Once long ago in a country far away there was a daily newspaper company which decided its reporters were getting too good deal. The answer was obviously to provoke a strike but keep publishing the paper throughout it. Now, this paper covered a wide geographic area and much of the content was written by freelancers. So, the management wrote to the freelancers saying it was going to cut its payments to them. The freelancers were outraged and turned to the paper's full time reporters for support. The area union branch was pretty much run by the paper's staffers. They weren't much interested in helping. The strike was then successfully provoked. The freelancers remembered how unhelpful the staffers had been. They kept contributing to the paper during the strike. The threatened cut in freelance rates never happened. Meanwhile, in preparation for the strike the company had hired a bunch of weekly newspaper reporters for a proposed new free sheet. Their employment contracts specified they had to work wherever in its publishing empire the company assigned them. So, they ended up as "accidental" strikebreakers. The free sheet never materialised and when the strike was over, they were all fired. Planning pays. We'll never know if worker solidarity would have.