The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labour. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining – it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process. Paul Clark, 1989
If you object to unfair treatment, you’re an ingrate. If you seek equity and fair consideration, you’re uppity. If you demand union security, you’re un-American. If you rebel against repressive management tactics, they will lynch and scalp you. But if you are passive and patient, they will take advantage of both. William Clay senior, congressman to AFL-CIO Federation of Government Employees, 1975
What precipitated the big strike in 1912, which is one of the great historical struggles in our country, was a political act on the part of the State. The hours of labor were reduced to 54 hours. You can imagine what they were before. That was only for women and children, but it affected something like 75% of the workers in the mills. On the first pay after the law went into effect, the employers cut the wages proportionately to the cut in hours and the wages were on the average of $7 and $8 a week at that time, and the highest pay to loom fixers and more highly skilled were getting possibly, $15 and $20. It was a margin between mere subsistence and starvation and so there was a spontaneous strike. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, re Bread and Roses Strike
Never forget, people DIED for the eight hour workday. Rebecca Gordon
Really what we would like to see is to take these unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles. Scott Hagerstrom, Michigan executive director Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, before Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s supposed fiscal crisis, February 2011
Remember that you are fighting more than your own fight. You are fighting for the entire working class and you must stand together. William Dudley Big Bill Haywood, to striking mill workers Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912
Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave? Joe Hill
The governor can stop a strike any time. If I were the governor I would stop a strike by simply saying, ‘These men have a grievance and demand redress from you. Come and discuss these questions with the miners on the fair soil of America like intelligent, law-abiding citizens. If you refuse I will close up your mines. I will have the state operate mines for the benefit of the nation.’ It is not right for public officials to bring scabs and gunmen into any state. I am directly opposed to it myself, but if it is a question of strike or you go into slavery, then I say strike until the last one of us drop into our graves. Mother Jones, 1913
On their side the workers had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. Mother Jones
We have come too far – struggled too long – sacrificed too much and have too much left to do to allow that which we have achieved for the good of all to be swept away without a fight. And we have not forgotten how to fight. Lane Kirkland
Personally, I look forward to continuing the fight for justice and equality on the workroom floor. APWU will never – NEVER – allow heinous thinking by management to continue without a battle. It’s an atrocity which must be and will be stamped out. We are American workers and, most importantly, we are human beings! Moe Lepore, Boston Metro Area Local APWU, 1985
We shall Strike. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking, bread and justice. Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order. We are poor, we are humble, and our only choices is to Strike in those ranchers where we are not treated with the respect we deserve as working men, where our rights as free and sovereign men are not recognized. We do not want the paternalism of the rancher; we do not want the contractor; we do not want charity at the price of our dignity. We want to be equal with all the working men in the nation; we want just wage, better working conditions, a decent future for our children. To those who oppose us, be they ranchers, police, politicians, or speculators, we say that we are going to continue fighting until we die, or we win. We shall overcome. Cesar Chavez, The Plan of Delano, 1965
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that ... They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. Do you know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your social security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And do you know something – they’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the big club! By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe ... what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people ... continue – and these are people of modest means – who continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. George Carlin, Who Really Controls America
Unions were relatively new in America, and Frick wasn’t about to let them take root on his watch. The Men Who Built America IV: Blood is Spilt, History 2012
Two-thousand steel workers barricaded the front of the plant to prevent Frick bringing in replacements. ibid.
The public’s outrage was escalating. ibid.
You see blokes on the picket line you’d never have dreamed would be there. And often they’re the ones who have the best ideas about what to do next.
I suppose most of the blokes still feel that this is just part of ordinary life. But I must admit for me it’s like living history. I feel that one day I’ll be telling those children’s children what it was like being in the Great Steel Strike of 1980. Tom Bartholomew
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number;
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you;
Ye are many – They are few. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
This is the end of the line … I am taking industrial action. Rumpole of the Bailey s6e2: Rumpole and the Summer of Discontent, Hilda, ITV 1991
What the matchgirls did next. In July 1888 1,400 women and girls walked out through the gates of the Bryant and May match factory here in Bow East London. Amanda Vickery, Suffragettes: Forever! The Story of Women and Power II
Just what could be achieved with direct action: a new type of political protest was born. Banner: National Federation of Women Workers. ibid.
At the front of the picket lines were the Italians. The Italian Americans: Becoming Americans 1910-1930, PBS 2015
A charismatic, tough independent trade-union leader and former physician, Dr Dutta Samant, persuaded Bombay’s 250,000 textile workers to lay down their tools for an indefinite strike. Misha Glenny, McMafia
The strike ended not in agreement, but with the virtual collapse of the textile industry. ibid.
The pictures were of hundreds of miners running down muddy banks to meet other miners. From that moment, for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people, for at least a year and maybe for life, everything changed.
The pit-closure programme had been announced, and it was the final stage of the Ridley Plan. It was the last scene of a predictable Western. Along the way Thatcher had disposed of many casualties but now she stood face to face with her sworn enemy. Arthur Scargill is often blamed for calling the strike at the end of winter, when coal stocks were high. But the strike was in response to the closures. Mark Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful
Scargill didn’t call the strike. One of the pits due to close, Cortonwood in Yorkshire, walked out. ibid.
Tory outrage exploded. The Sun called miners ‘scum of the Earth’. Social security payments to miners’ families were blocked. Ministers spewed disgust at pickets. Adoption of the slogan ‘right to work’. And the police blockaded pits in Nottingham, put roadblocks across striking pit villages and turned back Kent miners heading into the Dartmouth tunnel. ibid.