial unions -- that
were badly needed because of corporate restructuring
and the reorganization of production.  Strikes have
acted as incubators for class consciousness, rank-and-
file leadership development, and political activism. In
other countries, strikers have challenged -- and
changed -- governments that were dictatorial and
oppressive (plus union leadership no longer accountable
to the membership).

In some nations -- like Korea, South Africa, France,
and Spain -- where strike action helped democratize
society, general strikes are still being used for mass
mobilization and protest.  In recent years, millions of
Europeans have participated in nationwide work
stoppages over public-sector budget cuts, labor law
revisions, or pension plan changes sought by
conservative governments.  In Brazil, voters have even
chosen a one-time strike leader, Luis Inacio ("Lula")
da Silva, to serve as president of their country.

In America, meanwhile, "major" work stoppages have
become a statistical blip on the radar screen of
industrial relations.  As the recent experience of
transit workers in New York City and mechanics at
Northwest Airlines has shown, striking continues to be
a high-stakes venture as well. It involves considerable
legal and financial risks, particularly in the public
sector, where walk-outs are severely restricted and, as
in New York, subject to draconian penalties.  Since
1992, walk-outs by 1,000 workers or more have averaged
less than 40 annually.  In 2003, there were only 14,
with just 129,000 union members participating.  In
contrast, at the peak of labor's post-World War II
strike wave in 1952, there were 470 major strikes,
affecting nearly three million workers nationwide.
Robert M. Schwartz Robert M. Schwartz

As strike activity continues to decline in the U.S.,
the pool of union members and leaders with actual
strike experience shrinks as well.  That's why union
activists need to analyze, collectively and
individually, their strike victories and defeats --
summing up and sharing the lessons of these battles so
they can become the basis for future success, rather
than a reoccurring pattern of failure.  Attorney Bob
Schwartz's new book, Strikes, Picketing, and Inside
Campaigns: A Legal Guide for Unions, makes a valuable
contribution to this educational process.  It's the
latest in a series of easy-to-read guides from Work
Rights Press, which also publishes the author's best-
seller, The Legal Rights of Union Stewards.  As in his
previous books, Schwartz provides useful sample
letters, legal notices, and answers to commonly-asked
questions -- in this case, about the many different
types of union picketing and strike activity.  There
are also relevant case citations, tracking the
development of labor law in this area over the past 25
years.

Beginning with the PATCO disaster in 1981, when
thousands of striking air traffic controllers were
fired and replaced, the U.S. labor movement entered a
dark decade of lost strikes and lock-outs.  Many anti-
concession battles ended badly -- at Phelps-Dodge,
Greyhound, Hormel, Eastern, Continental Airlines,
International Paper, and other firms.  The lost-strike
trend discouraged many unions from using labor's
traditional weapon.  Among those that did, set-backs
continued into the mid-90s, at firms like Caterpillar,
Bridgestone/Firestone, and A. E. Staley, whose Decatur,
Illinois plants became part of single strike-bound "war
zone" in 1994.

Even during this difficult period for strikers, there
were contract campaigns that bucked the tide of
concession bargaining -- and Schwartz's book discusses
some of the tactics and strategies they used.  In 1989,
for example, sixty thousand members of the
Communications Workers of America and International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers waged an effective 4-
month strike in New York and New England over
threatened medical benefit cuts at NYNEX.  Telephone
workers made extensive use of the mobile picketing
tactics and targeted top officials of the company and
their allies in places where they least expected it.
(See Chapter 8 of Strikes, Picketing and Inside
Campaigns, entitled "Follow That Truck," and Chapter 6,
"Making It Personal.")

At the same time, the United Mine Workers succeeded in
making their 12-month walk-out against Pittston -- in
geographically isolated Appalachian mountain
communities -- into a national labor cause.  The union
mobilized its members for sympathy strikes at other
companies, linked arms with Jesse Jackson, used civil
disobedience tactics, staged the first plant occupation
since the 1930s, and created an encampment in southwest
Virginia (Camp Solidarity) that hosted strike
supporters from around the country.  Even an avalanche
of injunctions, fines, and damage suits did not deter
the miners and their families.

West Virginia aluminum workers, locked out by
Ravenswood, then applied many of the lessons of the
Pittston strike in a wide-ranging corporate campaign
orchestrated by the United Steel Workers of America.
The USWA leveraged international union connections to
put mounting pressure on key financial institutions and
investors who were tied to the employer.  (See Chapter
5 of Schwartz on finding the pressure points of
"integrated businesses," including their "foreign
connections.")  Despite massive hiring of replacement
workers and other union-busting measures, Ravenswood
was finally forced to end its lock-out and settle with
the USWA.  Since that victory, the ILWU and Bay Area
hotel workers have both turned the table on offensive
lock-outs by employer associations trying to thwart
shop floor action or a selective strike.  (Consumer-
oriented picketing -- and boycotts like the one HERE
Local 2 has pursued since its 51-day lock-out in San
Francisco -- are discussed in several chapters,
including one entitled, "Buyer Beware.")

In 1997, the contract strike made its biggest comeback
in recent years with the now-famous walk-out by 190,000
United Parcel Service workers.  The backing of Teamster
drivers has long been appreciated by other strikers. As
Schwartz notes (in Chapter 9, "Honor Thy Line"), IBT
contract language has been a boon to other unions who
count on Teamster drivers to respect their picket
lines.  In 1997, it was time for the rest of labor to
return the favor, which unions did in a tremendous
outpouring of support for UPS drivers and package
handlers.

