Abstract
I first experienced the power and potential personal consequence of striking in 2003. As a graduate student at Yale University, I had been an active member of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) for seven years. GESO—now Local 33 of UNITE HERE—had been campaigning for over 30 years to be recognized as the union of graduate teachers and researchers at the university. (GESO finally won an NLRB election by a huge majority in January 2022, and Local 33 successfully settled its first contract in December 2023.) In my seven years as a GESO member, I had attended countless rallies, marches, and speak-outs in support of the cause. During the spring of 2003, I helped organize several departments to participate in a weeklong walkout of teachers and researchers alongside Yale’s blue- and white-collar unions. On the picket lines, we demanded recognition of our union and fair contracts for our comrades who struck with us. 1
I did all of this with little consequence to my career prospects or income. As a PhD student in Latin American history, I worked with faculty who were either supportive of the union or ignored its efforts. During the spring walkout, I was on a research fellowship and not responsible for teaching or grading, so I did not have to tell a faculty member that I would not be fulfilling any classroom obligations while I walked a picket line. Teaching and research assistants, on the contrary, received a stipend for teaching class sections or providing research assistance to faculty member. These colleagues confronted antiunion faculty members who threatened to destroy their young careers, threats that were all-to-often carried out. Memorably, I witnessed a prominent Physics faculty member fail two striking researchers on their PhD comprehensive exams because they refused to cross the picket line, and the faculty member refused to reschedule the exams. The students had to leave Yale later that year. I also did not forgo wages during the strike. In fact, immediate economic risks were minimal for most striking grad students. Because of Yale’s insistence that graduate teachers and researchers were students rather than workers, the administration paid all striking graduate workers their usual salaries. My experience of organizing and fighting for the union was exciting, frustrating, and emotionally draining, but I did not take any real risks to confront my employer. 2
This all changed in the fall of 2003. Before the start of the fall semester, the union of clerical and technical workers (Local 34) and the union of maintenance, grounds, and dining hall workers (Local 35) walked out on strike. 3 That semester, I had been hired to teach two discussion sections for a large, popular lecture course. The faculty member in charge of the course was a well-known professor who had made casual statements opposed to graduate teachers and researchers unionizing. That said, in the rumor mill of graduate student life, there were no stories about him threatening his advisees or teaching assistants who publicly supported GESO. His course was one of the largest classes in the History department, so over a dozen teaching assistants had been hired to grade and facilitate mandatory discussion sections. Two of us decided not to attend lectures if they were held in a Yale building; asking instead to teach sections off campus for the duration of the strike. As members of GESO and in solidarity with Locals 34 and 35, we resolved not to cross picket lines to do our work.
At the beginning of the semester, we informed the professor of our decision in an email. The next day, we received a response, cc-ed to our academic advisors, the Chair and Director of Graduate Studies in the History department, and the Dean of the Graduate School, informing us that our request was denied and that if we did not attend the on-campus lecture and teaching assistant meeting that week, we risked not only forfeiting our positions but academic disciplinary proceedings for dereliction of duty. Furthermore, the email stated that if we proceeded to hold classes off campus, we would be in violation of the university’s in loco parentis policies by conducting official Yale business off campus. Doing that, the email said, created extraordinary liability for the institution, which could be cause for serious charges against us and possible expulsion. The email closed with an order to appear at the next lecture.
I received this email in my apartment, late at night, alone. I remember almost vomiting after I read it. Then I started to panic, filled with fear about my future. The raw experience of power being wielded over me, of an individual and institution trying to terrorize me into conforming to their will, tested my resolve. It was in this moment that I realized the gravity of the decision every worker makes when they decide to fight for the union, for a better life for themselves, their coworkers, and their families. I had never faced this kind of consequence and risk for my actions as a worker trying to organize. This was my moment of truth.
I was lucky. I called my organizer who listened, asked me how I was doing, talked to me about what I wanted, and put the decision in front of me. I had a choice, either to bend to the consequences and cross the picket line or stand by what I had been fighting for over the past seven years. If I chose the latter, my organizer and the whole union would back me up. It was my decision. I decided to say “no,” to refuse to cross the picket line and fight. Happily, the other teaching assistant who did not want to cross the line did the same.
