Europe Is on Strike — Like Postwar America
Europe Is on Strike — Like Postwar America -
Four European countries — Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal — held coordinated general strikes today, to signal opposition to cutbacks in basic services, now into their fourth year. A general strike feels like a very European tactic at this point in history, and it is. An attempt at a national strike in the US last May 1 fizzled terribly, and broad actions of this type are few and far between even in heavily industrialized parts of South and East Asia, Africa or Latin America.
But it wasn’t always so. A surprising bit of history recorded by California’s teacher’s union, the California Federation of Teachers, tells the mostly forgotten story of a wave of general strikes that struck the American west coast in the years after World War II.