January 4 - The Longest Strike

Last year Chicago saw the end of what may have been the longest hotel strike in history. On Father’s Day 2013, 130 workers from the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue walked off the job. They were protesting a reduction in wages and the hotel’s hiring of minimum-wage subcontractors.  For ten years the strikers, let by Unite Here, picketed the hotel.  The hotel management remained unmoved.  Unite Here quietly ended the strike.  But that was not the longest strike in history-not by a long shot.  Today in labor history, January 4,1961, barbers assistants in Copenhagen, Denmark ended their strike.  They had first walked off the job in 1928—and the Guinness World Book of Records has declared the strike the longest in recorded history!  Every strike, or a work-stoppage, has its own character.  A strike might be as short as just a portion of a day. Or a strike might last for weeks, months, or years.  Sometimes union members call strikes to last a specific amount of time—usually a few days.  Other times union members vote for an open-ended strike, with the duration uncertain.  The tactic of a strike is one of the most extreme measures a union can take.  Usually, a strike means that all other efforts to gain a fair contract have been exhausted.  Long strikes have become less common in recent years.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were only 15 major work stoppages in 2013.  Of these two-thirds lasted three days or less.