We emailed back that we were not going to attend the on-campus lectures or teaching assistant meeting. We also refused to teach classes on campus. If the university insisted the classes be on campus, they simply would not be taught. In the end, cooler heads prevailed, and a compromise was reached. Our classes were taught by other faculty members for the duration of the strike and we were provided with materials via email to stay up to date. I was relieved, but I learned how powerful fear is as a tool for the boss. Strikes are powerful, but they are also scary, and very, very hard to organize and win.
A Transformative Experience and a Life Change
My experiences at Yale led me to leave academia and fully embrace the labor movement. After spending a year working with Local 34, the Union of Clerical and Technical workers at Yale, I left New Haven in 2007 to work for the international hospitality workers’ union, UNITE HERE. After some time in Las Vegas, Toronto, and Miami, I settled in Boston in 2010. Local 26 in Boston had a history of innovative campaigns dating back to the 1980s, when an insurgent campaign led by a waiter, Domenic Bozzotto, had ousted a corrupt leadership. By refocusing the union on fighting shop-floor fights in the “heart of the house”—housekeeping and culinary department—the new leadership of Local 26, with Bozzotto as president, won extraordinary improvements to their contracts. In addition to workload limitations for housekeepers, the contracts included benefits aimed at helping lower-paid workers, including an interest-free loan for first-time homebuyers. 4 Bozzotto’s successor, Janice Loux, continued making gains for Local 26 members. Seeing an explosion of hotel development in the city, Loux put together a political program that ensured that workers in new hotels could organize without fear of intimidation from management. 5 This program helped Local 26 grow alongside the industry in the decade before I arrived. The Local had weathered antiunion campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s by finding creative ways to improve their contracts and organize nonunion workers. It had not, however, gone on strike.
In fact—barring a 1919 strike of male waiters at the Parker House hotel to stop the hiring of “lady” servers—no member of Local 26 or its predecessor organizations had ever walked off the job. The Local had never even established a strike fund to give workers picket-pay. Seeing this as a potential liability, the Local’s next president, Brian Lang, made the establishment of a strike fund a priority when he was elected in 2011. Lang had been the organizing director of the Local for the previous decade and understood that the union was vulnerable to concessionary bargaining if it did not have the funds to defend itself. Shortly after winning the presidency, Lang asked me to become the Local’s organizing director and work with him to design a campaign to raise the Local’s dues by four dollars a week to establish a Strike and Organizing Fund. Given that this was a 33 percent increase in dues, we launched a comprehensive organizing campaign that engaged the entire membership in the decision-making process. The vote to establish the fund was a referendum on the future of the union: either increases the dues to fight or keep the status quo and stagnate.
The membership responded strongly that they wanted to fight. Over the course of a day, over one thousand members voted by a margin of 95 percent to increase their dues. At the vote count, shop stewards packed the union hall, cheering when the vote was announced—it felt like we had already beaten the boss.
But the fights were still to come. The first test of the Local’s newfound ability to strike came at Harvard University in 2016. Facing an intransigent administration insistent on cutting health care benefits and denying workers’ demands for a minimum annual income of $35,000, dining hall workers walked off the job. 6 This strike was short-lived. After only three weeks, the Harvard administration—under significant pressure from students who rallied in large numbers to support dining hall workers—dropped their demands for concessions and agreed to our proposed minimum income standards.
This success emboldened us to consider striking the hotel industry. Unlike Harvard, however, the hotel industry was for-profit, with significant investment from the real estate and financial sector. Also, our ability to mobilize customers against the industry was limited, making replicating the Harvard model, where students played a crucial role in our victory, unlikely. Instead of relying on customer support, we had to figure out how to strike successfully, using new tactics that combined worker militance with debranding, investor activism, and boycotts.
As the Local’s organizing director during hotel bargaining in 2011—and later as president of the Local—I drew on lessons I learned during the strikes at Yale. Starting in the summer of 2017, we built a robust worker bargaining committee. The goal of this committee was to represent and mobilize a diverse workforce as we entered bargaining. Committee members came from every hotel department, every shift, and every race and ethnic group. To allow all committee members to participate in the negotiations process, we held meetings multiple times a day and translated materials and discussions into four languages. The committee served as a conduit, transmitting information and strategic direction between leadership and the rank and file, ensuring that the union leadership understood the membership’s priorities and the membership understood the campaign necessary to achieve these goals. Our success at building and maintaining this committee—at its apex over 200 members strong—played a central role in our victorious contract campaign.
