Can you, pray tell, imagine if your preschool workers went on strike? Like, you parental figure went to drop you off at the preschool on their way to work, but when you two arrived, a red and black flag was hanging from the front gate, above a poster proclaiming that the workers were subjected to inhumane working conditions and had shut down the school.
Can you imagine it? Personally, I really can't imagine the 60-odd year-old wives up upstanding church men who ran my Baptist preschool pulling off such a stunt, nor can I fathom such behavior at any other preschool I've ever heard of.
But, indeed, the preschool down the hill from my house did just that this week. The parents, a toddler or two in the crook of each arm, walked up to the sign, sighed in front of it, then calmly turned back to buckle their kids in their seats.
What if, on your way out of elementary school, your teacher slipped a letter home to your parents from the cafeteria workers, explaining that they were overworked and were shutting down the cafeteria for the next day? Skipping home with a list of union demands pinned to your backpack?
Again, the sight of my round, elderly cafeteria ladies, again, mostly women who went to church with my family, ever striking, or even complaining about their minimum-wage work, is hardly conceivable to me.
Yet, when I rolled up to my school yesterday, a letter, signed by the principle was posted to the gate explaining just that, as the letters sent home the day before stated, there would be no cafeteria due to a strike, and that parents should, "make the necessary arrangements". The teachers recalled that many students wouldn't come back for their afternoon classes, and others would bring lunch, and others would skip with their siblings up the hill to Grandma's, according to the habits of each family. This has not only happened before, this happens often enough that the teachers judge each parent based on their particular style of handling the situation.
Personally, I think that strikes are essential steps towards workers progressively obtaining humane working conditions and eventually seizing the means of production. I participated in a union in college and do my best to be an ally to those who strike.
But what does it mean to a society and to an economy if strikes are so common that everyone is used to them? What does it mean if everyone has a backup plan already and is hardly inconvenienced by a strike? Is it still effective? Does progress entail a decline in the efficacy of the strike? Do more progressive conditions require more radical action?
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