Feb 5, 2017
Why I Will Not Be Participating in a General Strike February 17
“A general strike (or mass strike) is a strike action in which a substantial proportion of the total labour force in a city, region, or country participates. General strikes are characterised by the participation of workers in a multitude of workplaces, and tend to involve entire communities.” — Wikipedia (emphasis mine)
I became an anarchist when I was 18. Basically, the first time I heard about Emma Goldman, I was in. I grew up supporting the labor movement. I studied labor history in college.
In short, I’ve always dreamed of being part of a general strike.
Why, then, am I feeling grouchy and uninspired by talk of a general strike in two weeks, on February 17, or even on May 1, the date that commemorates the Haymarket Square uprising and massacre of 1886?
I have done clerical work my whole life. Summers in college and graduate school I temped, so when I left school with a pretty useless master’s in political science, I applied for a few entry-level professional jobs (editing, admin, whatever), didn’t get any interviews, and then took a secretarial job at a nonprofit, where I worked for a few years. After it was made clear to me that I wouldn’t be moving up or out to anything more interesting, I figured I could at least get more money. Thinking it would indeed be temporary, I went back to temping. That’s how I ended up as a word processor at a law firm where, with a couple years’ break in the early 2000s to go work in Palestine, I have been for the last thirty years. A number of times I have thought maybe I could do something more rewarding with my paid time, but the people doing the hiring never agreed, so I have remained at my keyboard, thankful to have a comfortable, easy way to make a decent living and support the political and creative and creative political work I am passionate about.
In the early 1990s, San Francisco law firms responded to a looming economic crisis by slashing benefits, laying off staff and eliminating some of the things that made the jobs desirable, like four-day work weeks. Naturally, since they could, they laid off highly paid people who had been there a long time and felt comfortable, instead of lower-paid, newer, scareder people. My coworkers were shocked that “seniority,” absent a contract, didn’t protect them. Some of us activists who worked at firms thought this might be an opportunity to bring unions into the legal industry. Unions were mostly not that excited about the prospect of trying to organize the workers at the law firms that represented their union-busting adversaries in other industries, but a couple did agree to start working with us. We held a few meetings and did a couple days of leafleting, but in the end, we could not get critical mass of our coworkers interested in collective action. Some felt they had survived the purge by keeping their heads down, so they were sticking with that strategy. Others believed they survived because they were superior and didn’t want to be dragged down by less talented workers.
In 2011–2012, Occupy San Francisco was just yards from the building where I work. First, it was across the street at the Federal Reserve, then it moved a block away to Justin Hermann Plaza, and in between, it actually had a subcamp in front of our very building. I would pop over there on lunch breaks, to attend meetings or just see what was going on. The general assemblies were held right in front of the station where I caught the train to go home, so now and then I would stop and listen for a few minutes.
As far as I know no one but me ever deliberately went into the camp or stopped to listen to the GA meetings. I asked around at the holiday party, and people said they were curious but afraid, or just too busy to pay attention. They were supportive of the goals, but they didn’t see it as anything having to do with them. And the campers, for their part, never came and leafleted our building, inviting people to the weekly Saturday marches or the major days of action.
About 400 people work in my office. It’s pretty multicultural, at least on the staff level, though tinged with the conservatism of SF law firms. There are quite a few immigrants, especially from the Philippines, but also from Latin America. People occasionally whisper to me in the halls that they saw me on TV at some protest or other. Sometimes they know what the protest was about. Other times they just like the celebrity of knowing someone who was on TV.
Nearly everyone at work is upset about the direction the country is taking, some visibly so. In the days after the election, I saw people crying in the lunch room, as I was, and had intense political conversations. Quite a few coworkers went to women’s marches two weeks ago. If calls for a General Strike seemed to be gaining real traction, I might bring some fliers to work and try to talk to people about participating. But for that to work, there would have to be massive coverage in advance, and a sense that it was something everyone was doing, not a small group of activists. It would take months, not weeks. And I’d probably fail.
Over the years, I have seen calls that say “Don’t go to work,” and they always infuriate me. The decision not to go to work is a difficult one for my coworkers. Most of the women have kids at home and some also have parents they are caring for. We are among the lucky workers who have sick time, something like two weeks a year, and three or four weeks’ vacation, depending on how long you have been there. That sounds like a lot of time, but trust me, it isn’t. I’m always running out of vacation — partly because of the number of days off I have to take every year to protest. People with dependents need to save their time for when the kids are sick or the parents have to go to the hospital or for doctors’ appointments or soccer games, they need their vacation days for teacher preparation days and parent-teacher conferences and when the kids are not in school or camp or when the babysitter calls in sick.
If we call in sick and go to a demonstration, and someone sees us on TV, we could be fired for lying. That has happened to friends of mine. No one at my job, including me, is going to risk her job to be part of a one-day strike. If I lose the job that I’ve had for thirty years, how is that helping the revolution? It’s not. The movement’s not going to help me get my job back, and I know from experience that movement nonprofits are not going to hire me.
