How a Strike Was Won

The Evolution of Strikes in the United States

Over the past fifty years we have witnessed a dramatic change in how strikes are conducted in the United States. In the post–World War II era, strikes became deeply embedded in the emerging tripartite industrial system. Unlike strikes that occurred during the turbulent thirties or those immediately after the war, the strike was becoming a domesticated affair. The right to hold wildcats and spontaneous shop floor action was now forbidden during the terms of most union contracts that instead provided grievance and arbitration processes.

When bargaining failed, strikes took place in this institutional framework and inside a calculus of management practices during what labor historians have referred to as the labor management accord. For example, during much of the 1950s through 1970s the use of replacement workers and attempting to close the workplace during a strike were extremely uncommon. Most strikes were relatively brief, almost symbolic activities that ended in labor and management arriving at a viable agreement. It needs to be noted that this all occurred in a very particular economic context. It was a time of great economic prosperity in the United States, and firms were able to pass along productivity gains in increasing wages and benefits. This codified labor relations system provided for both labor and management, and there were no incentives to disrupt the process. ¹

Given the embedded nature of collective bargaining within this larger institutional framework much of the focus was on “table skills” (Better 1993; Lewicki, Barry, and Saunders 2010). Within the institutional framework of collective bargaining this was one of the key areas of activity. In terms of unions preparing for or conducting a strike, the focus was also procedural—such as how to set up picketing committees, staying with the bounds of the law, and keeping the membership disciplined.

This legal and cultural infrastructure surrounding collective bargaining and strikes began unraveling during the 1980s. For the first time since the end of World War II the U.S. economy was becoming challenged by emerging economies, and U.S. firms began facing what political economist David Harvey (2007) described as a “crisis of accumulation.” Facing shrinking profits corporations responded in several ways including introducing new technology, closing U.S. facilities in favor of production overseas, and embracing a new adversarialism during collective bargaining and strikes.

One of the first unions to feel this change was the Steelworkers in their contract negotiations in 1993 with copper giant Phelps Dodge. As Jonathan Rosenblum (1995) described in his Copper Crucible, the Steelworkers approached the bargaining as they had done in the previous twenty-five years. When they reached an impasse with the company, they called a strike, clearly expecting a relatively short strike before their members would return to work and operations would continue. Behind the scenes, however, Phelps Dodge president Richard Moolick had set in motion a process that rewrote the playbook on how management had behaved during strikes for the past twenty-five years. Their guide was Operating During Strikes, conceived by Wharton business school professor Hebert Northrup (Perry, Kramer and Schneider 1982). Moolick put in place much of what he learned including installing barbed wire fences, installing security cameras, hiring replacement workers, and outfitting sleeping and recreation facilities on site. This completely changed the rules of the game, and what the steelworkers thought would be a short strike became a long, bitter affair that broke the union and in the process helped to set in place a new model of union busting that firms adopted nationwide.

Through the 1980s we watched as this new approach was used to bludgeon workers and their union across the country, including at Hormel (Green 1990; Rachleff 1999); International Paper (Getman 1998); Bridgestone/Firestone, Caterpillar, and A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois (Ashby and Hawking 2009; Franklin 2001); Pittston (Brisbin 2002); and Ravenswood (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner (1999); among many others. This approach was further buttressed by the growing lack of political will by the Republicans to support the legal framework that enabled a level playing field in collective bargaining as became clear in the PATCO strike (McCartin 2011). Though too many of these strikes ended in heartbreaking losses, unions embarked on a number of important experiments that would be central to labor’s ability to meet this new antiunion challenge.

In an effort to respond to this new labor-management paradigm we saw innovations such as exerting pressure on a firm’s board of directors, as in the campaign at J. P. Stevens (Minchin 2005), using “inside strategies” pioneered by Jerry Tucker first at Moog and later at Staley (Ashby and Hawking 2009; Metzgar 1985; Schwartz 2006), and returning to community-based campaigns and building coalitions (Fine 2006; Tattersall 2010; Waldinger et al. 1998). Though much of the innovative work of the United Farm Workers predated the labor crisis of the 1980s, their approach was also a central part of this repertoire of new union strategies (Ganz 2009; Shaw 2007).

Now that unions could no longer depend on the accord to deliver justice in the collective bargaining process, labor would need to use these experiments to create an entirely new approach. Out of the wreckage of the 1980s it became clear that all of these new approaches were necessary but that individually any one was not sufficient to win against increasingly powerful global firms. By the 1990s the successful union campaigns that emerged were multifaceted, exerting pressure on several leverage points (Juravich 2007; Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999; Richard Trumka, interview, July 21, 2002). Though a complete review of the literature on strategic campaigns is beyond the scope of this article, we would like to highlight three kinds of “strategic leverage” (Weil 2005) that have been used in these successful campaigns to “ouflank” corporate power (Johnston 2004).

The first strategy, an outgrowth of Ray Roger’s “corporate campaign” strategy at J. P. Stevens, is to identify and exert leverage on key relationships or secondary targets. In many ways this concept is an outgrowth of Ray Roger’s “corporate campaign” strategy at J. P. Stevens. For many years the textile workers had tried to organize Stevens in the company towns where it was strongest. Roger’s brilliance was rather than campaigning directly against Stevens where it was the strongest, he focused instead on a secondary target or key relationship of the firm that could in turn put pressure on the company, in this case the board of directors (Minchin 2005). Unions in later campaigns realized that board members are only one of many key relationships or secondary targets that can be leveraged in a strategic campaign than could include lenders, customers, suppliers, and regulators (Juravich 2007).

