wildcat strike

wildcat strike, work stoppage undertaken by employees without the consent of their respective unions. Such strikes are not necessarily illegal, but they often violate terms of a collective bargaining agreement. The name is based on the stereotypical characteristics associated with wildcats: unpredictability and uncontrollability. These terms of description are often applied by the employers, the media, and the state, not the workers themselves.

The legitimacy of strikes per se has always been contested by the employers and the state, because strikes represent a challenge to their authority, power, and interests. For them, work stoppages that are held without notice or warning are often the most damaging, because the element of surprise and unpreparedness are two of the key tools in the workers’ armory for creating bargaining leverage. Wildcats provide no opportunity for employers to preempt the action by making threats to workers’ livelihoods or pay or by persuading them that their grievances should be dealt with by negotiations, mediation, or arbitration. In addition, such strikes leave little latitude for replacement workers to be hired or for stocks of produced goods or components to be built up or brought in from elsewhere.

Wildcats are particularly useful for workers in a variety of situations. The most obvious is when the strike’s impact has an immediate and disproportionate relation to the number of workers taking part, as, for example, in transport (air, rail, road, sea), newspapers, letter and parcel delivery, construction, and vehicle manufacture. The immediate impact of the wildcat is strengthened because, in these examples, the delivery of a service or product either is time-sensitive or has no substitute. Sometimes, the service or product is perishable. Often commercial contracts now stipulate specific times for service or project delivery, and failure to meet them results in financial penalties. This creates potential bargaining leverage. In recent years, a variant of this vulnerable configuration of work systems has emerged through the use of just-in-time (JIT) production, in which there are no supplies of stock at hand to withstand strikes (or breakdowns). Under JIT production systems, it is not only the immediate employer that comes under pressure but also the buyer of the components, as in the vehicle industry. Wildcats are also often used to provide a quick and robust demonstration of workers’ feelings on an issue or to apply a powerful form of pressure when management becomes intransigent during employer-union negotiations.

Wildcats have traditionally caused problems for unions. First, unions have rulebooks and constitutions under which proposals for strikes must pass to gain authorization and legitimacy. Wildcats eschew this process and challenge the authority of the national union and its general secretary or president. It nevertheless happens that, under force of pressure from the strikers, unions can retrospectively give sanction to wildcats. Second, when employers grant unions the rights of information, consultation, representation, and negotiation, employers presuppose that they are dealing with one unified and responsible bargaining partner typified by the union full-time officer. When a union’s members stage a wildcat, they will have contravened the stipulated use of negotiation, conciliation, mediation, and possibly arbitration to resolve grievances. In this situation, unions are often forced to condemn their own members’ actions because these actions are viewed to have undermined the legitimacy of the bargaining relationship with the employer.

However, wildcats are seldom unofficial strikes—that is, seldom are they completely without some degree of union support and knowledge. Most wildcats will be sanctioned in some way by the lower level of a union, be it the workplace representative or even the local paid officer, because these union officers understand the importance of such collective mobilization for aiding the strength and cohesion of the workplace union and, in turn, the importance of workplace unionism as a foundation of national unionism.