Just in Time Inventory Gives Unions a Tool

It appears that someone in the labor union movement has realized that with modern lean inventories, labor unions have another lever to use against recalcitrant management:

The recent Walmart strikes — beginning first among warehouse workers in California, then spreading to others in Elwood, Illinois, and finally to Walmart retail stores across the United States — raise the possibility that workers may be able to crack the anti-union wall at the country’s largest employer. The new momentum seems likely to spread among many more workplaces to come. But these wildcat strikes are a reminder that, if American workers are to have a better-organized future, they will have to better understand where their corporate opponents are vulnerable.

The Walmart strikes are part of a significant reevaluation of organizing strategy by labor unions and activists in the context of the continuing decline of unionism in the United States — where fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector belong to a union. As Nadine Bloch pointed out two weeks ago, such wildcat strikes on multiple levels of the supply chain at Walmart are unprecedented, and groups like OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers for Justice are planning to escalate the campaign in the coming weeks.

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Workers at key points in the supply chain can create massive disruptions in the process. A report conducted in 2002 found that a West Coast longshoremen lockout cost the U.S. economy $2 billion daily. And, in the recent strike of just two dozen subcontracted Walmart warehouse workers in Elwood, Illinois, the strikers heard reports from allies at Walmart retail stores in the region that there were already shortages of goods. This occurred less than 10 days into the strike, Elwood warehouse worker Mike Compton told me.

By focusing on key links in the supply chain, and by using a strike at the beginning of an organizing campaign instead of at the end, Walmart workers are not only taking advantage of the company’s 21st-century weaknesses. They’re also harkening back to an earlier form of union organization, which was far more common prior to the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935.

I'm not sure if I'm heartened, or alarmed that the union movement has to go back to the tactics of the early 1930s.