The second strategy employs the notion of the unexpected and involves changing the pace and rules of a campaign. The Steelworkers employed this strategy extremely effectively at Ravenswood. Not only were the new strategic campaigns multifaceted, but they moved in novel ways and at a pace that employers had not expected. Reflecting the dizzying pace of their campaign at Ravenswood, the Steelworkers’ vice president, George Becker, suggested, “We had to get them thinking about the Steelworkers continually, every day, … if we let an hour go by that our name didn’t cross their minds for some reason for another, then we were failing” (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999, 132).

A third strategy, drawn from the social movement literature, is to reframe the meaning of the employer’s statement and actions for the benefit of the public and key constituencies (Johnston 2004). Strikes frequently garner large media coverage, and how issues are framed can be a key element of a successful union strategy. During the UPS strike, for example, the Teamsters successfully reframed the strike in terms of the unfairness of “part-time work.” In all these cases this is not just the utilization of generalized tactics but the development of a campaign-specific strategy based on the makeup and vulnerabilities of a specific employer.

Now that the collective bargaining process was no longer circumscribed by the accord, unions needed to develop the capacity to run these types of innovative strategic campaigns. In many ways it was not just about unions’ utilizing new approaches, but it was about the creation of new kinds of unions with the capacity and will to seize the moment. The conventional wisdom in the labor movement is that unions can win strikes if they use a specific set of tactics. Early offers a typical labor analysis, suggesting that the features of a successful strike include “careful preparation and financing; membership mobilization and involvement; creative tactics and tactical flexibility; a message that resonates with the broader public; and a comprehensive plan, which enlists all possible labor and community allies, at home and abroad” (2008, 2-3).

While Early (2008) provides an excellent list of strike tactics, there are a whole series of preconditions that need to be in place for these tactics to be effective—preconditions about the fundamental character of the union. Are members involved in the life and activities of the union? Does the union have functioning committees or mechanisms for real member involvement in a democratic process? Does the union leadership have the support of the members? Does the union have the capacity, in terms of finances, staff, and expertise, to design and implement a winning strike strategy?

We cannot separate strike tactics from the character of the unions that employ them. Strike tactics, no matter how sophisticated, will never be successful if they are simply annexed to an otherwise dysfunctional union. Thus, we must examine the character and organizational capacity of a union (Weil 2005) before we can evaluate its strike tactics.

In preparation for the 1997 strike against UPS, for example, the Teamsters had built a broad swath of engaged and mobilized members. The newly elected president, Ron Carey, had ridden a wave of increased membership involvement striving to make the union more democratic, and UPS workers were heavily involved in these efforts (Crowe 1993; Kumar 2007; Witt and Wilson 1999). Contrast this campaign with the 1999 organizing campaign by the Teamsters at Overnight. Rank-and-file involvement was not a priority of the new president, James Hoffa Jr., and despite great fanfare, the Overnight campaign quickly dissolved without developing an involved and committed base (Crowe 2002).

More recently we saw the importance of the foundational work of rebuilding a union and its organizational capacity in the September 2012 Chicago teachers strike. According to Norine Gutekanst (2012), organizing director of the Chicago Teachers Union, this included painstaking efforts at rebuilding the union, including putting contract action committees in place in each building a year before the teachers’ contract expired. Though the bargaining and strike campaign was brilliantly executed, the campaign would not have been possible had the members not remade their union in advance of the strike.

Research Methods

This research is based on fifteen in-depth interviews with officers, staff, and members of Local 369. All interviews were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. Local 369 provided complete access to their files, which were analyzed along with company documents and local press coverage. Though contact was made with NStar representatives, they declined to be interviewed.

One Local from Six: The Rebuilding of Local 369

When Gary Sullivan took over the presidency of Utility Workers Local 369 in May 2004, he inherited an organization that had recently been created through the merger of six locals representing workers with jobs that ranged from doing underground electrical work or gas distribution to accounting or customer service in a call center. That meant combining six different types of workers, work cultures, and traditions. Daniel F. Hurley, who came in as secretary treasurer with Gary Sullivan, saw the difficulties of this merger firsthand: “When I was out in the field as a steward, I was very frustrated at the way the local was. It was kind of floundering, you know? My best way to put it is, it was like we had a ship without a rudder. We had a big ship and the rudder wasn’t in the water and we weren’t going forwards or backwards” (interview, September 27, 2005, 1). The rationale behind most union mergers is that bigger is better. Yet as Gary Chaison (1986, 1996) has suggested, mergers do not by definition build stronger organizations, and some are not really mergers at all but are more accurately described as amalgamations. Sullivan and Hurley knew that numbers alone do not matter if the local is fractionalized and divided.

With a contract coming up in May 2005 and knowing they were in an extremely weak position—a ship in the water without a rudder, incredibly vulnerable to attack—Sullivan and Hurly took an activist approach. They began by hiring the labor consultant Richard Sanders to explore ways to build the local. Sanders, a long-time union organizer and staffer, has always been a strong advocate of grassroots union building (Clawson 2003). He helped Sullivan and Hurley devise a plan of action with a two-pronged approach. They formed a strategic planning committee charged with putting together “a plan on how we get to where we need to be,” and they organized action teams to address specific problems—“fires we had to put out right away”—suggested Gary Sullivan (interview, September 27, 2005, 6).