When Occupy Oakland called for a general strike in 2011, I got permission to leave early so I could go to the march to the Port, which was amazing. I’m pretty sure I was the only person in my workplace who did anything that day, although a lot of other people live in Oakland. I did see a number of them at Saturday demonstrations at the beginning of the Iraq War. The day after the war started, March 20, 2003, I took the day off — I had simply told my boss I “wouldn’t be in,” hence avoiding saying I was sick — and participated in the shutdown of the city along with an estimated 20,000 others. I am pretty sure no one else at my workplace did. On May 1, 2006, the day of the Great American Boycott, before heading out to a rally I went into the bathroom to change into my “No Human Being Is Illegal” t-shirt, and my boss, who was Mexican-American, was there changing out of hers, having just come back.
The callout for the February 17 general strike says “Don’t go to work (unless absolutely necessary).” It’s been modified; it used to say “if you can do it without being fired.” So the organizers at least recognize that many people can’t skip work. But that misses the whole meaning of the word “strike.”
Strikes are not safe. They are risky. Workers risk their jobs by participating, and don’t do it lightly. Most of those who agree to strike do so because their coworkers, who are usually their friends, will be pissed off if they don’t. A strike without workers is an insult to its name. So is one that involves primarily workers who are risking nothing. I don’t know who is behind the 2–17 general strike. Maybe they have working class jobs. Maybe they’re union members, though they don’t seem to have any unions on board at this point. The idea has been credited to Francine Prose, a novelist and college professor, who suggested it in a Guardian article. I don’t know Prose’s work and she may well be a very experienced labor organizer, though her bio doesn’t mention it. But novelists and academics calling a general strike in the U.S. by writing an article on a British owned news site is … kind of case in point of why Donald Trump is now president.
A strike is not an individual action. Individuals taking a day off to protest is a good thing. I’ve done it many times. If enough of us do it, it can obstruct traffic, inconvenience workers and maybe have a marginal effect on corporate profits. Because business tends to overreact, sometimes we have an outsize influence, as when a Bank of America branch in San Francisco’s Outer Mission shut down for a few hours every week because a group of old lesbians showed up with walkers, wheelchairs and signs to protest for an hour. But that’s not a strike. A general strike is a collective action whereby workers in key industries prevent those industries from functioning by withholding their labor. One or three people in a 400-person workplace taking a sick day has no impact on the company’s ability to do its business.
The Occupy Oakland general strike could make a claim to living up to its name because they had significant buy-in from unions, who at that time represented 12% of Oakland workers. The ILWU shut down the port, the public sector unions got the city to say that their members could miss work, the health care workers participated, and enough businesses in downtown were worried about their windows being smashed that they shut down. If the unions pick up the call for a general strike on February 17, to the point that they shut down schools, nonurgent health care and city and state governments — despite the fact that those are exactly who we’re relying on to get us through the era of no federal funding for anything useful — then it may be a success. But it won’t be because workers like me stay home from work, so there will be no point in me doing it. If the organizers can somehow get transit workers on board, my work may say that we don’t have to come in and in that case, I’ll gladly be out there with you.
I’m not saying don’t call a general strike. I’m just saying be clear what it means. It doesn’t mean telling individual workers not to go to work. That’s a protest, what we used to call “No Business As Usual.” If you want a strike, you have to be organizing groups of workers. Organizing workers is hard and takes time and doesn’t happen on Facebook. It would be better to have 10,000 workers from fifty key work places participating than 50,000 individuals, because the impact of 50,000 diffuse workers on a city with a daytime population of a million (San Francisco) or 4 million (Manhattan) is going to be virtually undetectable. Here’s what The Guardian said about the Great American Boycott in 2006, in which between two and four million immigrants stayed out of work: “Districts across the country with large Latino populations were said to be quieter than usual, and some large employers said they were shutting down for the day. Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat producer, closed about a dozen of its more than 100 plants. But overall the effect on the economy appeared to be less than organisers had hoped. Other than communities with very high immigrant populations, most cities seemed to function normally.”
This is a moment like we have not seen before. People are taking risks because they feel personally threatened or because people they care about are threatened. People who had never been to a demonstration before poured into airports last weekend, risking arrest. The mainstream media is on our side in a way that has never been true in my lifetime, so they are inclined to play up the effectiveness of demonstrations whereas they usually play them down. That, presumably, is why Cosmopolitan, of all things, has on its website a pretty positive article on the general strike callout. So I could be totally wrong, and I hope I am. It could be that millions of workers are going to stay home and flood the streets.
On the other hand, the website for the strike lists among ways to participate:
– “#BreakLunch” Use your lunch break to disrupt and participate” — Hint: if you’re taking a lunch break, you’re not on strike.
– Participate in the National Day of Community Service to coincide with the General Strike on February 17. We hope this will allow folks who cannot ‘strike’ to take advantage of their employer’s commitment to Community Service and Community Service Leave request systems. Hint: If you’re going to volunteer somewhere (they say they are “negotiating” with “institutions” about this), someone is going to be working there because institutions don’t turn over the keys to random volunteers.
– Reach out to your representatives in Washington DC or your state and tell them why you are “striking” today, and post about it using strike related hash tags.
So wait — is this a strike or a “strike”?
See you on my “lunch break.”
