Strike action, also called labor strike, labour strike in British English, or simply strike, is a form of direct action in which employees collectively refuse to work. It is usually a response to employee grievances. Generally, strikes are intended to bring an employer to accede to employees' demands for improved working conditions or unionisation, particularly when other avenues of change, such as negotiations or legal redress, have been exhausted. Strike actions can be called by trade unions or be instigated by rank-and-file activists.
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 variety 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.
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.
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.
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.