Sullivan and Hurley set out across the region to major NStar facilities to meet with union members. Many of them had not seen officers in a long time, and at first tempers were short, with members demanding to know why they were paying dues. The going was tough. As Hurley describes, “My indoctrination was, we’d get up there and Gary would start a speech, and all of a sudden a guy would get up screaming and I’d be ‘Holy mother of Jesus!’ We did this in every single service center from Martha’s Vineyard all the way to Woburn and everywhere else. By our third or fourth time around, the yelling kind of stopped and people realized we were there to show them we cared” (Daniel Hurley, interview, September 27, 2005, 34-35). Sullivan explains that they would acknowledge a problem, “put some members that were hot on the problem on it guide them through it, and show them that they really have the power to make a difference” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 6).

Despite the growing interest among unions in strategic planning, many have come to discover it is not a simple process, particularly in terms of membership involvement and long-term follow-through (Weil 1997, 2005). The innovation of the approach crafted by Sanders, Sullivan, and the executive board of Local 369 was the establishment of the action teams in each area of work in the local. These teams not only helped to keep the strategic plan a living document but got members involved right away in addressing specific problems. Gary Sullivan gives an example of how it worked: “The underground is probably the largest group in the local. … They were upset and they wanted to know what in God’s name this union was doing for them. Why are they paying union dues? We got them in this room right here, about fifty of them, and we had at it with what their problems were. … We started the committee” (interview, September 27, 2005, 7).

In some instances the teams jumped right into action. In one NStar facility, for example, a new manager had come in and had started writing up Local 369 members who were not out on their trucks promptly at 7:30. So, as Gary Sullivan tells it, “we went work to rule” (interview, September 27, 2005, 7). “Our guys drive the vehicles when they probably shouldn’t be driven,” he explains. “Very rarely is everything working on one of those trucks. But they are good employees, good workers, and they want to get out there and do the right thing. They started doing ‘circle checks,’ checking the brake lights, tires, blinkers, horn, mirrors, wipers, flashers, and hazard lights. On these vehicles a lot of that stuff just doesn’t work. The next thing you know, instead of getting out at 8:15, the truck was laid up for the day or a week or a month” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 7).

This reestablishment of rank-and-file activism was fundamental to rebuilding organizational capacity in the local and helped transform it from a “servicing” to an “organizing” union (Conrow 1991; Diamond 1998, 3; Meuhlenkamp 1991). It also sent a powerful message to the company. “A business agent or a president can’t do what they did,” suggests the local’s President Sullivan. “I can’t pick up a phone and do what they did,” Gary Sullivan explains. “It got the message across” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 8). Dixon and Roscigno (2003) suggest that worker networks at the point of production increase members’ strike involvement. So this membership mobilization at NStar was fundamental to the local’s preparation for a possible strike.

It is also important to note how Sullivan and Local 369 dealt organizationally with the strategic plan and their action teams. Typically in a local union, the lack of staff time from already overworked staff can be the death knell for a strategic plan and efforts at organizational innovation. The decision to work with Sanders in developing the plan and the establishment of action teams was central to the union’s success. So too was the decision to hire Marty McCabe as a full-time staff person to help implement the plan.

The strategic plan also called for the union and its members to move out of their insularity and become more involved in the community. The combination of stable employment in what had been a major public utility and the local’s successes in negotiating strong union contracts meant that the union and its members rarely felt the need to reach beyond themselves.

They reached out in four new directions. They turned first to the communities where their members lived and became involved. “The Woburn parade, we put a float in,” Sullivan explains. “We were there with utility workers saying, ‘We’re here for you.’ We’ve done a million things. We’ve put lights up on ball fields. We’ve sponsored little league teams” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 9). And while its efforts at community service did benefit the community, they were not just willy-nilly efforts. As Secretary-Treasurer Hurley recalls, “We got involved in the communities where we knew we were going to have issues. We started in Plymouth, Lexington, Woburn, all communities that were heavy NStar communities and spread out everywhere” (Daniel Hurley, interview, September 27, 2005, 15).

Next they reengaged with the labor community in the greater Boston area. They had had little contact with the local labor councils or the state AFL-CIO over the past years, so Gary Sullivan and Local 369 started playing a more active role at this level, including getting heavily involved with other union struggles. “Whatever it was they needed,” Sullivan explains, “if they needed people at a forum we were there. If they needed a letter, we sent it. If they needed money, we sent that. If they needed bodies, we sent bodies. Most of all, they needed us not to cross the picket line. Our people refused to cross the picket line. It wasn’t even a question” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 10). The local supported the Shaw’s workers who were out on strike, and they were one of the few locals supporting the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association. Supporting other union struggles was important for its own sake, but it also built capacity for activism within the local. Local 369 also began rebuilding ties to the political community. It reenergized its COPE Committee on Political Education (COPE) funds and began contributing money and time to political candidates. As Kevin Emory, an executive board member of Local 369, observes, “The local has changed their way of doing things. It’s more politically and community active than it’s ever been” (interview, October 11, 2005, 1-2).

