Northwest Airlines could face a
strike as early as Saturday morning if it does not reach a contract agreement with its mechanics union.
Although the dictionary defines a strike as "a temporary stoppage of [work] in order to bring about compliance with demands," historians can better understand a strike as a cultural act, as a drama which workers use to convey their messages to potential supporters.
First, there is clear evidence that the strikers analyzed the Klein's-Ohrbach's strike as a struggle of white-collar workers.
While it is difficult to point to the strike as the cause of changes in the hospital environment in the two years after the strike, its impact is definitely significant.
The revolution in nursing and collective bargaining over the previous 5 to 10 years made a strike a likely occurrence.
The socialist editor and labor organizer Oscar Ameringer described the "scab brigade" as composed of "riff-raff, slum dwellers, rubes, imbeciles [and] college students."(6) Journalists described the 1,500 strikebreakers shipped in from Western towns to help break the 1905 New York IRT
strike as unkempt lumpenproletarians, a "weird appearing lot," with "holes in their shoes," who "had not patronized [barbers] .