"When the United Auto Workers walked out on Detroit's car companies earlier this month, the union called its unconventional plan of attack the Stand Up Strike, an homage to the Sit-Down Strike that transformed American labor nearly a century ago. But the tactics also echoed another innovative campaign with its own catchy name.
Chaos.
Create Havoc Around Our System was the strategy the Association of Flight Attendants unleashed in 1993, when two dozen employees suddenly walked off a total of seven Alaska Airlines flights, showing how a limited number of unpredictable strikes could be more powerful than a mass work stoppage. The strategy was built around the element of surprise, and it was as creative as it was counterintuitive.
Now the UAW is shredding its historical playbook and taking a page from the AFA's.
Instead of the traditional method of striking, a full walkout at one of the Big Three automakers, the UAW is selectively targeting plants operated by Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis without much warning. It started with three facilities. It widened the strikes at GM and Stellantis on Friday to 38 parts-distribution centers, sparing Ford from this round because of recent progress in contract talks. The UAW is not saying when or where it might strike next.
But its leaders have explained why less than 15% of the unionized workers are walking out right now. UAW President Shawn Fain told the rank-and-file that this strategy will give negotiators leverage and flexibility at the bargaining table with the Big Three.
"The goal here is to maximize the hurt on the companies while minimizing the risk for the workers," said Barry Eidlin, a McGill University sociologist who studies the labor movement.
That was also the theory behind Chaos, and it was not just effective but highly efficient: The strikes resulted in a better deal with higher pay even though 99% of the unit's flight attendants kept reporting to work.
The UAW's Stand Up Strike strategy was not directly inspired by any one event, but you don't have to squint to see the influence of the AFA's Chaos.
Both are meant to sow confusion, keep companies guessing and paralyze interconnected systems. Both amplify uncertainty and create opportunities for mistakes that the union can exploit. Both stoke members' desire to join the fight and give management an incentive to settle before the strikes expand.
And both actually require more trust, organization and discipline than a typical work stoppage because they depend on secrecy and clear lines of communication. When members of a union are gearing up for a strike, the leaders must have credibility to persuade them that going to work is the savvier move. It takes order to manage chaos.
But here's the most valuable thing about the strategy: It saves money. The slow rollout of the Stand Up Strike means that most workers are still on the job, and the UAW can ratchet up the pressure while preserving its $825 million fund to compensate striking employees. The drawback of an immediate, outright strike is that starting with an extreme action drains resources and leaves the union with little room to escalate based on a company's response.
"You can't turn it up to 11," Eidlin said. "This isn't Spinal Tap."
The strategic philosophies have enough in common that when I called Jerry Glass, a longtime consultant to airlines on labor issues, he told me that he was having Chaos flashbacks.
"It was the first thing I thought of," he said.
Sara Nelson, international president of the AFA-CWA, told me that Chaos strikes increase a union's chances of success because they flip the balance of power and put executives in an unfamiliar position: They have no clue what's coming next.
"And they lose their minds," Nelson told me. "It's very interesting running a Chaos campaign and knowing exactly what's happening. It's sort of like standing in the middle of a tornado and watching everything around you swirling out of control. Except you're not getting caught up in it."
Every useful business strategy is born from someone's imagination. This one was also born from someone's desperation.
David Borer began work as the AFA's director of collective bargaining in 1987, when TWA had just replaced thousands of striking flight attendants from another union. "It was devastating," he said. It was also disorienting. If airlines were going to hire permanent replacements during strikes, Borer feared that his union would never be able to strike.
He wasn't sure how to handle such a tricky situation. Then he opened his copy of "The Art of War."
"Strikes are remarkably analogous to warfare," Borer told me. "One of the things I got from Sun Tzu was that you don't just attack your opponent. You attack your opponent's strategy. The strategy of the airlines was that they would just replace the flight attendants. So our strategy had to go right at that."
The union's top priority was reducing the possibility of permanent replacements taking their jobs, he said, and temporarily striking a limited number of seemingly random flights would achieve that goal. Alaska had prepared for a potential strike by training hundreds of accountants, secretaries and office workers to be replacement flight attendants and putting them on planes just in case. After the contract talks stalled in May 1993, the AFA tortured the airline with two months of threats to create havoc -- and then, right before a crowded plane from Seattle to San Diego was scheduled to board, the flight attendants struck.
Chaos ensued.
"They had no idea what to do," Borer said, "because nobody had done this before."
The airline suspended some flight attendants, replaced others and pledged to fire anyone else who participated in the strikes. But most of the union members picketing with "Pay us, or Chaos" signs kept working their assigned shifts. The entire campaign involved 24 of 1,500 flight attendants and seven flights over several months. The AFA hoped it would spook passengers and dent the airline's business, and Alaska's traffic fell as soon as the flight attendants promised chaos -- and before Chaos delayed a single flight.
The key moment in this labor dispute was a federal court ruling in December 1993 that upheld the legality of the intermittent strikes and validated the AFA's strategy. That decision prohibited Alaska from disciplining flight attendants who walked off the planes and forced the airline to reinstate the ones who had been replaced.
Alaska and the AFA had been at war for three years by then. They had peace within two weeks of the court ruling.
The flight attendants have only used Chaos once. But once was enough.
The mere possibility that it might torment the airlines with more Chaos provides the union with ammunition in labor disputes to this day. When the flight attendants are bargaining, they're also picketing in loud, purposefully ugly green Chaos shirts, reminding management that their airline could be the next Alaska. This strategy doesn't even have to be executed to be successful.
Chaos isn't a strategy that applies to every strike because not every company is as vulnerable to disruption as airlines. While striking a few movie sets won't shut down Hollywood, targeting a few factories can slow down Detroit's production line. And that can manufacture a negotiating advantage for the side at a financial disadvantage.
Just ask David Borer. He's now the general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees. On his office wall is a poster celebrating the AFA's declaration of victory. On the shelves are two dozen editions of the book responsible for that victory.
"I actually collect Sun Tzu," he said. "I had one at the time. I've been collecting ever since."" [1]
I'm not a lawyer, I don't know what the law allows striking teachers in Lithuania. And if allowed, striking teachers could unexpectedly disrupt showing up to the work of some parents of young children by suddenly announcing a day of strike in strategically chosen classrooms. These disturbances would ripple through the entire Lithuanian economy and change the government's position in the negotiations quite quickly.
1. EXCHANGE --- Science of Success: Chaos Has Come to Detroit. This Is Why It Works. --- The UAW's strategy relies on surprise, but it's not unprecedented. Cohen, Ben. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 Sep 2023: B.5.
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