Anticipating that the negotiations with NStar would be tough, the local also began organizing outside contractors who would be the most likely replacement workers if the union went on strike. It started with Maverick Construction, a firm that did a great deal of work for NStar. It was a tough sell to many members, who could see Maverick only as taking work away from Local 369 members. But as Gary Sullivan argued, “Come work-stoppage time, you’re going to feel a lot better about them being out there and not crossing your picket line, than somebody who will” (interview, September 27, 2005, 23). In addition to organizing Maverick, the local contacted both union and nonunion contractors, who they believed might be called in the event of a strike.

Bargaining Like Never Before

Bargaining with NStar would be different this time. It would be the first time all six locals had negotiated together with management. The committee would have to bring together disparate concerns of Local 369 members from the six different locals and occupations that now made up the local. It would also be the first time negotiations took place in the open. “In the old days,” Dan Hurley explains, “we had our bargaining committee, but then you had private meetings and the president and the treasurer and the business agent would go in and meet with the company on a higher level and they’d bring back to the executive board where they were at. There were no outside meetings happening and they weren’t going to happen” (interview, September 27, 2005, 6). When negotiations with NStar began at the Four Points Hotel in Norwood, twenty-one people sat at the bargaining table rather than the five that were typical in earlier negotiations.

Initially the local was optimistic about bargaining. NStar had brought in Tim Manning as the senior vice president of human resources. Formerly of Raytheon, he had a reputation as a good communicator and somebody who avoided strikes. But the local was stunned by the first proposal by NStar management, a contract that was only seventeen 17 pages long. The current contract with Local 369 was 177 pages long. “You can imagine—they had taken everything out,” exclaims Hurley. “Anything we knew or recognized was gone” (interview, September 27, 2005, 6). As Barbara Discipio, an NStar accountant and Local 369 executive board member, tells it, “They wanted to redo the whole contract book, every paragraph. There’s absolutely no way you can do that in a month. They just wanted to take everything: travel time, meals, everything that you can imagine. Every day they added to the list” (interview, October 11, 2005, 2).

The company clung to this approach for a while, but negotiations eventually moved in a different direction. Instead of everyone staying at the main bargaining table, they decided to break down bargaining into a number of smaller subgroups. Local 369 put the twenty-one people on the bargaining committee in charge of separate groups. Feeling they were stretched too thin, they expanded the bargaining committee until it ultimately reached ninety-four people—a far cry from the five-person bargaining committees of the past. “It turned out to be one of the best things we did,” Hurley reports, “because they saw everything. They saw where the company was coming from. The strategic policy of being open and honest was a great advantage for us in this negotiation because the members knew everything. There wasn’t anything they didn’t know” (interview, September 27, 2005, 7). Already Local 369 was changing the rules of bargaining by expanding the size and composition of the bargaining committee.

With only two months remaining before the contract expired on May 15, the local held a strike authorization vote on March 13, 2005. Ninety-two percent of the members of Local 369 authorized a strike (LaPlante 2005). The local used this opportunity to raise the issues that had stalled in bargaining—retirees’ health care, an increase in copays, and changes in work rules. They also blasted NStar on the staffing issue and its impact on their members and public safety. Gary Sullivan told the press, “This is one of the oldest systems in the country. Our members are in danger every time they go into a manhole or climb a pole. We’re telling the company, ‘Let’s do something to prevent injuries’” (LaPlante 2005). Tim Morrisey, an executive board member who represents overhead workers, explains the need for increased staffing: “We have some jobs working on high voltage, working on 14,000 volts. We want one person on the ground and one person in the air working on this voltage because there are always things you don’t see. When they’re up right in between conductors at 14,000 volts, you want someone to say, ‘Okay, watch your back’” (Morrisey, interview, October 11, 2005, 2).

It had not been a good spring for NStar. In May a teenager was seriously injured when an underground explosion of NStar wiring sent a manhole cover through his windshield (Reidy 2005). Earlier, in March, first one and then another dog was killed after stepping on an electrified manhole cover, and yet another dog was killed in a park by stray voltage from a street light that had been removed. The family of that dog sued NStar for $740,000, the amount of NStar’s CEO’s salary (Howe 2005a, 1). Not only were the dog owners and the general public horrified by NStar’s negligence, but Massachusetts state attorney general Thomas F. Reilly got involved, citing these incidents and “major blackouts in several communities in the past four years” (Howe 2005c). He went on to press for a public inquiry. The attorney general’s office was a key relationship the company needed to do business. The heat was on NStar.

Back at the bargaining table, negotiations dragged on with little apparent progress. With just a week left before the expiration of the contract on May 15, talks started around the clock. The committees were no longer operating, and despite efforts to break into smaller working groups, chaos prevailed. Seemingly confident that the union would not strike, the company kept pressing for concession after concession from the union—on retirees’ health care, vacation times, health care copays, and work practice changes, among others. “They kept asking for more,” remembers Ed Lynch, an electrical engineer and executive board member. “When we came back to the table, they were asking for additional concessions on work practice changes, after we had agreed” (2005, 3). “[We] saw things fall off the table … but they came back. They came back at the end and they kind of tried to force them down our throat,” tells Tim Morrisey (interview, October 11, 2005, 4).

