Two thousand workers at the Kohler faucet plant in Northern 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.
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.
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.