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The threat by Uber and Lyft to shut down operations in California has two historical precedents.
The first is the “lockout” — which has a long and ugly history in Anglo-American labor relations.
The second precedent — which may well be more relevant — arose during the early years of the civil rights movement when Southern white segregationists adopted a strategy known as “massive resistance” to thwart the Supreme Court’s Brown decision mandating integrated schools.
Lockouts take place when capitalists seek to pressure workers to accept concessions in wages and working conditions. The infamous 1892 Homestead Steel Strike began as a lockout when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick demanded that the Amalgamated Union of Iron and Steel Workers accept wage cuts.
Frick also wanted to end the power of the union on the shop floor.
Other lockouts of more recent vintage took place at Caterpillar in 1992 when the corporation tried to get the UAW to accept big concessions, and such lockouts are rife in professional sports.
Workers at Uber and Lyft do not have a union, but as with so many other worker struggles today, they have worked through the courts and politics to achieve important improvements in their conditions of work, indeed in their rights as actual workers and not spurious contractors.
Uber and Lyft are therefore threatening to lockout these workers, and deprive riders of their services, in order to blackmail California citizens and lawmakers into accepting a debasement of the labor law.
No Pinkerton private armies are at their disposal (as in 1892). But the economic damage could be considerable. And of course, this is entirely a management decision. They are not being “forced” by some court or legislature to shut down. Their use of that word is purely rhetorical.
Some might object to my deployment of the segregationist “massive resistance” when seeking insight into the Lyft/Uber current shutdown threat. After all, Tony West, the chief Uber legal strategist, served in the Obama Department of Justice.
But Uber’s effort to thwart Court rulings today bares similarity to that of Southern elites who sought to thwart and nullify integrationist Court rulings of the 1950s. “Massive Resistance” was a strategy adopted by Southern elites (not the KKK or the bombers), to shut down schools, and did so, in states like Virginia rather than see local school boards or courts enforce integration orders. They claimed that the entire Southern way of life was at stake.
Today, Uber/Lyft claim they can’t live with a law passed by legislature and ratified by the courts. Their version of “massive resistance” is designed to generate conflict and distemper among thousands of drivers, riders, and citizens — not unlike the white elite mobilizations back then.
The Uber/Lyft threat of a shutdown is reprehensible. They should obey the law as written and adjudicated. Or will it require deployment of sovereign force — as at Little Rock in 1957 — to thwart their intransigence?