Without much more than a week left to go and with talks going nowhere fast, the local walked out of bargaining, arguing that the company had failed to bargain in good faith. On May 10, Gary Sullivan met with company officials, and talks resumed. But still the negotiations seemed to go nowhere. On the last evening before the contract expired, Sullivan asked to speak to the NStar CEO, hoping he could introduce some reason into the process, with the contract expiring in just a few hours. At 8:00 p.m., the bargaining committee joined a growing crowd at the Plumber’s Union Hall on Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from one of NStar’s largest service centers. Dan Hurley picks up the story: “I think one of the things they didn’t count on was—I think in this day and age companies think people are afraid to strike. What this membership has been through in the last ten years—they really were excited to finally say, ‘Fuck you.’ It was like Caesar conquering Rome. It was incredible. We went in that room and people were so psyched that we told the company, ‘No. This is not fair.’ … The people were ready” (interview, September 27, 2005, 17).

The bargaining committee went back to the negotiations, “so psyched,” Hurley explains, that “we told the company, ‘no, this is not fair.’” Then, it was over before it started. “The next thing I know, at five minutes to midnight, the company took two carts of stuff out of the hotel and walked right by our room and out they went,” recounts Dan Hurley. “That was it. I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re going on strike’” (interview, September 27, 2005, 18). “We were prepared to stay there and continue to negotiate,” tells executive board member Brendan Sullivan. “The company just marched out of the room with all of their paperwork … the game was on” (Brendan Sullivan, interview, October 11, 2005, 5). Approximately 1,900 workers would not be showing up for work the next day.

Picket Lines and Rat Patrols

The next morning an NStar spokesperson told the Boston Herald, “We have put a generous offer on the table and we think that if our employees had seen it, they would have reached the same conclusion, but we think the union is out of touch” (Fitzgerald 2005c). This is a standard argument leveled at unions when talks break down. Perhaps the NStar spokesperson was unaware of the ninety-four people on the bargaining committee, including a large number of rank-and-file workers, who knew exactly what the company had offered and had rejected it. The local had outflanked the company by changing the rules by which bargaining had worked.

Gary Sullivan painted a different picture and reframed the meaning for the Boston Herald: “NStar put us out on strike. … We’ve bent over backwards to work with these people” (Fitzgerald 2005c). Throughout negotiations, the union had framed the strike in terms of insufficient staffing, its impact on preventive maintenance, and the health and safety of Local 369 members and the general public. “For months we’ve been dealing with the same stuff, and they never budged,” Gary Sullivan told the Boston Globe. “We have too few workers here. I have some workers who are doing two years’ worth of work in a year. They don’t have enough bodies to do the work, and things like stray voltage and flying manhole covers are a reflection of that” (Howe 2005e). As an NStar electrical inspector put it, “They wait until things blow up and then fix them, and that’s how they do maintenance” (Jewell 2005b).

The next day Boston mayor Thomas Menino appointed Gary Sullivan to a citywide task force to address the issue of stray voltage, with the mandate, “Find It, Fix It” (City of Boston 2005). The establishment of the committee and Sullivan’s appointment were not what NStar wanted on the second day of a strike. The work Local 369 had done on the public safety issue and reengaging with the political community was paying off.

Managers and outside contractors would now have to service 1.4 million electric customers and 245,000 gas customers in the greater Boston area, extending as far as New Bedford and Cape Cod. While warning that customers “may experience delays in electrical service requests,” NStar’s website promised there would be no interruptions in services (Jewell 2005a). Local 369 members, who had long done the work in an aging infrastructure that was in many ways already pushed as far as it would go, were skeptical.

How well managers and outside contractors could run the system would help determine the outcome of the strike. Given the skilled nature of this work, it was difficult for NStar to simply hire replacement workers from the general public. So NStar would have to turn to outside contractors to do the skilled work their managers could not do. Again, the organizing work the local had done in the past years paid off. Workers at Maverick were now part of Local 369. Their refusal to cross the picket line during the strike was key in limiting NStar’s ability to operate during the strike. There were also indications that the effort to contact other contractors in advance limited the number who were willing to take struck work. But now that the strike was on, the union needed to keep any contractors from supporting NStar management, so their picket lines went up. The picket lines allowed Local 369 members to get involved firsthand.

The support the local had given to other labor struggles during the previous three years also paid off, as members from other unions showed up on their picket lines. Kathy Flynn, an NStar customer service representative and a new executive board member of Local 369, describes the response from the other unions as “absolutely phenomenal. At any given time,” she adds, “you could go to one of the strike assignments and you’d have Teamsters, corrections officers, police, fire, and plumbers, who opened up their hall for the local and offered them coffee” (interview, October 11, 2005, 1-2).

On Tuesday, May 17, the second day of the strike, the local got a tremendous boost when “members of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association manned pickets outside NStar’s Massachusetts Ave facility in Dorchester” (Fitzgerald 2005d). Police are rarely seen on the labor side in labor disputes because they are responsible for maintaining the law and because many work off-duty as security for companies on strike. Kathy Flynn received a call from her brother. “He called me up to tell me that he was walking the line and all of a sudden they could see the Boston Police Department marching down the street to walk in our picket line. He said it was just incredible. He said, you know, fifty or sixty guys, but it was like this sea of blue coming down to support your union. He said, ‘That says volumes about your Local that you would get this kind of support’” (interview, October 11, 2005, 5-6). The police in New Bedford also “refused to take picket duties on detail,” according to Arthur Rebello, who coordinated picketing there. “They consistently supported us in many, many ways throughout the whole strike” (interview, October 11, 2005, 2).

