Organizing Strikes and Boycotts
One of the actions that a labor union might organize that first comes to mind for most people is probably a strike. The union gained leverage for collectively bargaining with employers because of their solidarity, but sometimes concrete action needed to be taken to show employers that the union's solidarity was indeed a force that they needed to acknowledge. In the below document, Hearl Maxwell received orders from M.L. Walters, District 14's president, to begin organizing a strike due to a breach of contract between one of the companies' managers and the UMWA (this document will not be shown on this page, but can be seen here).
Maxwell has been ordered to lead the union workers of the Sheridan Coal Company and additionally bring in union workers from other areas if necessary for aiding the success of the strike. The work of the union does not end with the order to begin a strike; it includes negotiation with the business owners, organizing their own members in the strike, and attempting to gain cooperation from the non-union workers of the company. Blumenfield and Victorio have linked the success of a strike to a variable they called "strike intensity," which is essentially a ratio of work-hours spent on strike compared to work-hours spent working (519). Essentially, they found that higher strike intensity tended to have negative results for the outcome of the strike (519); however, of course the union members did not know this and would spend their hours on strike, and Walters provides a strategy to also reduce the work-hours of the independent workers of the company by sending members to their meetings to garner cooperation. This document shows viewers the strategies that unions used to attempt to gain support from non-union workers --namely, meeting with them in person and providing their argument to try to gain support--, but it also reveals something that with Blumenfield and Victorio's research can be seen as possibly a bad tactic, revealing a possible cause for what some have seen as a modern downturn of union activity: inefficiency due to sometimes having poor knowledge of effective bargaining tactics. They made the strike too intense, which modern research has shown to be ineffective in a strike.
Boycotts
Possibly less commonly thought of but equally important of a duty for a union is organizing boycotts. The unions looked at local businesses, and determined that some of them employed practices that were against organized labor. They acted to protect union interests other than their own, because organized labor as a whole was strongest when working together instead of in opposition. The bulletin below provides a list of stores that the UMWA saw as harming organized labor by refusing to support unionized clerks. In it, the miners of this organization and any sympathizers of any organized labor are urged to shop elsewhere.
