When workers recognise this, at least in a period of social upheaval, they have in the past sometimes attempted to take power in their unions and tur… - Dan La Botz

Surely there must be other such strikes and sit-ins that haven’t been covered by the press, and we know there are many other protests by all sorts of workers, particularly important among them teachers and nurses, though we do not include those in this discussion, important as they are. The wildcat strike holds a particular place in the history and theory of the labour movement, as well as today reaction to the bosses and the government during the coronavirus pandemic. We notice that these strikes involve both highly skilled and highly paid workers – such as those at the ’ Bath shipyard – and also lower paid workers such as those at the Purdue chicken processing plant in Georgia and the bar and restaurant in Portland, Oregon. One can make the case that black workers – Pittsburgh sanitation, Kathleen, Georgia, Purdue chick, and Memphis Teamsters – play a leading role in the strikes. Yet workers at Bath shipyard are overwhelmingly white, while autoworkers are black, Arab, white and Latino, and GE’s Lynn jet engine plant also has a racially mixed workforce. No doubt workers of all genders can be found in these protest, and we hear both men and women giving voice to the workers’ concerns. While the central demands are about workers’ health, we can see that already they begin to raise demands about wages, benefits and working conditions, as well as job security.

What is most extraordinary about these actions is that union officials have not called them. In some cases, there is no union. In other cases, such as auto, there is a union and workers are forced to strike against it as well as the company. In certain cases, such as the Bath shipyard, it seems that union officials may have tacitly supported the workers’ walkouts, though the situation is unclear. Sometimes these unofficial strikes violate a union’s contractual non-strike provisions or in the case of public employees such s may also violate the law. Yet workers have organised themselves to carry them out with few resources beyond social media and traditional word-of-mouth, in order to protect their health and to save their jobs.

Across the United States, we are seeing workers walk off the job in wildcat strikes in response to the employers’ failure either to shut down the workplace or to make it safe. The strikes are too few to call them a strike wave, but we should be aware that on their own initiative workers are taking what practically is the most powerful action they can: withdrawing their labour. The strikes are taking place in both the private and , in both unionised and non-union s large and small.