Strike One

I was looking through some boxes in my attic and found some old letters that I'd sent to a friend many years ago. My friend died about 10 years ago and his family returned the letters I'd written to him to me. The letter had been written when I returned to New York after a trip, and the city was evidently in the midst of a sanitation workers' strike. It was not hard to tell that this was going on because there were 6-10 foot-tall piles of garbage bags in front of every building. The smell was pretty hard to miss too.

I only bring this up because it's important to understand that strikes are inherently messy things. One of the problems with the way people perceive strikes is that because they are 'us versus them' kinds of things, and because people are necessarily inconvenienced by strikes, their reactions tend to be emotional and black/white/right/wrong in nature. This is unfortunate, because the reality is far more nuanced.

I've been in and around a number of strikes, as management, labor and innocent bystander. My main observation is that there are never any winners in strikes, only survivors and victims. Everyone suffers. Management can lose revenue, customers, and reputation. Labor can lose reputation, money, and jobs. Bystanders lose anything from a convenience to a necessity.

On the management side, the concerns vary. If the customers have alternative providers of the product or service they provide, they have incentive to at the very least try out the competition. This is not at all what any business wants. In the case of a transit strike, the fallout is usually a drop in ridership, as people find other ways to get where they need to go. For labor, paychecks are the first thing to go, but clearly there's potential for more serious downside. For the bystanders, again, it depends on whether they have alternatives and whether or not the product is a necessity.

Above and beyond that, the organization as a whole invariably loses big time. Whatever the nuance in the situation, for those within the organization, strikes are a black and white choice. You work or you don't work, there is no in between. You have to choose sides. There is always a loss of collegiality; supervisors and workers never look at each other the same way again. Every worker has their own issues that often don't fit into stark choices. Often coworkers never have the same feeling of teamwork and shared purpose. Organizations and organisms sound alike for a reason- they both depend on a variety of processes working together smoothly, and this becomes far more difficult after a polarizing event like a strike. There is simply no knowing in advance how serious the damage is and whether or not it can be repaired.

Another victim in a strike is the truth. Both sides have no choice but to spin the truth, because strikes are often resolved as much based on public opinion as anything. There are always people caught in the middle and where they place the blame is of critical importance. So appearances are just as important as reality.

Whether you view management as penny-pinchers or unions as a bunch of thugs, it's important to not get caught up in the stereotypes. The union movement grew up to protect the weak from the powerful. Labor disputes are always one-sided battles. Management has almost every advantage. They have more resources at their disposal, and as much as their side in the dispute insists that there's only a finite piece of the pie available for labor costs, the pie's recipe is completely under control of management. Labor has one resource- its people, and it's a blunt instrument. Because they have fewer options, labor almost always has to take the more drastic approach. Lockouts, the management equivalent of strikes, are relatively rare. This is consistent with any kind of dispute resolution when the balance of power is one-sided. The more powerful side has the greater ability to generate a long, varied and sustained attack. The weaker side necessarily has to take the more extreme action.

I, like everyone, have to be on one side or the other in the dispute. I will report in as factual a manner as possible on what's going on, but will not venture into the specifics of the dispute and the relative rightness or wrongness of anyone's position. This is nasty business from whatever perspective you view it and I will simply attempt to present it as it appears to me.