I live in Chicago and we have a teachers strike. I went by several striking schools and I have seen teacher sitting there with signs. I’ve seen children carrying signs and I’ve seen them leaning on building carrying signs.
I thought that in order to properly picket, you have to carry a sign and walk up and down. I didn’t realize you could just sit there in a lawn chair or have kids carry your signs.
Or is this just one of those things you see on TV that isn’t like that in real life?
Certainly there are rules, but they’re designed to prevent picketers from being overly obstructive toward managers, non-union employees, and customers who are “crossing picket lines” to work at or patronize the operation being picketed. If you’re sitting off to the side in a lawn chair, you’re being less obstructive than if you were walking back and forth with a sign, and thus unlikely to run afoul of the law.
There are rules, although I don’t know what they are. My first job, and for many years, the highest paying job I had was walking the picket line when food store employees were on strike.
I thought you had to keep moving to avoid being arrested for loitering.
The rules in some places in Canada I imagine apply most places - you cannot be obstructing traffic. You may picket "to get your message across’ but if you block the way, do not allow people through, then you are being obstructive.
The letter of the law may define what constitutes blocking in some jurisdictions; so you will often see an endless stream of picketers crossing back and forth in front of incoming traffic so that nobody is standing in the way and specifically blocking the traffic.
Of course, especially in Canada, forcing a confrontation by being dicks about the letter of the alw is not the best approach when the goal is to get the strikers to agree to something of their own free will. It is a perfect recipe for ticking them off, annoying strikers, prolonging the strike, etc. Sometimes employers will do so in order to provoke a reaction that allows them to go to court and get an injunction.
Often the police do not want to get into it either - they don’t need to be picking sides on what is essentially a dispute between two private parties… unless it gets to the point where property is seriously damaged or threats are made.
In the old days, picket lines physically blocked people from entering the premises, and that’s when the popular idea of what a picket looks like formed. There’s still plenty of stuff like that – I work in downton D.C. and you see people walking the line at least once every couple weeks. But federal legislation has, for many decades, made it illegal for strikers to obstruct customers, managers, scabs, or other employees from entering a place of business.
It’s therefore not uncommon for strikers to just sit around – enough to establish a presence for bystanders, but that’s it. I’d say this is especially true in major strikes like this, when there’s plenty of news coverage, so the union isn’t relying on the picketers to notify the public that a certain business is being struck. (Also, presumably, some of these folks are working other jobs to make up the lost income.)
–Cliffy
You can’t picket on company property. The GE plant in Schenectady used to have a big white line by the entrance to mark this off.
You can’t block traffic or pedestrians.
Picket lines have changed. In the early days, you indeed spent the time marching (unless it was a sit-down strike, though those have been banned since the 30s). But there’s no requirement that you march and the “keep moving” you see in old movies was only to make sure the picketers weren’t blocking traffic.
The most popular picketing technique in my neck of the woods is to have a couple of strikers sitting out in the parking lot with a giant inflatable rat.
Last year when we were in Boston the Verizon workers were on strike. We happened to pass a Verizon store which had picketers circling outside. As soon as they saw we were walking by they moved out of the way so they weren’t blocking us. They were very polite to us.
ETA: I don’t know what would have happened if we had tried to go into the store.
Haha, I saw this too. In a Chicago suburb. It was hilarious!
Years ago, I ‘walked’ a picket line on a strike.
We literally walked back and forth in front of the driveway to the plant carrying signs only a few times: several times during the first day when news media came by with cameras, and each day around 9am and 5pm when management arrived or left the plant. Then we went back to sitting in chairs or inside somebody’s car.
We’d jump up and re-form the picket line when somebody tried to drive out from the plant (the truck drivers wouldn’t cross our picket line, so after trucks were loaded at the plant, managers would drive them out and meet the drivers at a nearby truckstop or coffee shop.)
We couldn’t stand still (that was ‘loitering’ or ‘obstructing’ but had to keep moving, so we went one after the other close together, with no time for a vehicle to go by (and pedestrians in a crosswalk had the right of way). After the first few days, we generally held them up for only a couple of minutes, long enough for the crowd to sing a verse of “We Shall Overcome” or “Joe Hill” or similar songs. (Hearing our execrable singing was probably the worst they had to endure!) Managers got a fair amount of insults & bad language; visitors got treated better, with nice explanations of why we had to strike because the company was treating us unfairly.
We also re-formed the picket line when any vehicle arrived at the driveway. Sometimes it was a delivery vehicle with a driver who wouldn’t cross the line – they would radio in to their company dispatcher, who would phone into the plant, and they would send a manager out to drive that vehicle across the picket line. Meanwhile the driver waited outside with us (and was offered coffee, doughnuts, and lots of handshakes).
Most of my time on the picket line was really rather boring. You sat around with nothing to do. No real violence or anything, just a lot of threats, insults, and bad language. The majority of my time on the picket line was actually spent sitting inside someones car, with the heater running – it was winter in Minnesota.
Scabby! I love that guy. You used to see him in D.C. all the time, then I didn’t see him at all for a couple years, but I’ve seen him two or three times so far this summer.
–Cliffy
Back when my wife was a union member her experience was similar to t-bonham.
You can’t step on the employer’s property because they could have you arrested for tresspassing, so you stay on the sidewalks, the street or a designated area.
You can’t stand still while you’re on the curb cut (entrance) because that’s obstructing traffic, so you walk closely together while crossing.
The rest of the time you’re standing or sitting around.
The last time I personally saw picketeers genuinely try to block all traffic into a business was back in the 1970’s.