The workers and other protesters who gathered at the Group of 20 summit meeting last week in London were continuing a time-honoured European tradition of taking their grievances into the streets.

Two weeks earlier, more than a million workers in France demonstrated against layoffs, and in the last month alone, French workers took their bosses hostage four times in various labour disputes. When General Motors recently announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the company’s German headquarters.

But in the United States, where GM plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the television news, but that’s about all. Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits.

The US certainly has had a rich and sometimes militant history of labour protest—from the Homestead Steel Works strike against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 to the auto workers’ sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the 67-day walkout by 400,000 GM workers in 1970. But in recent decades, American workers have increasingly steered clear of such militancy, for reasons that range from fear of having their jobs shipped overseas to their self-image as full-fledged members of the middle class, with all its trappings and aspirations.

David Kennedy, a Stanford historian and author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, says that America’s individualist streak is a major reason for this reluctance to take to the streets. Citing a 1940 study by the social psychologist Mirra Komarovsky, he said her interviews of the Depression-era unemployed found “the psychological reaction was to feel guilty and ashamed, that they had failed personally.”

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