... The history of Memphis labor struggles is also key to understanding the lockout. Memphis is infamous as the city where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while standing in solidarity with striking sanitation workers. The 1968 sanitation strike was important not just as a labor action, but because it represented the merging of the labor and civil rights movements. Sanitation workers famously carried signs reading “I Am a Man” — signaling that they were not just protesting economic conditions, but the overt and casual racism of supervisors, who routinely addressed black male workers as “boy.” The significance of this cannot be overstated in a city where paternalistic white politicians ruled for decades, and where black people still face endemic racism and poverty. No picket line or labor action is complete without “I Am a Man” signs. Striking fast food workers, one of the most vibrant labor struggles in the city, routinely reference the strong labor history of the city. ... Emboldened by the weak status of the US labor movement, employers have increasingly turned to lockouts: in the last twenty years, the tactic has nearly doubled in use. Workers confront a globalized capitalist system in which trade unions are weaker, labor is precarious, and capital can flee. These were all apparent in the Memphis lockout – union-busting, increased management control, and outsourcing. Yet it was also a process of radicalization for many workers. As scholar and activist Marta Harnecker notes in her book on the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, struggle is the most important education for workers. Employers are constantly on the hunt for new ways to decrease the cost of labor, and lockouts can be an important tool in the class war toolbox. But in the long term, the employing class may decide that forcibly preventing employees from working just creates more militancy. ... https://jacobinmag/2014/11/accumulation-by-lockout/
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 10:41:53 +0000
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