How the Teamsters framed their dispute with UPS was a
critical factor in gaining broader public sympathy. The
main strike objective was creating more full-time job
opportunities -- to thwart management's strategy of
converting the UPS workforce into a largely part-time
one.  "Part-Time America Doesn't Work!" the Teamsters
proclaimed, in a successful effort to invest their
contract fight with larger social meaning.  The UPS
strike not only beat back the company's concession
demands and made job security gains.  It became a
rallying point for everyone concerned about the
societal impact of part-timing, with its accompanying
erosion of job-based benefits.

Unions engaged in more recent struggles against health
care cost-shifting have tried to borrow from the
Teamsters' playbook at UPS -- by linking their strikes
to the movement for health care reform.  When 18,000
General Electric workers staged a 2-day nationwide
walk-out in 2003, to protest medical plan changes, many
locals organized around the slogan, "Health Care for
All, Not Health Cuts at GE!"  Strike-related rallies
and publicity emphasized the common bond between union
and non-union, insured and uninsured workers.  (The
UFCW's 2003-2004 strike and lock-out, involving
thousands of grocery workers in southern California,
was  less successful in making the connection between
management demands for benefit cuts and the need for
universal medical coverage.)

As Schwartz notes, some unions are now striking with
greater tactical flexibility than before, experimenting
with limited-duration walkouts and inside campaigns to
reduce the risk and cost of protracted shut-downs. HERE
members at Yale University have repeatedly demonstrated
creativity -- and unusual solidarity between separate
white-collar and blue-collar units -- during their
campus-based bargaining battles.  In 2003, Yale workers
skirmished effectively with the university for the
ninth time in the last thirty-five years. Faced with
aggressive picketing, mass rallies, and strike-related
arrests, Yale sued for peace in the form of a long-term
contract settlement.

In similar fashion, thousands of telephone workers in
the northeast entered regional bargaining with Verizon
in 2003 with a record of five strikes in the previous
two decades -- and a deeply-ingrained "no contract, no
work" tradition.  Confronted with unprecedented strike
contingency planning by management, members of CWA and
IBEW shifted gears, to throw their corporate adversary
off balance.  For more than a month, they worked
without a contract (engaging in all the "job wobbling"
activities described by Schwartz in Chapter 2, "No
Contract -- No Peace.").  Verizon incurred enormous
strike-preparation costs, without getting the
opportunity to replace its existing workforce with an
army of scabs, as planned.  The result was a new
contract that preserved job security guarantees, plus
fully-paid medical coverage for workers and retirees.
(In 2004, a four-day national "warning strike" by
100,000 workers at SBC Communications -- some of whom
had not been on strike in twenty years -- produced
similar results, while avoiding the risk of an open-
ended walk-out.)

"Job wobbling" -- in the form of work-to-rule and other
"inside tactics" -- has also figured prominently in
recent rank-and-file discussions about how to respond
to the deep wage and benefits cuts demanded by Delphi
Corp., the nation's largest auto parts supplier.  Both
UAW leaders and some dissidents seem to have endorsed
the work slow-down approach -- in a situation where
walking out might actually facilitate the company's
downsizing and plant-shutdown plans.

Regardless of what form worker militancy takes, it
helps to have adequate financial backing for strikes
and contract campaigns.  One bottom-line requirement is
a big national strike fund, with the flexibility to pay
out fixed weekly benefits (of at least $200 to $300 per
week) -- either for strikers or for the disciplinary
casualties of concerted in-plant activity.  Some unions
like CWA (which has a $360 million "Member Relief
Fund") also maintain a separate source of contract
campaign funding -- for use by workers who are
prohibited by law from striking and for the payment of
strikers' medical expenses and/or COBRA premiums.  (See
Chapter 10 of Schwartz, entitled "Benefit Daze," for
much valuable advice about COBRA coverage, unemployment
claims, and related issues.)

Creativity, careful planning, and membership
involvement are essential to success -- whether a union
chooses to stop work or pursue a non-strike strategy. A
big part of the internal planning process is sizing up
the strengths and weaknesses of management's position
-- and your own.  Before (rather than after) walking
out, union members need to line up labor and community
support through solidarity coalitions like Jobs with
Justice or local central labor councils. Otherwise,
there is great danger that a small group of workers --
and sometimes even a large one -- will end up on picket
lines isolated, frustrated, and impoverished.

Bob Schwartz's new book is a unique tool to use in
membership education, leadership training, and union
strategy discussions about what to do when a contract
expires.  In situations where striking is a necessary
and viable worker response, Schwartz's book outlines
what it takes to make a walk-out effective, while
helping unions anticipate likely employer counter-
measures at the bargaining table, in court, and at the
NLRB.  The author has pulled together an enormous
amount of material that has not been readily accessible
to non-lawyers in the past -- even to activists relying
on the official strike manuals of the few unions that
have them.  Union members who fail to consult
Schwartz's book while preparing for a contract fight
will not be as ready as they could be to deal with the
many legal and organizational problems that may arise.
Any union bargaining team that doesn't have a copy of
Strikes, Picketing and Inside Campaigns is missing out
on information and advice that will make the hard job
of winning good contracts just a little bit easier