Local 369 put a system in place to track contractors and prevent them from doing the work they were being paid to do for NStar. They called it the “rat patrol.” In the building and construction trades, nonunion contractors are referred to as “rats,” and unions often picket their job sites with a large inflatable rat. Tim Morrisey ran the operation. “I’d call the different service centers, including Mass Ave., where we had most of the people. Then we had Walpole, Southboro, Somerville, and we’d just call. ‘Okay, how many guys do you have?’ ‘Oh, jeez, we only have five guys here.’ ‘Okay, we’ll send one out.’ And then we’d call and, ‘Okay, I’ve got twenty guys over in Waltham’” (Tim Morrisey, interview, October 11, 2005, 7).

The goal was to turn up enough people at any location to shut down the work. As Tim Morrisey describes, “Say it was a struck pole that was broken and in the street. This is something that has to be taken care of. Contractors would show up and we’d man it with fifty people. The police officers would shut the job down. They’d say, ‘Make this thing safe and get out of here.’ They wouldn’t even let the contractors go to work in some circumstances” (interview, October 11, 2005, 7-8).

The rat patrols were dogged in their pursuit of the contractors. In some instances the contractors, who were equally determined, would drive to New Hampshire and back in a futile effort to elude the rat patrol. “They’d think we’d just let it go,” Tim Morrisey (interview, October 11, 2005, 8), an NStar linesman, reports. “But we had guys following them all the way to New Hampshire.” NStar was able to get a Canadian crew to come down to Boston, under what many in the local believed were false pretenses. As soon as the Canadians learned the truth they didn’t last long. “The Canadians went back after having a few beers with “our guys. … They didn’t know they were breaking a strike; they returned home” (Brendan Sullivan, interview, October 11, 2005, 24).

The War of Words

Not all the activity of the strike was on the picket line. From the beginning it was also a media battle, and Local 369 came out of the blocks strongly. Sullivan was very media savvy, and the local took every opportunity to get in the newspapers, on television, and on talk radio. NStar CEO Thomas J. May, described by the Boston Globe as a “publicity-shy ‘workhorse’ out of his element,” was no match for Sullivan (Howe 2005d). Local 369 also got a big break the first night of the strike when Thomas P. O’Neill III, son of the legendary Massachusetts congressman Tip O’Neill and head of the Boston public relations firm O’Neill and Associates, contacted the local and asked for a meeting the next morning. “So at 8:00 a.m. me and Danny and Marty went over to Tom O’Neill’s place,” tells Gary Sullivan. “He said, ‘Look, I want to help you guys.’ It was kind of funny because he came in with about ten people in the room. Danny was crying knowing they’re all about $800 an hour” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 20-21).

In the end, however, O’Neill and his team did a huge amount of press work for the local at a very modest cost. They built on the skills that Sullivan and the local had already developed, which O’Neill noticed the first night of the strike, and they professionalized the operation to get ready for the onslaught from the NStar media. They told Sullivan, “You don’t even know what’s coming at you” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 22).

NStar’s first shot was a series of full-page ads in local newspapers on the second day of the strike that focused on the salary of NStar workers. In an ad titled, “Does this sound reasonable to you?” the company wrote, “At NStar, we believe the proposal we’ve made to our workers is generous and reasonable. We are known as one of the best employers in Massachusetts, and our proposal shows why. It improves wages and benefits, and adds jobs. In 2004, the average NStar workers earned $97,000. Our proposal offers a pay raise. Sound reasonable?”

Using a tactic frequently used by firms in strike situations, NStar sought to portray the company as generous and the union and its members as greedy, to turn public opinion against the strike. Without an active media strategy already in place, many unions get caught unprepared by this kind of press. But Sullivan and Local 369, now with the help of the O’Neill group, saw the publication of this ad as an opportunity to raise their issues in the press, to show that $97,000 reflects oppressive work schedules with many hours of overtime. “The company was stupid enough to say that the average salary is $97,000. It gave me the opportunity to say, ‘Yeah, he’s working 97,000 hours!’ You know how you’re at your kid’s birthday party? Well, our guys missed their kid’s birthday party. They would trade that in a minute. We’re looking for more time off” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 18).

“I work constantly, and I’m on call 24 hours per day, seven days a week,” Morrissey says. “We are making $97,000 per year but it’s only because we’re forced to be here. I had 1,000 hours of overtime last year and that is not unusual. People I work with have 1,000 to 1,800 overtime hours. That’s unsafe” (Lewis 2005). The local was able to turn NStar’s argument on its head by reframing the meaning to be about issues of staffing, mandatory overtime, preventive maintenance, and public safety.

Then three days into the strike NStar cut off all health benefits to the striking workers, without even a grace period. Rich Marlin, legislative director of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, told the Boston Herald, “We don’t know of any instance where healthcare was cancelled as quickly as the company did here” (Howe 2005b). Sullivan considered the move a hostile act. And he was incensed that the local learned about the cutoff from their insurer, not from NStar itself (Fitzgerald 2005a).

