Though “detailed studies of long-term trends of strike activity are surprisingly rare,” it is evident that in the United States “the rate of strike activity has always been high compared with that in other countries”: “strikes [here] have at times involved massive, bitter, and violent struggles between workers and employers.” U.S. strikes often have involved struggles for control of the workplace, while in “other countries the struggle has been politicized or brought under institutional control”—e.g., powerful political parties that avowed to represent the interests of unions and the working class. In Europe during the 1930s “Social Democratic governments in several countries began to take over many functions which had previously been left to market forces. Many key battles were thus moved from the economic to the political arena, and the nature of strike activity changed as a result.” Paradoxically, despite the high rate and bitterness of strikes, the labor movement in the United States has been “among the least radical in political terms.”

The CSU strike was a prototype of this pattern. A “Social Democratic” government in Sacramento or, especially, Washington could have sought to resolve the jurisdictional issue that drove CSU to the picket lines, rather than to collaborate with moguls to drive CSU from the industry. Sorrell alluded to this point when he was asked by a congressman why he seemed to rely more on strikes than law. He responded simply, “[Y]ou can’t do that … [P]eople who tried to go to the law for relief … are eliminated. It is impossible. I can give you one example after another.”2