ARTICLES

Can the Service Sector Strike?

MAX FRASER

In the midst of the brutal heat wave that

hit the East Coast this past July, a group of
McDonalds workers in Washington Heights
decided theyd had enough. On July 18, just
as the temperature in Upper Manhattan was
approaching triple digits, the stores air-conditioning system began giving out. The AC had
been a perennial problem, so much so that the
staff had raised the issue with management
many times before, but the independent
franchisee who owned the store consistently
refused to pay for the necessary repairs.
This year was worse, though, and when the
temperature soared to 110 degrees in the
kitchen by 10:30 the next morning, Shelyz
Mendez, a twenty-year-old college student
from the Bronx, passed out from the heat and
was rushed to the hospital. An hour and a half
later, five of her coworkers walked off the job.
They spent the sweltering afternoon picketing
the restaurant with signs that read No AC, No
Peace and were soon joined in their sidewalk
protest by community allies and members of
the state assembly and city council.
In retrospect, the most remarkable thing
about this story may have been how unremarkable episodes like it are fast becoming.
Fast food work has long been synonymous
with bad working conditions and crummy
paybut beginning in the fall of 2012, it had
also become synonymous with widespread
labor unrest. That November around 200
New York City fast food workers at dozens
of McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King, and
Wendys restaurants joined a one-day strike to
protest low wages and employer intimidation.
Since then, a wave of fast food worker organizing had swept across the country, sparking
periodic protests in Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle,
and many points in between. Ten days after
she fainted from heat stroke, a rehydrated

Mendez would join her coworkers in a rally in

front of a McDonalds on Grand Concourse in
the Bronx, part of a nationwide one-day strike
that saw coordinated walkouts at more than
1,000 stores in over fifty cities.
For a labor movement that has struggled
to generate much national news since the
Wisconsin state capitol protests in 2011,
the actions of workers like Mendez and her
colleagues were suddenly getting noticed not
only in the usual places like Dissent but also
in Forbes, the Washington Post, and CNN. And it
was not only the unfamiliar sight of fast food
workers marching through the local drivethrough that made it a national story, but also
the unfamiliarity of the tactic these fry-guys
and burger-flippers were using: they were
striking! After all, who actually goes on strike
anymore?
In 1952 there were 470 separate strikes
involving 1,000 or more workers. All told,
nearly 3 million people600,000 steelworkers
alonestruck their jobs that year. But sixty
years later, in 2012, there were only nineteen
such strikes, involving a total of just 148,000
workers. The almost absolute disappearance
of the strike has been one of the signal accomplishments of the legislative and juridical
assault waged for the last half-century against
American unions, which has greatly curtailed
the potential effectiveness of the strike tactic
while significantly increasing the individual
and collective repercussions faced by striking
workers.
Organizers and labor historians agree that
the simultaneous decline in the frequency
of strikes and the overall strength and
membership of the American labor movement
is not a coincidence. And so it comes as
no surprise that the recent uprising in fast
foodand its corollaries at Walmart and
other low-wage service-sector employers
has been the source of much excitement in
labor circles. There has been ample evidence
W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 DI S S EN T 49

SERVICE SECTOR STRIKE?

in recent years of growing agitation within

the notoriously quiescent American working
classfrom Wisconsin, to Occupy, to the
annual May Day immigration actions. It is still

By mobilizing a militant minority, OUR

Walmart has already been able to press
the issue of Walmarts low pay and chronic
labor abuses in a new and more forceful
way.

premature to judge the long-term significance

of the one-day strikes. But already it is clear
that they have provided a shot in the arm,
and perhaps more, to a labor movement that
needed one.
Some unions and progressive organizations
are banking that a targeted focus on organizing low-wage employers like McDonalds
and Walmart could turn them into the General
Motors and U.S. Steel of the twenty-first
century, with the same broad effects of the
CIO organizing drives of the 1930s. Mary Kay
Henry, president of the Service Employees
International Union, has said the fast food
fight is about shifting the entire low-wage
economy. Even if it falls short of that,
managing to revive the use of the strike or
deliver a living-wage floor in rapidly growing
industries like fast food and retail, which
account for a distressingly large share of the
jobs created during our tepid recovery, would
critically improve labors fortunes. Might the
actions of Shelyz Mendez and her coworkers
point the way out of labors decades-long
swoon?