NStar workers on strike would now have to pay between $462 and $1,478 a month under COBRA to receive medical coverage. Massachusetts AFL-CIO president Robert Haynes, who had worked with NStar CEO Thomas May on a number of civic efforts, was shocked. “I am very surprised that Tom would do this,” he told the Boston Globe. “Taking away people’s health insurance is the worst thing you can do to a family. That’s not the Tom May I know” (Howe 2005e). Added to the issue of stray voltage and the death of several pets, this action only strengthened the public perception of NStar as heartless and helped build public support among NStar customers and the public at large. NStar customers in the greater Boston area were a key relationship that NStar would need to maintain, and they were losing ground quickly.

The severing of health care and other aggressive actions by an employer early in a strike can deal a strong blow to union solidarity. But not at Local 369. They were prepared. NStar’s predecessor had done the same thing in 1986. Though Sullivan expressed outrage in the press (Howe 2005c), privately he says, “We knew they were going to do it. We were ready for that. We had already sent out the COBRA instructions so the members weren’t surprised at all. The only thing that surprised us was when the whole world gasped” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 20).

The impact of cutting all health care benefits was dramatized later in the first week of the strike. Jordan, the six-year-old daughter of Mark Simpson, who had been with the company for nineteen years, was scheduled to be fit with a prosthetic leg. But the fitting was canceled when the insurance was cut off. The local quickly voted to authorize any funds necessary for the procedure, but Sullivan was reluctant about making this a public issue. “I called O’Neill and said, ‘I want to know how this is going to play, because I don’t want to look like we’re taking advantage of this little girl.’ He said, ‘No way. This exactly exemplifies what you guys are talking about’” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 18).

The coverage in print and visual media was huge. In an effort to save face and grab the moral high ground, May told the Boston Globe he would have the company pay for whatever medical procedures Jordan needed, adding, “I don’t want to see any little girl caught up in union politics” (Howe 2005b). Jordan’s father refused the offer, saying “his family would not accept any special treatment and will not take medical aid from NStar unless the utility has signed a contract that restores company-paid health insurance for all 1,900 striking workers” (Howe 2005b).

NStar was losing the public relations war. Between the electrocution of dogs and the elimination of health coverage and its impact on a young girl, NStar was struggling with its public image. The union had turned around the company’s effort to portray Local 369 members as overpaid and continued hammering the company on staffing, preventive maintenance, and public safety. On the street, the picketing lines held, with participation by Local 369 members and others, and the “rat patrols” were limiting the effectiveness of outside contractors. When talks were restarted on May 23, the union seemed to be in a very strong position. And though the company had largely been able to deliver electricity and gas to its customers, it was losing their loyalty. As Tim Morrisey suggests, “There were supervisors who’d go into coffee shops and they were refused being served. They wouldn’t serve them. People would have a tree on their wires coming into their house, and they’d see the picketers following these people and they’d see what was going on, and they’d open their doors and say, ‘Get off my property. I don’t want you doing the work. I’ll wait until they’re off the strike. I’ll wait until the strike’s over and have the real workers perform the work’” (interview, October 11, 2005, 8).

Storms and Settlement

The talks on May 23 did not go well. In a four-hour meeting with a federal mediator, little progress was made, and no further talks were scheduled. The union rally that day at Prudential Center had more than 2,000 people attending, including several politicians, such as state representative Marty Walsh and secretary of state William Galvin, who blasted NStar’s cutting off of health benefits: “It strikes me as a new low in terms of tactics” (Noyes 2005). Cracks were beginning to develop in the company’s key relationship with the larger political community.

Late the next day, union officials heard that NStar had mailed postcards to striking workers, urging them to come back to work with the approach of a summer storm (Fitgerald 2005b). The next morning the local had a sharp retort on the recorded information line where members could learn about strike details. Gary Sullivan, president of Local 369, said, “A Nor’easter is expected to hit our region this evening. We believe NStar is nervous. As such, NStar is trying to get our members to cross the picket line through a mailing which some members have reported receiving. Do not be fooled. This is a sign of how desperate NStar has become,” he said. “It is critical that all union members continue to tightly hold the line together. We will not roll over; we will not cross the picket line, because the only leverage you have to ensure safe working conditions and fair compensation for you and your family is to stay united.”

The storm came, and at least 20,000 NStar customers lost service. The company did its best, with its management and contractors, to respond. Throughout the storm, the union kept its pickets up. Hurley and Sullivan visited some service centers in the pouring rain and howling wind, expecting to see “a skeleton crew” on the picket line. But Hurley says, “we rounded a corner and I saw a hundred people there. I was amazed” (interview, September 27, 2005, 26).

By Thursday, May 26, it was clear that NStar was way behind in its repair operations, and customers “were facing twelve hours and longer to get power restored” (Howe 2005a). The company tried to blame their slow response time on the strike. But because of all the work the union had done with NStar’s customers, they were unmoved. With 3,000 customers still without power on Friday, the company agreed to meet with the union Saturday. But back at the bargaining table, the demeanor of NStar’s bargaining team had changed little. As Gary Sullivan reports, “They were still in the ‘Fuck you, you’re not getting anything’ [mode]. But their shoulders were a little drooped and their heads were just a little bit down. They knew that we knew they were beaten. … But they wanted to save face and act tough” (interview, September 27, 2005, 26-27).

