Strike-breaking targeted continuity through division, isolation, and comfort

Evidence

Much like a picket line itself, a strike is something whose strength lies in its continuity. Thus, as always, employers focused their efforts on breaking the line. Early on, they tried to get each port to negotiate its own separate agreement, thus preventing a coast-wide alliance. They hired strikebreakers—in some cases college football players—offering them a police escort and housing aboard a moored ship with plush treatment: meals, laundry, entertainment, and banking facilities. The employers also attempted to foment racism among the longshoremen; Quin writes that “[b]osses who would never hire Negroes except for the most menial jobs now made special, and relatively unsuccessful, efforts to recruit Negroes as scabs.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 289

Categorization

• XREF: The tactic of fomenting racism among workers to break their solidarity resonates with Milgrom’s and Milgrom’s accounts of coordination costs inside divided trading/labor communities. — connects to: Good-feeling token environmental gestures substitute for and delay real change — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2955
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Good-feeling token environmental gestures substitute for and delay real change — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2955