By early 2018, we had settled on our key demands: increased pension benefits; protections against sexual harassment; a process to limit the introduction of new technologies; job security for food and beverage workers (including the right to strike mid-contract in the event of layoffs or closures); and limitations to housekeeping programs that eliminated daily room cleaning. In addition to these demands, we needed to maintain our existing benefits and win significant wage increases. To ensure that these demands represented the will of the membership, we held a large convention where we reviewed them, discussed them, and voted to affirm that we would not settle a contract without achieving them. The vote passed unanimously.
Having built consensus, we engaged Marriott in bargaining. From very early in the bargaining process, it was clear it would take a strike to win a new contract. The company correctly saw our core demands as a move to change the balance of power between management and workers. By seeking to control how technology was deployed; the way a hotel dealt with guests accused of sexual harassment; and the kinds of services they offered, we were demanding that our members have more job security and control over their lives. Our technology proposal, for example, required a vigorous vetting process of new technology and its impact on the workforce as well as job protections for employees affected by these technologies. The sexual harassment language we proposed required employers to cooperate with all investigations, including those that related to customer behavior; and allowed workers to refuse service to an offending guest and to ban them from properties entirely. Our goal, ultimately, was to win a contract that guaranteed our members could stay in a good union job for their entire working lives. We summed up this goal in the campaign’s slogan: “One Job Should Be Enough.”
Reimagining the Strike as a Public Spectacle
After recruiting our committee, we designed a series of organizational “stress tests” during the summer and early fall of 2018 to evaluate our strike readiness. These tests involved working with the committee to mobilize the membership in an escalating series of actions, each time evaluating the level of participation and militance across the organization. The tests also put workers in direct confrontation with their managers before walking out on strike, a process that allowed our members to overcome individual fear collectively and in less stressful situations than a walk-out. We began at the property level by signing petitions, wearing union buttons, having large groups of workers confront management, marching through lobbies, and picketing general managers’ offices. Then, we turned to public-facing actions, rallying; picketing; and marching to demand a fair contract. Finally, we prepared to strike, turning out the entire Marriott membership for a strike vote and to sign-up for strike benefits. This process of testing and building our organizational capacity was arduous—I remember some strong committee members expressing frustration about how slowly the campaign escalated—but it paid off in the end. When we finally struck in October 2018, the level of participation was extraordinary.
The strike was a culmination of a year and a half of campaigning. When our members walked off the job, they knew that the strike was a strategic action to leverage a settlement with Marriott. They also understood that the strike would not close the hotels. Early in organizing for the strike, we explained that Marriott would find ways to keep properties open. The company brought in extra managers to work the front desk and food and beverage outlets; they contracted with temp agencies to staff banquet departments and to clean guest rooms. Our goal, we explained to the committee and membership, was not to shutter the properties. Instead, we wanted to use the drama of the strike to bring public attention to our campaign and create an ungovernable situation for the Marriott corporation. By creating chaos for the company, we believed Marriott would be forced to come to the bargaining table and settle on our terms. The spectacle of the strike, amplified by media, was leverage.
After we walked out, we deployed dozens of tactics to draw attention to our campaign. We blasted out social media content, featuring strikers; picket lines; and chaotic scenes of guests arriving at hotels on strike. We launched a boycott with dozens of strikers calling lists of future hotel customers, advising them not to patronize striking properties. This effort led many groups of customers to cancel or move their events, including the election-victory party of Republican Governor Charlie Baker which was scheduled for the striking Sheraton Boston. We engaged investors in the properties, sending delegations of striking workers to the corporate offices of real estate companies and private equity firms that owned striking hotels. The strikers also got on earnings calls of publicly traded hotel ownership companies to ask questions of principal officers about what they were doing to end the strikes. We also looked for opportunities to dramatize the conflict with Marriott. One of the best moments of the strike came when the New York Yankees—who were playing the Red Sox in the American League Divisional Series—crossed the picket line at the Ritz Carlton. Seeing an opportunity to hitch our strike to the longtime rivalry between Boston and New York, we put out a public call, asking anyone who wanted to protest the Yankees’ decision to stay at a striking hotel to join our picket line. Hundreds of members of the community joined us for a giant picket and rally in front of the hotel, holding “Yankees = Scabs” signs as the players boarded the bus to Fenway Park. 7 When the Houston Astros came to play the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, they did not make the same mistake.
