Fifty years ago, in the early 1970s, Joe Uehlein was a construction worker in Pennsylvania, building a bridge over the Susquehanna River.leaks in some of the structures placed in the river put the workers' lives in danger of drowning. But Uehlein's boss was ignoring these concerns.
Labor experts say this year's high-profile private-sector strikes – many of which are yielding concrete gains for unions – could mark another turning point in the U.S. labor movement.Of course, strikes can come at a high cost to workers, who often don't get paid when they walk off their job. Even though UAW has been paying $500 a week to its union members, who are on strike, not every union does that.
Among those who have walked off the job this year are more than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers, from coast to coast. They went on strike for three days in early October, after their unions failed to reach an agreement with Kaiser management for a new contract. "Strikes are certainly more rooted in the private sector, and that's important because that's where unions have been weakest," Kallas said.But despite the current surge in momentum for unions and high-profile labor actions, this year's figures pale in comparison to the hundreds of major strikes that took place each year through the 1970s. In 1970, there were 381 large strikes involving roughly 2.5 million workers, according to the labor department.
The data reflects the impact of Reagan's union-busting. After 1981, there was a steep drop in the number of big strikes for decades, meaning those involving at least 1,000 workers, from hundreds to just a few dozen each year.Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, said the disappearance of strikes since the early 1980s gave rise to a generation of workers who had never been part of a collective action, some of whom had never seen a picket line.