Practice Pickets: solving the problem of no-strike clauses before contract expiration

The Problem of Fear

In February 2005, I was an organizer preparing union members for a strike at a laundry plant. Like most union agreements, the workers’ contract contained a no-strike clause prohibiting strikes and pickets before expiration. As we were negotiating the contract’s renewal, this clause became problematic. The employer did not believe members were ready to fight – that is, ready to strike and deprive the company of profits – so it was sticking to its harshest proposals. The workers needed to convince management they were ready. Seeing employees march in a picket – an action that looks to managers like a strike – would have had a powerful effect on the employer. However, our no-strike clause forbade picketing.

Instead I pushed other tactics: stickers, leaflets and circulating a petition, which asked for hepatitis vaccinations the company had “forgotten” about for years. Members’ response revealed their fear of supporting the union. Stickers “fell off” people during the day. Members would read leaflets, but no one wanted to help pass them out. The clearest indicator that members felt overpowered was that many refused to sign the petition. People might take stickers off or refuse to help with leaflets because they ideologically disagree with the union. But if they won’t sign a petition for a legally-mandated health protection, it’s safe to assume they are afraid of management, not ideologically pro-disease.

Members were also reluctant to talk in public. Management installed surveillance cameras soon after I started working. If I sat with members in the lunchroom, they would offer me food non-stop. Sharing food is a kind gesture, but sometimes getting the girl from the union to eat something is also a way to get her to close her mouth. Fear of talking increased after a manager, in a meeting in front of the entire wash department, yelled an obscene taunt at the only washer who openly supported the union. In total, only this washer plus two other members seemed as though they would be ready to strike when the contract expired in May.

Developing a Practice Picket

I wanted management, not my members, to be afraid of a strike. I asked the union’s attorney to send me a copy of the contract. The no-strike language prohibiting “picketing the employer’s establishment” was vague. The term “picketing” has a well-known legal meaning – “patrolling at a site with a message . . . on . . . sign[s]” – so it did not need definition. Howard Lesnick, The Gravamen of the Secondary Boycott, 62 Colum. L.Rev. 1363, 1364 n. 5 (1962). But the contract language also did not define “the employer’s establishment.” Moreover, it did not say that no picketing could occur during the contract. It only forbade picketing at the “establishment.” This gave me an idea.

There was a vacant lot a block away from the laundry. I sent a description to our lawyer of its distance from the plant. I told him we wanted to “practice” picketing the chainlink gate to the lot. He agreed with me that although the lot was within sight of the plant, it was sufficiently unrelated to the plant for us to picket without violating the no-strike clause.

I thought an opportunity to experiment with picketing would build members’ confidence. Picketing a block away would feel less likely to get you fired than doing something in time and space that management has the right to control. Workers often feel they do not have a protected right even to wear a sticker in their workplace. Moving activity a block away makes a psychological difference. Moreover, underneath their fear, the members DID want a raise, DID want vaccines, and they DID want to be respected.

Member and Management Response

On the day of the picket, the first to arrive were not members, but two managers and their video camera. They stood across the street recording. Soon members arrived. We learned the chants and practiced patrolling. Mostly we patrolled the gate to the lot, which stood in for a client’s delivery entrance. One worker drove his minivan to the gate so we could simulate a truck arrival. We obstructed the “truck” by walking back and forth and taking our sweet time to get out of its way. After the picket, I compared my attendance list to the shop list. We had seventy-three percent participation. Better yet, the picketers walked into work talking and laughing about the picket. They didn’t look scared.

I was relieved, and so were the three members who had helped bring co-workers to the picket. Management was less relieved. They hired a guard and held a “fire drill” that turned into a union-bashing meeting. The general manager even bolted the bathroom window shut because he thought I was sneaking into the plant through it. Fortunately, the members found all this funny rather than intimidating. One woman talked back to the GM at the fire drill. When the contract expired two weeks later, the members volunteered to picket the plant itself. Seeing their managers frightened of them – simply because they had marched around like strikers – had shifted their sense of the balance of power.

Result

Conclusion

A practice picket can give members confidence and pressure management into a better contract. A practice picket’s success lies in that members and management do not have the same perception of it. Members see it as a way to try out something they have a right to do on their own time. Managers see it and imagines a strike. The confidence members derive from the picket collides with management’s newfound fear, and the balance of power shifts. Thus practice pickets recover some of the power that a no-strike clause takes away.

The swing shift's practice picket, April 15, 2005. The man kneeling in the middle is my co-worker Heraclio, a shop steward at San Diego Airport Sky Chefs. He took several months off of work to help organize the laundry.

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Our vacant lot is the gray rectangle labeled "1201 South Airport Way." The gray-roofed building with white trucks in the parking lot is the laundry.

Thank you for all your work on this, Paulina. Your suggestions are terrific and I am working on them. It’s been hard, because many of the things I should develop are the hardest things to explain. You're right that the “raw material is excellent for storytelling: it has conspiracy and intrigue and power plays and creative problem-solving” and your ideas for improving that are very good. On the other hand, I'm strugging with writing about those things briefly in a way that people who have not worked on a union campaign will understand. I don’t mean that to sound arrogant, I just mean that it’s an unusually hostile environment (my tires were slashed in Stockton, and it was one of the campaigns where a manager laid hands on me – he grabbed me by the back of my shirt collar while trying to prevent me from going on the shop floor) but at the same time workers do so much to hide their fear from organizers. One of the top reasons people fail as union organizers (the average organizer lasts two years, and that’s counting in all the warhorses who work for 20+ years) is because they are unable to recognize fear behind the rudeness, avoidance, and, ahem, fibbing that most people put on before they start to trust us. It’s hard to make it clear in just a few words that when a worker insists on giving me a soda, that means she’s avoiding supporting the union. But I’m working on it and just writing this update to you has given me some ideas. Thank you!

*Practice Pickets: solving the problem of no-strike, no-picket clauses before contract expiration *