Collective Actions Comprising the 1969 Charleston Hospital Workers Strike: A 100-Day Collaboration of Labor and Civil Rights Movements.

The American Sociological Association has a section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements but there are scarce examples in the literature describing or explaining the relationship between the two phenomena. One reason for this is that "collective behavior" has been, more often than not, advanced as a kind of "explanation" than it has been operationally defined as phenomena that can be observed and recorded. McPhail and Schweingruber (1998, 1999) identify and define more than four dozen elementary forms of collective action (EFCA) that have been and continue to be observed in many social movement campaigns, e.g., two or more persons collectively marching, chanting, singing, gesturing, placarding, picketing, boycotting and/or sitting-in. This paper draws upon our interviews of campaign organizers, comprehensive newspaper records and photographs, and three days of systematic field observation records to describe some of the collective actions that comprised the 1999 strike campaign of Charleston South Carolina hospital workers.1 The campaign was a collaborative effort of civil rights and labor union movement organizations to bring about change and the actions of the state to prevent it. Specifically, we examine the interplay of striking workers' sustained collective actions attempting to disrupt the community quotidian and the collective actions of the state and local government that attempt to prevent or thwart the workers' actions (e.g., arrests and curfews). The Charleston campaign illustrates the necessary if less than sufficient contributions of local and national movement organizations to mobilize participation as well as necessary resources for participants (e.g., money for food, rent, utilities, clothing for participants and their families).² The campaign also illustrates the combined worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment that Tilly argued is required for success; these too were important but insufficient. Our thesis is that the interplay of the collective actions of strikers and the state, and two unanticipated but collateral actions - one by the federal government and one by an international labor union - had the cumulative and sufficient effect of disrupting the quotidian to the point that state, community and hospital decision makers were eager to come to the bargaining table with civil rights and labor union decision makers.3 This ended the disruption of concern to community decisions makers but only provided a partial resolution of the striking workers' grievances and demands. Nonetheless, our paper shows that movement campaigns can be viewed as concatenations of individual and collective actions and interactions of challengers and the challenged and thereby provide one way of rethinking the functional relationship between collective actions and social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]