Activity

Just months into her first job, Clara and her coworkers walked out over the company’s pay system, which involved the workers keeping track of piles of tiny tickets representing their production. They were not allowed to keep the tickets on the sewing tables. They were not allowed to place them in t…

At the meeting, I talk about Good Boss/Bad Boss/Sad Boss as the kind of menu of tactics the company will draw from. I said some version of a thing I have now said thousands of times in meetings and house calls: Good Boss is when they buy off or try to buy off workers, with favors and fixes or even …

Despite the modest protections of the NLRA and the active threat of the Mackay doctrine, workers in the mid-1940s launched another massive strike wave, which included over five million workers at public utilities and in industries like coal and steel, meatpacking, and auto manufacturing. In 1946 in…

In 1938, just three years after the NLRA’s passing, the Supreme Court ruled in its Mackay Radio decision that while workers could not be fired for striking, they could be permanently replaced. Under the Mackay doctrine, as it came to be called, if workers struck for economic gains like raises and i…

The Uprising of the 20,000 was part of a wave of strikes that blew the top off of whatever had been containing the remaining rage and militancy of workers during the Gilded Age, a time that, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, marked the greatest level of economic disparity in US his…