Strike action, also called labor strike, labour strike in British English, or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became common during the Industrial Revolution, when mass labor became important in factories and mines. As striking became a more common practice, governments were often pushed to act (either by private business or by union workers). When government intervention occurred, it was rarely neutral or amicable. Early strikes were often deemed unlawful conspiracies or anti-competitive cartel action, and many were subject to massive legal repression by state police, federal military power, and federal courts. Many Western nations legalized striking under certain conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Strikes are sometimes used to pressure governments to change policies. Occasionally, strikes destabilize the rule of a particular political party or ruler; in such cases, strikes are often part of a broader social movement taking the form of a campaign of civil resistance. Notable examples are the 1980 Gdańsk Shipyard and the 1981 Warning Strike led by Lech Wałęsa. These strikes were significant in the long campaign of civil resistance for political change in Poland, and were an important mobilizing effort that contributed to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of communist party rule in Eastern Europe. Another example is the general strike in Weimar Germany in response to the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. It was called by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and received such broad support that it resulted in the collapse of the putsch.
There are a varitety of different types of strikes, as well as responses to them or actions taken against them. They are the subject of various schools of thought, as well as creative works, such as films.
History
Origin of the term
The use of the English word "strike" to describe a work protest was first seen in 1768, when sailors, in support of demonstrations in London, "struck" or removed the topgallant sails of merchant ships at port, thus crippling the ships. The 1797 Spithead and Nore mutinies have been compared to labor strikes, and anticipated elements that would later become widespread, including use of the red flag in the context of labor disputes.
Pre-industrial strikes
The first historically certain account of strike action was in ancient Egypt on 14 November in 1152 BCE, when artisans of the Royal Necropolis at Deir el-Medina walked off their jobs in protest at the failure of the government of Ramesses III to pay their wages on time and in full. The royal government ended the strike by raising the artisans' wages.
The first Jewish source for the idea of a labor strike appears in the Talmud, which records that the bakers who prepared showbread for the altar went on strike.
An early predecessor of the general strike may have been the secessio plebis in ancient Rome. In The Outline of History, H. G. Wells characterized this event as "the general strike of the plebeians; the plebeians seem to have invented the strike, which now makes its first appearance in history." Their first strike occurred because they "saw with indignation their friends, who had often served the state bravely in the legions, thrown into chains and reduced to slavery at the demand of patrician creditors".
During and after the Industrial Revolution
For the first time in history during the Industrial Revolution, large numbers of people were members of the industrial working class; they lived in towns and cities, exchanging their labor for payment. By the 1830s, when the Chartist movement was at its peak in Britain, a true and widespread 'workers consciousness' was awakening. In 1838, a Statistical Society of London committee "used the first written questionnaire… The committee prepared and printed a list of questions 'designed to elicit the complete and impartial history of strikes.'"
In 1842 the demands for fairer wages and conditions across many different industries finally exploded into the first modern general strike. After the second Chartist Petition was presented to Parliament in April 1842 and rejected, a strike began in the coal mines of Staffordshire, England, and soon spread through Britain, affecting factories, cotton mills in Lancashire and coal mines from Dundee to South Wales and Cornwall. The strike was politically motivated, and was driven by an agenda to win concessions. As much as half of the then-industrial work force were on strike at its peak–over 500,000 men. The local leadership marshaled a growing working class tradition to politically organize their followers to mount an articulate challenge to the capitalist, political establishment. Friedrich Engels, an observer in London at the time, wrote:
by its numbers, this class has become the most powerful in England, and woe betide the wealthy Englishmen when it becomes conscious of this fact … The English proletarian is only just becoming aware of his power, and the fruits of this awareness were the disturbances of last summer.
As the 19th century progressed, strikes became a fixture of industrial relations across the industrialized world, as workers organized themselves to collectively bargain for better wages and standards with their employers. Karl Marx condemned the theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon criminalizing strike action in his work The Poverty of Philosophy.