Nevertheless, negotiations moved quickly on Saturday. The union had moved virtually all of its issues off the table. The company agreed to create 150 new positions and address many of the safety and health concerns the local had raised. The only issue remaining was pensions. The company still had a two-tiered pension plan on the table. The bargaining committee was divided over how to respond next. Some felt they were on a roll and argued for staying out till the pension issue was off the table. Others wanted only to get “a fair and reasonable contract knowing that tomorrow tides could turn” (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 30). Sullivan continues,

The one thing I’ve learned about negotiating is this: when you’re on top and you have the leverage, you do not kick, you don’t rub people’s faces in it, you do not take advantage of it. Don’t vary from fair. You pick a fair and reasonable position and stick to it. Just because things are going your way, doesn’t mean you can kick it up a notch. Because that can come back and bite you so quickly it’s not funny. I’ve experienced it—one minute I’m on top of the world and the next minute I’m begging for a deal. That’s the way it is. Fortunately, the board saw it that way. (Gary Sullivan, interview, September 27, 2005, 30)

Right after the union signed off on the agreement, a series of storms rolled through the Boston area, and it is not clear whether the union would have held onto its public support if it had still been negotiating over what to most would have been a minor pension issue.

By the end of Saturday, the union and NStar had a tentative agreement. They met again on Sunday and by 6:00 p.m. had signed off on a new contract, subject to ratification by the Local 369 members. Thirteen days after it started, the strike was over. Local 369 members overwhelmingly approved the contract and returned to work the following week.

How the Strike Was Won

Although the actions that Local 369 took during negotiations with NStar and during the strike were important, alone they would not have been enough. It was the kind of union it built that allowed it to take full advantage of its strike strategy and tactics and bring the strike to a successful conclusion. At the foundation was the local’s transition out of business unionism to a more social unionism—reengaging with the larger labor movement and with the communities where its members worked and lived. This reengagement created allies that would prove invaluable during the strike and built a capacity for activism among its membership. Also, because the local had not been on strike since 1986, this coalition work was an important surrogate for the institutional memory of activism within its own organization.

None of the changes the local made was more important than increasing transparency and membership involvement as the local moved from a servicing to an organizing model. Beginning with the implementation of its strategic plan and the action committees and continuing with the expansion of the bargaining committee during negotiations, members were central to the life and activity of Local 369. With this level of involvement, NStar was unable to whipsaw Local 369 members and leadership during the bargaining process, as too often happens. Without member involvement throughout the bargaining process, some of the membership of Local 369 very well could have been lured back to work with an approaching storm, as the company was hoping, and they would probably have been considerably less committed to walking the picket line and keeping contractors out.

Adding staff capacity was also one of the key building blocks for Local 369. The union worked with a labor consultant to devise a strategic plan and organize action groups and hired a full-time staff person to implement the plan. Later, during the strike, it hired a PR firm. Given the level of employer opposition unions are facing today, it takes additional staff resources to win, especially when, as we saw here in Local 369, they were linked back to rank-and-file involvement.

Having built organizational capacity before the NStar strike, Local 369 was able to leverage three important key relationship that were key to NStar’s success. First the local reached out to the public concerned about electrical safety. After the storm hit, concern about electrical safety and the use of professional, qualified personnel to provide services increased among utility customers and other community members. On the safety issue, the union was also able to involve politicians, including the state attorney general and later the mayor—key relationships that NStar, as a utility company, needed to maintain its operations. The severing of health benefits also provided an opportunity to more deeply involve politicians in the strike and provide an additional secondary pressure point. Finally, the local further reduced the supply of potential replacement workers by focusing on outside contractors—organizing a major player, contacting some in advance, and subjecting those who showed up to unrelenting pressure.

The union was also successful in changing the rules and the pace of the campaign in two key areas. Breaking with a long tradition, it moved bargaining out of the back room into the daylight. Not only did this change the nature of the negotiations, for the first time allow members full participation in the process, and prevent the company from trying to sell inadequate offers directly to the members—the union also changed the rules through an aggressive media campaign that allowed it to reframe issues than in the past had been presented only from the point of view of management.

The media-savvy Local 369 president, Gary Sullivan, with the assistance of the O’Neill group, was very strong in reframing the meaning of the strike. They flipped the $97,000 annual salary for workers that NStar claimed into 97,000 hours of overtime and into an issue of staffing and public safety. Later, when the company tried to pin the slow response to the storm on the union, the union was able to build on its excellent relationship with customers and blame it instead on corporate irresponsibility. And it reframed NStar’s offer to help a disabled child as the inhumanity of the company’s cutting off health benefits.

One could look at the NStar victory and say that the union got some big breaks—a perfectly timed storm, a young girl in need of an artificial limb, and an industry in which it is difficult to find qualified replacement workers. And indeed these issues all contributed to its victory. But also Local 369 made its own luck by painstakingly remaking the union. From a rejuvenated base, it was then able to conduct a highly successful campaign targeting key relationships, changing the rules of engagement with management, and continually reframing NSTAR’s characterization of the union and the campaign.

The NStar victory shows that we must move beyond the belief that strikes are won simply by using the right tactics. A strong union, one with a high level of loyalty and involvement by its members and sufficient finances, expertise, and staff capacity to sustain a strike, provides the foundation for a successful campaign. Once the foundation has been set, unions need to explore ways to outflank power by leveraging secondary targets, changing the rules and pace of the campaign, and reframing meaning to the union’s advantage.