By reimagining the strike as a public spectacle, we succeeded in building leverage for a settlement with Marriott. We saw the 1,500 striking members not simply as picketers, but as organizers and activists who could play a diversity of roles. Strikers called customers; talked to the press; lobbied politicians; and visited investors. By expanding the strike beyond the picket line, we were able to disrupt Marriott’s business in multiple, simultaneous ways and alleviate the drudgery of endless picketing. This helped both to isolate the company and give striking workers creative outlets to fight the boss. Instead of being stuck picketing in the cold (and possibly succumbing to despair and fear), strikers actively participated in strategic tactics to force the company to move ahead in bargaining. After 46 days on strike, we settled the best hotel contract in the history of the Local.
Sustaining a Level of Militance
Unlike my experience at Yale in 2003, the 2018 Marriott strike ended with an unequivocal win. 8 This win changed the relationship between the union and Marriott. By winning our key demands, our members now have real job security and protections against sexual harassment. We also won significant improvements to our pension that allowed hundreds of members to retire with dignity during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, in my opinion, the most important victory is how our union was transformed. By empowering workers to decide on their demands and building an organization capable of winning, we transformed what the members of Local 26 expected from their jobs. Because our members were at the center of this campaign and because we insisted that our committee be strong enough to carry the rank and file to victory, the union as an institution has become stronger. This has meant that members now have much more control over the shop floor. Instead of accepting the boss’ power as fixed, our shop stewards and members now challenge management routinely. Our discipline in building a resilient, representative, and tough committee in the lead-up, course, and eventual victory of the strike has paid off by creating a sustained level of engagement and militance. I believe this strength carried us through the most difficult challenge our union ever faced, the Covid-19 pandemic.
I have been on strike six times during my career in the labor movement. Each strike has taught me about the strength and resiliency of working people. These strikes have also taught me about how powerful and discouraging fear can be. Striking can be liberating and transformative for individual workers who reclaim their humanity and realize the power of their labor. Striking can also be terrifying if workers do not understand why they are walking out or how their campaign will succeed. This is especially true in an environment where strikes are unlikely to shutter production. If workers do not feel like the strike is winning every day, a walkout quickly becomes drudgery and drudgery leads to loss of hope and failure.
To avoid this outcome, unions need to re-imagine striking as a spectacular tool that can create leverage when dealing with an employer by dramatizing workplace conflict. During a strike, workers and their unions can deploy a variety of tactics that draw attention to their employer from various stakeholders. By interrupting an employer’s business in unexpected places—investor calls, social media, and customer gatherings—workers can create a chaotic, ungovernable situation for a company. Doing the unexpected during a strike makes an employer anxious, they become uncertain where and when the conflict with their workers will appear next. As this anxiety mounts and union actions are successful, momentum can be built toward a settlement.
None of this is possible without a high degree of consensus and organization in the workforce. Union leadership must understand that if rank-and-file members do not know what is being bargained at the table and what the plan is to win the campaign, they will be persuaded by management to lose faith and succumb to fear. In my experience, the only way to build a militant, winning union is through the tedious but democratic process of creating a representative worker committee that constantly engages both the management and the rank and file. A robust committee will challenge elected union leaders’ assumptions about member militancy and push nervous rank and filers to act when necessary. This dialectical push-and-pull is critical to building winning campaigns in the present-day workplace.
The twenty-first century strike is a distant cousin of walkouts in an earlier industrial era. However, that does not mean that strikes today are less effective at winning concessions from employers. By reimagining how strikes work, how they are communicated to civil society, and how they are supported and organized, unions and rank-and-file members have reinvented the strike as an important tool in workplace struggle.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