In 1937, there were 4,740 strikes in the United States. This was the greatest strike wave in American labor history. The number of major strikes and lockouts in the US fell by 97% from 381 in 1970, to 187 in 1980, to only 11 in 2010. Companies countered the threat of a strike by threatening to close or move a plant.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted in 1967 by the United Nations General Assembly, ensures the right to strike in Article 8. The European Social Charter, adopted in 1961, also ensures the right to strike in Article 6.
The Farah Strike, 1972–1974, labeled the "strike of the century," was organized and led by Mexican American women predominantly in El Paso, Texas.
Frequency and duration
Strikes are rare, in part because many workers are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Strikes that do occur are generally fairly short in duration. Labor economist John Kennan notes:
In Britain in 1926 (the year of the general strike) about 9 workdays per worker were lost due to strikes. In 1979, the loss due to strikes was a little more than one day per worker. These are the extreme cases. In the 79 years following 1926, the number of workdays lost in Britain was less than 2 hours per year per worker. In the U.S., idleness due to strikes never exceeded one half of one percent of total working days in any year during the period 1948-2005; the average loss was 0.1% per year. Similarly, in Canada over the period 1980-2005, the annual number of work days lost due to strikes never exceeded one day per worker; on average over this period lost worktime due to strikes was about one-third of a day per worker. Although the data are not readily available for a broad sample of developed countries, the pattern described above seems quite general: days lost due to strikes amount to only a fraction of a day per worker per annum, on average, exceeding one day only in a few exceptional years.
Since the 1990s, strike actions have generally further declined, a phenomenon that might be attributable to lower information costs (and thus more readily available access to information on economic rents) made possible by computerization and rising personal indebtedness, which increases the cost of job loss for striking workers. In the United States, the number of workers involved in major work stoppages (including strikes and, less commonly, lockouts) that involved at least a thousand workers for at least one full shift generally declined from 1973 to 2017 (coinciding with a general decrease in overall union membership), before substantially increasing in 2018 and 2019. In the 2018 and 2019 period, 3.1% of union members were involved in a work stoppage each year on average, these strikes also contained more workers than ever recorded with an average of 20,000 workers participating in each major work stoppage in 2018 and 2019.
By country
For the period from 1996 to 2000, the ten countries with the most strike action (measured by average number of days not worked for every 1,000 employees) were as follows:
Variations
Black ban
The black ban is strike action taken against a particular job or employer, in order to protect the economic interests of the strikers.
Byline strike
A byline strike is when newspaper writers choose to withhold their names from their stories, as a way to protest actions of their employer.
Flying squads
Activists may form "flying squad" groups for strikes or other actions, a form of picketing, to disrupt the workplace or another aspect of capitalist production. Examples include supporting other strikers or unemployed workers, participating in protests against globalization, or opposing abusive landlords.
General strikes
Strikes may be specific to a particular workplace, unit within a workplace, or employer; or, they may encompass an entire industry, or every worker within a given area. Strikes that involve all workers, or a number of large and important groups of workers, in a particular community or region are known as general strikes. Under some circumstances, strikes may take place in order to put pressure on the State or other authorities, or may be a response to unsafe conditions in the workplace.
Green ban
During the development boom of the 1970s in Australia, the Green ban was developed from the black ban. This is a form of strike action taken by a trade union or other organized labor group for environmentalist or conservationist purposes.
Hunger strike
A hunger strike is a deliberate refusal to eat. Hunger strikes are often used in prisons as a form of political protest. Like student strikes, a hunger strike aims to worsen the public image of the target.
Jurisdictional strike
A jurisdictional strike in United States labor law refers to a concerted refusal to work undertaken by a union to assert its members' right to particular job assignments, and to protest the assignment of disputed work to members of another union, or to unorganized workers.
Overtime ban
The overtime ban is when employees refuse to work overtime with the intent to frustrate business. Such strikes may in some cases be a form of "partial strike" or "slowdown".