Answering that question begins with recognizing that, like many a good invention, the
novel tactics at the heart of these recent organizing efforts were born of necessity. As the
United Food and Commercial Workers know
well from their unsuccessful twenty-year fight
against Walmart, the challenge of bringing
the worlds largest corporation to heel is a

5 0 D ISSE N T W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

daunting one. The UFCWs Walmart campaign

has been a classic example of the union movements growing reliance on comprehensive
campaigns, a strategy of combining jobsite
and community organizing with various forms
of political, legal, and economic pressure to
compel an unwilling employer to recognize
and bargain with a group of workers. Though
there have been few private-sector organizing
successes in recent years, many of the most
notable ones, from SEIUs Justice for Janitors
campaign to UNITE HEREs Hotel Workers
Rising, have come as a result of highly
sophisticated and effective comprehensive
campaigns.
Comprehensive campaigns inevitably
require significant investments of material
and staffing resources and tend to play
out over a long timeframe; unions must
organize workers to adopt a one day longer
approach to outlasting recalcitrant employers
while bringing to bear successive waves of
outside leverage until they finally buckle.
In Walmarts case, the company has shown
no signs of buckling. And so in deciding to
bankroll and staff OUR Walmart, the independent non-union organization that has been
the driving force behind the rolling strikes
of the last couple years, the UFCW was also
conceding that, as Organizing Director Pat
ONeill put it, the old way of organizing that
we did didnt work.
Instead, OUR Walmart has borrowed a
page out of an even older playbook. Minority
unionism, the practice of providing representation to groups of workers without requiring
them to first demonstrate an overall pro-union
majority at their jobsite or employer, was a
common practice from the turn of the twentieth century through the organizing breakthroughs of the CIO era. Both the United Auto
Workers and the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee (SWOC) were practicing a variety
of minority unionism when they first secured
bargaining rights and contracts with GM and
U.S. Steel. It was only with the passage of the
National Labor Relations Act in 1935 that the
majoritarian collective bargaining framework
we are now familiar with was put into place.
In formalizing the process, the NLRA put
a critical weapon in the hands of anti-union
employers. If a union representing a group of

SERVICE SECTOR STRIKE?

workers could not first demonstrate majority

support across a particular bargaining unit,
the employer could now invoke the letter of
labors own Magna Carta to justify its refusal
to recognize and bargain with them. For a
notorious union-buster like Walmart, which
has intimidated and fired workers for trying
to organize and even closed down whole
stores rather than allow a majority of workers
to certify the union, the arduous course of
majority recognition has allowed the company
to continually deny the UFCWs legitimacy
and right to represent any of its employees.
OUR Walmart publicly disavows any intent
to operate like a traditional union for Walmart
workers. But by mobilizing a militant
minority, it has already been able to press
the issue of Walmarts low pay and chronic
labor abuses in a new and more forceful way.
Even more important, the organized minority
is demonstrating to the not-yet-mobilized
that they too can fight for a voice at work and
live to tell the tale. By framing their actions
not as economic strikes for higher wages
(for which employers are legally allowed to
hire permanent replacements to take the
strikers jobs) but as unfair labor practice
strikes against Walmart for punishing workers
that try to organize (for which workers are
protected against permanent replacement),
OUR Walmart members and strikers have
been relatively immune to retaliation for their
actions. As such, instead of flaming out after
the headline-grabbing Black Friday strikes
in 2012, when some 400 Walmart workers
struck in 100 cities across 46 states, OUR
Walmart has been able to keep the pressure
onrecruiting more members, bringing new
workers out for job actions of various kinds,
and keeping the spotlight sharply focused on
Walmarts low wages.
Like the UFCW at Walmart, SEIU has
provided much of the financial and institutional support for the fast food industry
campaign and has been the driving force
behind member organizations like Fast Food
Forward, which staged the first one-day
strikes in New York City just a week after
Black Friday in 2012. This kind of minority
unionism allows a group like OUR Walmart
to build a numerically powerful organization
without having to first organize a numerical

majority at any given store.

