Today’s bat­tered labor move­ment no longer thinks of water­shed strikes; we are so beat­en down and used to defeat that no par­tic­u­lar loss is seen as crit­i­cal. And sad­ly, it’s not as if labor must win this par­tic­u­lar bat­tle to sur­vive. The truth is labor has learned to live with defeat. But a more fun­da­men­tal point is at stake: Labor must rede­vel­op the abil­i­ty to win this type of strike if we are to have any chance of survival.

Two thou­sand work­ers at the Kohler faucet plant in Wis­con­sin have been walk­ing the pick­et since Novem­ber 16. Such a strike would have been com­mon­place decades ago. Nowa­days it is a rar­i­ty. Major strikes of over 1,000 work­ers are few and far between. Even rar­er are open-end­ed strikes at an indus­tri­al plant.

The Kohler strike is an open-end­ed, large scale, non-pub­lic­i­ty style strike in man­u­fac­tur­ing, a tra­di­tion­al­ly orga­nized indus­try. Labor has become adept at hit-and-run pub­lic­i­ty strikes such as the Wal­mart, retail and fast food strikes of recent years. Although impor­tant, these are not the fight-to-the-fin­ish type bat­tles, nor do they involve any­where near the num­ber of work­ers or lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion, that this strike does. It is like­ly that more days of work lost to strik­ing have accu­mu­lat­ed in two weeks of the Kohler strike than in five years of retail and fast food strike activity.

Decades ago, vic­to­ry or at least a draw in such a strike would have been like­ly. Here we have a union, the Unit­ed Auto Work­ers (UAW), with close to a cen­tu­ry of union­ism and a long his­to­ry of con­fronta­tion­al class strug­gle. The strike involves almost 100% par­tic­i­pa­tion by the work­ers fac­ing a his­tor­i­cal­ly anti-union cor­po­ra­tion. Indeed, the Kohler plant was one of the most anti-union hold­outs in the North at a time when most cor­po­ra­tions oper­at­ing in North­ern and Mid­west­ern states like Wis­con­sin tem­porar­i­ly accept­ed work­ers’ demands for unions and the right to strike.

The Kohler plant has a his­to­ry of intense bat­tles, includ­ing a 1934 strike which result­ed in the for­ma­tion of a com­pa­ny union. After the work­ers aban­doned com­pa­ny union­ism for the UAW, one of the longest strikes in U.S. his­to­ry com­menced in 1954. The strike in many ways was a divid­ing line between the mass mil­i­tan­cy of the 1930s era and the mod­ern era, which out­laws effec­tive trade union activ­i­ty. The strike pro­duced pick­et line mil­i­tan­cy, con­gres­sion­al hear­ings replete with con­ser­v­a­tive attacks on mil­i­tan­cy, a Supreme Court case and final­ly a set­tle­ment in 1966 which kept the union intact. Unlike in many of today’s bat­tles, the nation­al UAW and AFL treat­ed this is a key bat­tle and helped sus­tain a nation­al boy­cott of Kohler prod­ucts for almost a decade. Despite the company’s vehe­ment anti-union­ism, the labor move­ment was able to fight the bat­tle to a draw.

As recent as 20 or 30 years ago, pro­gres­sives in the labor move­ment regard­ed strike sol­i­dar­i­ty as crit­i­cal to labor’s suc­cess. The idea was that when a sec­tion of the work­ing class went into an impor­tant bat­tle, all of labor must view their vic­to­ry as our high­est pri­or­i­ty. Bat­tles such as the P9 strike at Hormel in Austin, Min­neso­ta, the Detroit news strike and the Sta­ley lock­out drew sup­port from thou­sands of trade union­ists across the coun­try who viewed those bat­tles as their bat­tles. Today, in con­trast, when work­ers choose to fight, they often do so in iso­la­tion or with spo­radic sup­port from the entire labor movement.

For­mer ILWU long­shore orga­niz­ing direc­tor Peter Olney wrote a per­cep­tive arti­cle a num­ber of years ago which could have been writ­ten about the Kohler strike. Writ­ing in the after­math of the RIO Tin­to lock­out where work­ers employed mas­sive sol­i­dar­i­ty to beat back an attack of union­ism at a long-orga­nized mine, Olney called for reviv­ing the lost art of strike strat­e­gy. After detail­ing the many for­got­ten ele­ments of such strat­e­gy, Olney con­clud­ed, ​“Per­haps most impor­tant­ly, the labor move­ment has lost the con­cept of ​‘swarm­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty.’ Cen­tral labor bod­ies — once charged with mobi­liz­ing labor forces in their geo­graph­ic areas in sup­port of strik­ing or locked-out work­ers — have become prin­ci­pal­ly tasked with polit­i­cal action work.”

Olney point­ed out that defen­sive bat­tles like the Kohler strike are crit­i­cal for the labor move­ment to win. ​“Every time these bat­tles are lost, it sends out a wide­spread mes­sage that unions can’t defend their mem­bers and the union move­ment is dead. Con­verse­ly, when work­ers win these fights, con­fi­dence in labor grows and orga­niz­ing becomes a bit eas­i­er because of the pos­i­tive demon­stra­tion effect.” By this mea­sure, the labor move­ment must ral­ly behind the bat­tle of the Kohler work­ers and view their vic­to­ry as essen­tial for the labor movement.

Yet vic­to­ry is far from cer­tain, for we have seen this script play itself over and over in the last three decades. A local union, tired of the unfair management’s relent­less attacks, decides to take a stand. The coura­geous work­ers go out on strike with spir­its high on the pick­et line. After some spir­it­ed pick­et line activ­i­ty, the employ­er seeks and obtains and injunc­tion against mass pick­et­ing. The union large­ly com­plies with this direc­tive. The more enlight­ened union­ists in the city and through­out the coun­try help orga­nize some spo­radic sol­i­dar­i­ty ral­lies and hol­i­day fundrais­ing while most in labor goes about their busi­ness. The employ­er hires per­ma­nent replace­ment scabs, and pro­duc­tion con­tin­ues. The strike is even­tu­al­ly com­pro­mised or lost.

If labor is to not just sur­vive but thrive, we must be able to change that sto­ry line — and win. That means con­crete acts of sol­i­dar­i­ty such as res­o­lu­tions of sup­port, sol­i­dar­i­ty efforts and fundrais­ing. But it should also mean that the labor move­ment begins to dis­cuss what it means to break out of this cycle of loss­es — a cycle that is direct­ly attrib­ut­able to the rules of the game being fixed in capital’s favor. One hun­dred years ago, the AFL under Samuel Gom­pers’ lead­er­ship strate­gized about how to defy injunc­tions, as did a gen­er­a­tion of trade union­ists in the 1930s.

Labor devel­oped a phi­los­o­phy of defi­ance to unjust laws and pro­mot­ed the right to an effec­tive strike. Today’s nation­al labor move­ment offers no such strate­gic guid­ance and is far more like­ly to coun­sel com­pli­ance with unjust labor laws.

In recent years, many in labor have become accus­tomed to high­ly chore­o­graphed strikes and well-script­ed cam­paigns. All those things cer­tain­ly have a place in the worker’s move­ment. Yet, real trade union­ism based on local unions root­ed in the work­place do not work that way. We don’t always get to pick the bat­tles we sup­port or the strug­gles that take place. But sol­i­dar­i­ty, and our sur­vival of the labor move­ment, requires we sup­port those increas­ing­ly rare instances when work­ers do choose to fight. The Wis­con­sin Kohler strike is exact­ly such a bat­tle in need of such support.