Big labor peaceful in March
Reuters reports: “No big U.S. strikes in March-Labor Department”: “ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ee/Tables/strike.txt.”
There were no large strikes by American workers in March, the Department of Labor said on Friday, after a 20-week-long grocery store action in California ended in late February.
Economists said the return of the striking grocery workers during the reference period used to calculate the department’s payroll number for March is likely to boost the job growth figure for the month.
Good news. It doesn’t make much sense to strike when the job market’s as weak as some of the numbers (and the Democrats) suggest. And the UFCW’s experience should be a sobering lesson. It may even be this decade’s equivalent of the 1980′s PATCO strike (air traffic controllers — anyone remember that?) in terms of suppressing labor’s urge to strike.