Clearly, the SEIU and UFCWtwo unions
whose long-term viability depends on
figuring out how to organize new workers in
the private sectorhave calculated that the
one-day strikes and minority union approach
can chart a course to union growth. SEIU
has been discussing plans to break into the
non-union fast food industry in a fast and
furious fashion since at least 2009, according
to an internal organizing memo. But just how
much groups like OUR Walmart or Fast Food
Forward will be able to accomplish is another
question.
Both organizations have identified as their
primary objectives significant increases in
wages and benefits, along with an agreement
from employers to respect the rights of
employees to organize. But as Joe Burns, a
longtime union negotiator and labor lawyer
whose 2011 book Reviving the Strike was a welltimed companion to the upswing in activity
in fast food and retail, notes, advocates of
minority unionism have not been able to
alter the wage structure in an industry, at
least not while remaining at minority status.
The modern-day incarnation of the Industrial
Workers of the World has had some success
organizing Starbucks stores in certain areas,
but barista wages still remain comparable to
their non-union food service peers.
Worker centers like the National Domestic
Workers Alliance have been more successful.
By pursuing legislative solutions to the
lawless conditions often experienced by
nannies, housekeepers, and other caretakers
not covered by the NLRA, the NDWA has
thus far been able to secure passage of a
Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New
York, Hawaii, and California. These state laws
include mandated overtime pay, paid time off,
protection against workplace harassment and
discrimination, and even access to workers
compensation insurance.
As Josh Eidelson has reported in Salon,
the fast food campaign might pursue something similar, such as citywide living-wage
ordinances that would mandate higher
compensation for fast food work or a collective
agreement with the largest companies to
voluntarily establish a code of labor standards.
Scott Courtney, SEIUs assistant to the pres-

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 DI S S EN T 51

SERVICE SECTOR STRIKE?

ident for organizing, acknowledged there was

a whole package of things on the table that
the workers and the union might attempt. But
there are complicating factors. The franchisee
business model that prevails in the industry
makes it relatively easy for fast food corpo-

The reason the early UAWs brand

of minority unionism accomplished
something other minority unions have
not was because its militant minority
found a critical weak link in GMs chain of
production and held on for dear life.

is not some relic of radical cant. He mounts

an impressive historical catalog of soberminded economists and conservative trade
unionists who say something along the lines
of economist Jack Barbashs assertion, in 1956,
that there can be no collective bargaining
if workers and unions are unable to bring a
halt to a companys business operations when
negotiations break down. None of them, Burns
suggests, would be surprised that as labors
most effective weapon has been watered
down by legal decisions (like outlawing the
sit-down strike or allowing employers to
permanently replace strikers) and legislative
amendment (like the banning of secondary
strikes or boycotts), so have workers ability
to form unions and win gains from employers
at the bargaining table diminished.

Impressive as they are for their current scale

rations to deny responsibility for working
conditions in their stores (think of the independent franchisee whose busted AC unit
sent Shelyz Mendez to the hospital), while a
legislative fix may prove equally challenging.
Home care and other domestic workers often
work for employers who are subsidized by
public monies, but most municipalities are
currently unable to legally regulate the wage
standards in a private industry like fast food.
More difficult to resolve may be another
issue Burns raises in his book. He points out
that one-day publicity strikes have tended to
be successful when used against employers
who are susceptible to public pressure,
most notably hospitals, universities, or
public employers. It is hard to imagine
McDonalds or Walmart being similarly
susceptible. Walmart, after all, has already
survived fifteen years of heated public relations battles with the UFCW and progressive
coalitions of various kinds, and it remains
the worlds largest retailer. Otherwise, Burns
argues, the only truly effective strikes waged
by workers of any kind have gone beyond
simply grabbing attention and actually halted
production.
As Burns is at pains to demonstrate in
Reviving the Strike, the idea that organized
groups of workers must be able to shut down
production to win improvements to their jobs

