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:: Sunday, July 18, 2004 ::

The General Strike Can Teach Unions How to Grow by David Bacon, ZNet
For four days during that summer of 1934, nothing moved in San Francisco. Long afterwards, whenever he tried to explain what it was like, Archie talked about how quiet it was when all the work stopped. The important thing about the silence, he said, was not its contrast with the city's normal cacophony. It was the fact that he and his fellow workers created it themselves, by doing nothing. Not working may seem a passive form of protest, yet their action gave them a sense of power they never lost.

'Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.' Archie must have sung this verse to Solidarity Forever, the hallowed union anthem, hundreds of times on picketlines in the decades that followed. To him and other veterans of the general strike, these were not just words. They expressed a reality experienced first hand. The strike taught these wharf rats about power - that working people could get it, and wield it with devastating effect, if they understood that the world depended on them.

Seventy years later, as our modern labor movement struggles to regain the power it's lost, these four days shine as a beacon. They point out that the way workers won power proved to be as important as what they did with it.

posted 10:25 AM :: reference link :: 0 comments ::

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