Have you noticed that there is hardly a day without news about a new or an upcoming work stoppage?
Teachers in different parts of Canada, Crown employees, CN Rail employees, you name it. The Co-op Refinery Complex employees who are the Unifor members went on picket lines at the end of last week in Regina. SkyTrain employees in Vancouver will go on strike this week if a deal isn’t reached with the employer. The U.S. news feed has been steadily flooded with strike updates for the last two years. And it seems that those who aren’t on strike or locked out yet, are talking about it.
I always thought there was something romantic about strikes and revolutions. There also was something inspiring and strong in those kinds of movements. It’s something natural but hard to pull out. Like when smaller birds fly together as a big cloud to keep the predators away by creating that image of something big and powerful.
The university years of research convinced me that violent revolutions were romanticized more than romantic, as they are really unsustainable and rarely lead to positive outcomes. Strikes still attract my attention as something quite resultative, brave and valuable. But with what feels almost like an outbreak of strikes across the world I started wondering what is going on.
Is it a domino effect in the world of globalized information? Or is it tough times in different spheres around the globe? Or is it the end of the decade and people are at the pick of their frustration? Or is it a full moon (something I hear people blame for almost anything)?
It’s hard everywhere financially. Costs keep going up, and wages don’t. People are getting desperate. The new jobs are created, but the population keeps growing and we work longer now, so after all, the employment situation is not that positive. Besides, with all the cuts the jobs often disappear, while bills don’t.
And that’s something we are experiencing no matter if we are in Canada, Russia, the U.S., South Korea or almost anywhere else.
What are strikes?
Simplistically, that's a conflict between employers and employees that appears when an employee wants to be paid a “million” while doing the minimum, and the employer, on the other sides, wants the opposite – they want the employee to work a lot while being paid a “thousand.” (Even though nowadays most strikers state that they go on picket lines for other reasons, I think that money is still the bottom line here).
In the real life, in most cases employers and employees find a compromise, besides, the laws regulate much of it, making it bearable for both. But sometimes there is a rock on which they split. So the strike is a way to find that new compromise, which usually is a lose-lose situation, but which is good enough for both sides to get back to working together.
Why do employees who want to be paid more agree to take less? Because nobody can pay a “million,” and there will always be somebody who will agree to take the job. But it works for employers as well. Why do miners get decent money for work? Because no miner will work for a “thousand.”
Union strikes are a powerful weapon, but they also hurt. They cause considerable financial damage to the company (which is a working threat mechanism of any strike), but they also drive a wedge between the company and workers, drive customers away and hurt a lot of innocent bystanders, which are collateral damage in this conflict.
A quick look at the economic situation suggests that strikes are mirroring the general frustration of the population, and probably have a pinch of a relative deprivation effect (when people see how others achieve something they want as well they tend to employ the same techniques).
I see a lot of comments of “They should be happy with what they have; I’ll take their job if they don’t want it”-type. That suggests that the level of despair for some is close to what a mouse experiences when stuck in a trap and instinctively chews on itself to get out, despite the fact that it’s more likely going to kill it.
So it seems that the time came to renegotiate many deals that were made between employers and employees before. And the current wave of strikes reflects the economic anxiety millions are dealing with, which is also often intensified by the sense of unfairness caused by a growing gap between employers gains and a portion they are allocating for employees, many of whom have been without a raise for years.
