It’s a common trope in US culture: people sitting in parks or on front porches drinking from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
What’s the point of that bag of paper? It forces a choice. A police officer who sees someone drinking from a brown bag must choose between investigating further and taking action or looking the other way. Critically, it’s the thinnest of veneers that provides the officer with enough plausible deniability to choose the latter. The officer didn’t see the label. They didn’t know what the person was drinking. And given that the officer had other more pressing priorities, they chose not to investigate any further.
To be clear, a brown bag over a bottle of alcohol is not an actual legal protection. Drinking in public in many places is a violation of open container and public intoxication laws. But there is still a valuable lesson here: enforcement is discretionary.
And the brown-bag tactic of plausible deniability extends beyond liquor and beer. It also applies to labor actions. And it is on full display right now as thousands of agents working for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are calling out sick in an organic, bottom-up wildcat partial strike that defies the government and the law.
Federal laws prohibit strikes by federal workers and can be extremely punitive. Federal workers who strike can face a felony prosecution, time in prison, and fines of thousands of dollars. In fact, if you are a federal worker, you can be officially blacklisted from working for the federal government just for claiming you have the right to strike or even for being a member of a union that makes that claim.
To win real collective bargaining rights, federal workers had to directly face off against these constraints.
It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a massive wave of public sector strikes in the 1960s and 1970s. Over those two decades, hundreds of thousands of public sector workers went on strike, often in defiance of their…
Auteur: Chris Brooks
