After the Strike: The Lasting Impact of Hiring Striker Replacements

Abstract

During the 1980s, several once-union-friendly companies took an uncharacteristically aggressive approach to collective bargaining: they demand major concessions and dared the unions to go on strike.1 Behind the new strategy was the willingness, perhaps even the desire, to respond to a strike by hiring permanent replacement workers. The companies reasoned that after the strike they would have a new, more easily managed workforce—less skilled, to be sure, but also younger, less expensive, and, best of all, non-union.