![]() To address these questions, we employ rich strike event data collected by the US Commissioner of Labor for the years 1881–86 inclusive, a tumultuous period of capital-labor relations. If the strike is labor’s “only true weapon,” to what extent does strike solidarity by workers, or alternatively scabbing, influence strike outcomes-that is, success or failure in obtaining worker demands? We place solidarity and its antithesis in a framework that emphasizes the two-sidedness of cooperation in the commodity form of social organization, and in so doing highlight the intersection of political economy, the sociology of class formation, and social movement scholarship. Our purpose is to theorize and empirically assess key dimensions of workers’ strike solidarity and its antithesis-what the labor movement would call “scabbing” or acting as replacement workers during strikes when the US labor movement was in its formative phase. Quite simply we do not know the relative efficacy that dimensions of solidarity (and its breakdown) may have on strike outcomes. Yet we have no systematic general evidence indicating how strikebreakers influence the likelihood of strike success or failure, and how other conditions may moderate strikebreaker influence. Historical case studies do suggest that strikebreakers have potent negative influence on outcomes, and this is the case for early strikes (e.g., the Homestead Carnegie Steel strike of 1892 or the Gould rail strike of 1885–86 see Brecher Reference Brecher1997: 40–42, 69–114) as well as more recent clashes (e.g., the PATCO strike in 1981 the Arizona cooper miner’s strike of 1983 the Detroit Newspaper strike of 1995 ). Both assumptions should be empirically assessed across multiple dimensions of solidarity. ![]() Footnote 1 Even more notable, scholars often assume that strike solidarity carries the day, or alternatively that the presence of strikebreakers will automatically spell defeat. While much has been said about the importance of strike solidarity and its antithesis-strikebreaking-in labor history, there has been little systematic analysis of the relative impact of solidarity and strikebreaking replacements on strike outcomes. Reference Griffin, Wallace and Rubin1986 Isaac Reference Isaac2002 Smith Reference Smith2003), including the use of replacement workers (or “scabs” as the labor movement would have it) to break strikes and undermine union formation (Kimeldorf Reference Kimeldorf2013). With the growth of industrial capital during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, strikes expanded dramatically and, with them, a host of forceful countertactics devised by employers (e.g., Griffin et al. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the historic formation of the US labor movement and its present predicament.Īs “periodic revolts of the working-class against the autocracy of capital” (Marx Reference Marx1974: 435–36), strikes have long been regarded as labor’s “only true weapon” (Gould Reference Gould1993: 202). Intraclass solidarity is necessary for the success in interclass struggle but needs to extend beyond the struck firm implicating the importance of solidarity of the surrounding community and wider social factory. The most powerful predictor of strike outcomes is employer use of replacement workers, signaling the key to undermining working-class strike solidarity directly pits the working class against itself. We also find that the urban regime of strike policing matters by moderating the impact of strikebreakers. Disruption costs that strikers seek to impose to gain leverage can be significantly reduced by the countertactic of hiring strikebreaking replacement workers recruited from the local community or imported from beyond. We find that while strike solidarity at the point of production is necessary, it is not sufficient for success. ![]() Drawing from historical political economy, cultures of class formation, and social movement outcome literatures, we address the question of solidarity’s impact across dimensions and at various levels of scale (i.e., at the point of production or firm level, local community, and wider society) by analyzing the outcomes of more than 4,500 strikes during the late-nineteenth-century rise of US industrial capitalism. However, there is little research that attempts to gauge the impact of various types, limits, or breakdown of solidarity directly and systematically. It is axiomatic that high-risk activism requires solidarity if social movements are to have success in struggles against powerful adversaries.
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