On May Day, tens of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans took to the streets. Invok­ing labor’s mil­i­tant past, Occu­piers in many cities called it a ​“gen­er­al strike.” But few have asked why even the tra­di­tion­al strike has become almost an anachro­nism for America’s labor move­ment. In 1974, there were 424 major work stop­pages, each involv­ing at least 1,000 work­ers. By 2009, only five such stop­pages occurred.

Circumventing the law is a provocative tactic, but it may just be the Hail Mary we've been looking for.

It’s easy to see this trend as damn­ing evi­dence of labor’s irrel­e­vance and the need to find a fresh well­spring of social and eco­nom­ic change. It’s even eas­i­er to place the blame square­ly at the feet of con­ser­v­a­tive union lead­ers. Both these views lack nuance. Labor unions face a legal frame­work stacked against them. Laws can’t be casu­al­ly bro­ken: Unions have an impor­tant respon­si­bil­i­ty to their mem­bers and the finan­cial assets they safe­guard. Yet it’s worth remem­ber­ing that past labor lead­ers believed in indus­tri­al action on a scale that would seem rev­o­lu­tion­ary even to rad­i­cals in the move­ment today. Fig­ures like Samuel Gom­pers, Dave Beck, George Meany and Wal­ter Reuther thought the strike was the most effec­tive weapon of the work­ing class. The decline of this ven­er­a­ble tac­tic has been dev­as­tat­ing to our unions.

What’s changed?

Wider eco­nom­ic trends have worked against labor for decades. Inter­na­tion­al­ly, the 1970s saw the inter­sec­tion of weak growth and per­sis­tent infla­tion. This struc­tur­al cri­sis was resolved against the inter­ests of work­ing peo­ple, with the after­math espe­cial­ly stark in Amer­i­ca. Real wages have declined and our social safe­ty net has erod­ed, while hyper-mobile cor­po­ra­tions are glossier and equipped with slick pub­lic-rela­tions depart­ments, but just as exploita­tive as ever.

The response from reform­ers with­in the labor move­ment hasn’t helped mat­ters. As Joe Burns writes in Reviv­ing the Strike: How Work­ing Peo­ple Can Regain Pow­er and Trans­form Amer­i­ca, ​“Adapt­ing their own ideas to match this new con­ser­v­a­tive real­i­ty, these activists cre­at­ed the one-day strike, the cor­po­rate cam­paign and social union­ism – tac­tics that func­tioned com­fort­ably with­in the exist­ing struc­tures imposed by man­age­ment and the legal system.”

If unions need to strike like they used to, but can’t because they’re jus­ti­fi­ably afraid of the legal reper­cus­sions, what can be done?

Cir­cum­vent­ing the law is a provoca­tive tac­tic, but it may just be the Hail Mary we’ve been look­ing for.

Burns argues for the erec­tion of inde­pen­dent work­er orga­ni­za­tions with­out assets or prop­er­ty that would be able to get around laws that make it dif­fi­cult for unions to legal­ly strike. Though this idea was endorsed by the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers in a 2005 memo on pos­si­ble future labor strate­gies, it’s con­sid­er­ably more mil­i­tant than most unions are ready for now.

But in a sense, the Occu­py move­ment may be a pos­i­tive influ­ence. Labor lends its num­bers, dis­ci­pline and orga­ni­za­tion, while Occu­py invokes a rich his­to­ry of Amer­i­can civ­il disobedience.

Dur­ing the past 30 years the U.S. union move­ment has become more pro­gres­sive on issues of immi­gra­tion, for­eign pol­i­cy and the envi­ron­ment, but union mem­ber­ship con­tin­ues to fall. Yet the return of mass demon­stra­tions offers a new cli­mate for labor. Now is the per­fect time to remem­ber how to fight.