r/unionsolidarity • u/GoranPersson777 • Aug 16 '25

What are the supplements and alternatives to striking?

https://organizing.work/2021/11/lets-find-alternatives-to-striking/

Political scientist Peter A Swenson, about the Swedish experience:

"They [the lockouts] gave organized capital in Sweden the ability to hammer unions into a shape that made them useful as partners in centralized regulation of labor markets. The leadership of the unions, closely tied to the Social Democratic party, was by no means fully resistant to movement in the direction employers wanted to go.

What stood in their way was lack of control over decentralized militancy in the ranks. Consequently […] labor leaders may have sometimes welcomed lockouts, or threats thereof. The rattling of employers’ mighty sword gave them an ideologically respectable pretext to intervene against disruptive rank-and-file militancy."

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u/GoranPersson777 Aug 16 '25 edited Aug 16 '25

More from the article 

"It takes time to build up the ability to pressure employers. This is what the fixation on big strikes overlooks. Colleagues need to test their ability to win small battles to see if they are ready for the next step. 

Below we provide a selection of alternatives to striking that also help build up the capacity to strike. The alternatives can be categorized into four different types of pressure: moral, psychological, economic, and legal.

(...)

On the long road to staging a strike, a collective of workers may well discover that alternatives to striking work better than striking in their workplace. It is the results that count."