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To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (17882)	4/5/2002 11:39:36 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

dolinar, What do these statistics signify? The average duration of a work stoppage by an individual bargaining unit? Or other? Here in Oregon, we've just settled a nurse's strike at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) with a duration of 56 days, as I recall. And a metal workers strike that got converted into a nasty "lockout" by management at Wah Chang Teledyne in Albany lasted six months. But the percentage of workers in unions in this country is about the lowest in the OECD countries, and substantially lower than it was in the salad days in the American economy up until 1973, so the impact of strikes is quite limited these days. -Ray

To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (17882)	4/6/2002 12:19:43 PM
From: AC Flyer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

Meaningless without a definition of the stat. (1) Average length of strike and (2) Days lost to strikes per capita in the national workforce are two completely different stats. Your data is most likely (1). If you looked at (2) you would see a totally different picture. The reason for this is obvious. Collective bargaining in the US takes place under totally different conditions to that in most "Euro" countries (Canada is a Euro country for all practical purposes). To illustrate this, a labor lawyer once described the implicit contract between US employer and US employee to me thus: "you can fire someone for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason, as long as you don't violate their civil rights." And this is in Massachusetts, one of the more pro-labor union states in the US. Many US states do not allow the economic abomination of the so-called closed-shop. These are the "right to work" states, where a worker can not be coerced into throwing his money down some Union rat-hole. Of course, we still have to deal nationally with the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) which is staffed by neo-Communists like Raymond Duray. So, when US workers strike it's because they have a heartfelt grievance of some kind (as framed by their local AFL-CIO bloodsucker). When Euro-workers strike, it's because they didn't like the meatballs served in the cafeteria that day or because there's no toilet paper in the bathroom or some such equally pressing issue. Hence the difference in strike length.