5 2 D ISSE N T W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

and persistence, the strike waves at Walmart

and in the fast food industry are still a long
way from actually disrupting the normal state
of affairs for the companies they are targeting.
There are a number of reasons for this, not
the least of which are the currently slack
labor market and highly replaceable nature
of the low-skill work involved. Moreover,
the relatively small capital investment in any
particular fast food outlet or Walmart superstore makes it much easier to idle or even
close a struck store than a factory, mine, or
distribution hub.
But there is also a clear difference between
the still-diffuse actions of groups like OUR
Walmart or Fast Food Forwardwhich might
involve as few as one or two activists at any
given store, spread across hundreds of stores
and dozens of citiesand the much more
focused actions of the Flint sit-down strikers
in 19361937. At the time, the Fisher Body
plant where the strike began was the largest
of its kind in the world and one of only two
in the country that produced essential dies for
Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs. Even if
the McDonalds strikers stayed out on strike
indefinitely, Big Macs would continue to roll
off the assembly line.
The reason the early UAWs brand of
minority unionism accomplished something
other minority unions have not was because

SERVICE SECTOR STRIKE?

its militant minority found a critical weak

link in GMs chain of production and held on
for dear life. And one reason Myron Charles
Taylor, then president of U.S. Steel, settled
with SWOC a few weeks after the resolution
of the strike at Flint was not because SWOC
had shut down a similarly vulnerable point in
U.S. Steels business operations, but because
Taylor was terrified they might.
It is unclear where the equivalent would
be, or if there even is one, for the fast food
giants and Walmart, but organizers would
need to take into account the increasingly
global supply and logistics chains upon
which the companies depend. Members of the
Change to Winsponsored group Warehouse
Workers United have organized similar
one-or-two-day strikes over the last year at
massive warehouses that Walmart uses in
Mira Loma, California and Ellwood, Illinois,
also in response to employer retaliation
against workers for trying to organize. Syncing
up the retail strikes with these and other
ongoing efforts to organize port, warehouse,
and other distribution workers involved with
transporting goods to their final destinations
would be a step in the right direction. Until
that happens, and on a much larger scale and
duration, it seems unlikely that the major
retailers will experience a critical disruption
in their flow of operations.
But neither Rome nor Flint was built in
a day. If there is a historical corollary to the
present moment, it might be not the sit-down
strike itself but the many smaller, subtler job
actions that led up to it, what Henry Kraus
referred to in his famous first-person account

of the Flint strike as the secret ferment which

continued ceaselessly to boil among the rank
and file workers and without which no strike
could have been successful. Each coordinated slowdown, each act of illicit machinebreaking or tampering with the line, each
wildcat strike in 1934 and 1935 made possible
the major confrontation of 1936 and 1937, by
making Flint workers bolder, more confident
about taking risks, and finally more willing to
defy authority and trust that their coworkers
would do the same.
To build solidarity is to engage in actions
that build solidarity, Burns writes in Reviving
the Strike, and the wisdom of that phrase
will be apparent to anyone who has ever
tried to organize a group of workers into a
union. Though it may sound hackneyed and
outmoded in our current strike-poor moment,
solidarity is a precious thing. Without it, no
amount of ideological conviction or material
desperation will provoke a group of people
to do anything so dangerous as occupy an
automobile plant for a month and a half while
the National Guard waits outsideor even to
walk out of work one unbearably hot summer
day after the air conditioner breaks and a
coworker passes out from the heat. Every
such action builds more solidarity, emboldens
the militant minority to believe more in its
potential power, and makes the next action
possible. As in Flint, the major confrontation
may still be to come.
Max Fraser is a graduate student and organizer at Yale
University. His writing on labor and culture has appeared in
American Art, the Nation, New Labor Forum, and elsewhere.

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 DI S S EN T 53

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