Recognition strikes
A recognition strike is an industrial strike implemented in order to force a particular employer or industry to recognize a trade union as the legitimate collective bargaining agent for a company's workers. In 1949, their use in the United States was described as "a weapon used with varying results by labor for the last forty years or more"; one example cited was the successful formation of the United Auto Workers, which achieved recognition from General Motors through the Flint sit-down strike of 1936–37. They were more common prior to the advent of modern American labor law (including the National Labor Relations Act), which introduced processes legally compelling an employer to recognize the legitimacy of properly certified unions.
Two other examples include the US Steel recognition strike of 1901, and the subsequent coal strike of 1902. A 1936 study of strikes in the United States indicated that about one third of the total number of strikes between 1927 and 1928, and over 40 percent in 1929, were due to "demands for union recognition, closed shop, and protest against union discrimination and violation of union agreements". A 1988 study of strike activity and unionization in non-union municipal police departments between 1972 and 1978 found that recognition strikes were carried out "primarily where bargaining laws [provided] little or no protection of bargaining rights."
Rolling strike
A rolling strike refers to a strike where only some employees in key departments or locations go on strike. These strikes are performed in order to increase stakes as negotiations draw on, and to be unpredictable to the employer. Rolling strikes also serve to conserve strike funds.
Sickout
A "sickout" is a type of strike action in which the strikers call in sick. This is used in cases where laws prohibit certain employees from declaring a strike. Police, firefighters, air traffic controllers, and teachers in some US states are among the groups commonly barred from striking, usually by state and federal laws meant to ensure the safety or security of the general public.
When a sickout is conducted by police officers, it is sometimes called a "blue flu", receiving its name from the uniforms worn by police officers, who are traditionally prohibited from striking. The term "red flu" has sometimes been used to describe this action when undertaken by firefighters.
Sit-down strike
A strike may consist of workers refusing to attend work, or picketing outside the workplace, to prevent or dissuade people from working for, or conducting business with, their employer. Less frequently, workers may occupy the workplace, but refuse to work. This is known as a sit-down strike.
Student strike
A student strike involves students (sometimes supported by faculty) refusing to attend classes. In some cases, the strike is intended to draw media attention to the institution, so that the grievances that are causing the students to strike can be aired before the public; this usually damages the institution's (or government's) public image. In other cases, especially in government-supported institutions, the student strike can cause a budgetary imbalance and have actual economic repercussions for the institution.
Sympathy strike
A sympathy strike is a strike action in which one group of workers refuses to cross a picket line established by another, as a means of supporting the striking workers. Sympathy strikes in the United States were once the norm in the construction industry, but have since been made much more difficult to conduct. The National Labor Relations Board has made decisions permitting employers to establish separate or "reserved" gates for particular trades. Consequentially, if a union establishes a picket line at any gate other than the one reserved for the employer it is picketing, that makes it an unlawful secondary boycott. Still, the practice continues to occur; for example, some Teamsters contracts often protect members from disciplinary action if a member refuses to cross a picket line. Sympathy strikes may be undertaken by a union as an organization, or by individual union members choosing not to cross a picket line.
Wildcat strike
Occasionally, workers decide to strike without the sanction of a labor union, either because the union refuses to endorse such a tactic, or because the workers involved are non-unionized. Strikes without formal union authorization are also known as wildcat strikes.
In many countries, wildcat strikes do not enjoy the same legal protections as recognized union strikes, and may result in penalties for the union members who participate, or for their union. The same often applies in the case of strikes conducted without an official ballot of the union membership, as is required in some countries, such as the United Kingdom.
Work-in strike
A similar tactic is the work-in, where employees occupy the workplace but still continue work, often without pay. They attempt to show they employees are still useful, or that worker self-management can be successful. For instance, this occurred with factory occupations in the Biennio Rosso strikes–the "two red years" of Italy from 1919 to 1920.