Strike

Everyone seemingly knows what a strike is – it refers to the withdrawal of labor or, to speak plainly, not going to work. We can locate the strike in the labor struggles that shaped Ancient Egypt (Mark 2017). Historian Marcus Rediker (2020) traces the history of the modern strike to the eighteenth century when sailors would “strike the sail” to prevent a ship from delivering its cargo and to demand their unpaid wages, better conditions, and a life less brutal at sea. To be more precise, the strike was born in its modern form on the floating factories of the Atlantic, amongst the multi-ethnic proto-working class of the navies (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000), that organized that violent and bloody circuit of exchange and colonial rule. The strike emerged alongside food riots, rebellion, and the birth of the factory system, in a period where to govern meant administering social governance through the threat of death and its punitive enactment – a thanatocracy (Linebaugh 2006). A genealogy of the strike finds the present in the past – the demands of 80 percent of all contemporary strikes in China are very similar to those of the sailors (China Labour Bulletin) and beginning in 2020, Indian farmers lead one of the largest strikes in history.

With the development of the first landed factories came movements of rebellion. Machine smashing, food riots; a drive to organize workers in those factories but also across the communities within which they were embedded. The unique nature of the factory as the mass organization of alienated labor for profit propelled the strike and drove its innovation. The strike takes hold within this profit-driven prison. It is the collective disruption of production from within the machine. At its most complex and complete expression it rises to the general strike (Luxemburg 1906), like those in Cuba (1902), Russia (1905 and again in 1917), England (1926), and Portugal (1910). The general strike led to mass rebellion, as it did in Jamaica in 1831 when, led by Samuel Sharpe, tens of thousands of slaves turned to open rebellion after their demands were not met, burning and looting plantations before finally being defeated in 1832. The so-called Baptist War directly contributed to the British government’s abolition of slavery in 1833 (Zoellner 2020). As Du Bois teaches us, it was the general strike of enslaved African Americans during the Civil War that crippled the Confederate economy and forced the hand of President Lincoln, turning a war to save the Union into a war to end slavery (Du Bois 1935). Plantations, ships and factories all served as cauldrons within which the general strike fermented across the first hundred years of industrial capitalism. 

Yet to define it narrowly as withdrawal is to mistake a tactic (a specific action: the withdrawal of labor) for the strategy (a comprehensive plan to achieve change: the strike). We can map the contours of this form of proletarian violence by unpacking the ways in which the excess of disruption has been sanctioned or codified in law. We can better understand the power and conversely the limits of the modern strike by the ways in which it has been contained.

In the United Kingdom, the country where we both live and work and organize, an unprecedented wave of strikes took place in the health sector between 2022-2023, as years of deteriorating wages and conditions collided with the demands of workers during a global pandemic that had cost many health workers their lives. Midwives, ambulance drivers, and doctors all took strike action. But it was the nurses’ strike – the first strike to be called by the Royal College of Nurses in their 106-year history – that caught the public imagination. Despite intense vilification from large swathes of the media and government, and mass disruption to health provision, even after a year of strikes the public still steadfastly backed the nurses. Despite this support, the strike ended in 2023 when a re-ballot was needed to extend the strike mandate, and the union failed to meet the legal threshold.

In response to the nurses’ strike action, as well as other on-going strikes in schools and universities and across the railways, the Conservative Tory government passed legislation to mandate workers meet minimum service levels on strike days – effectively ending the ability of workers to conduct effective industrial action. In 2022, the government changed existing legislation to allow employers to hire scabs to replace striking workers, while increasing the fines for illegal strike action. In 2016, the same Conservative government introduced the Trade Union Act, legislation that increased the notice period required to take strike action to fourteen days and required a minimum of 50 percent of all union members to vote in the strike ballot for strikes to be considered legal. This amended the 1993 legislation that first required seven days’ notice of strike action. In 1992, laws were introduced making it a requirement that an employer must first officially recognise a union before strike action could take place. In 1990 it was made lawful for employers to fire anyone taking “unofficial” strike action. Between 1980 and 1984 legislation was introduced to replace in-person strike ballots with more complicated and expensive postal strike ballots, and to make ballots secret. During the same period secondary strikes – strike action in support of other workers and workplaces – were made illegal, while legal strike action was reduced to “trade disputes” such as pay and conditions, banning political strikes. There is a clear mechanism of containment occurring through this history, an enclosure of the power of the strike. We can pose this as a contraction of the possibilities of disruption, one culminating in guaranteed minimum service levels, all but making the strike in Britain little more than a performance of discontent. 

The processes that enabled a strike to take flight were contained. From enforcing ballots, to making them secret, ensuring ballots were outside of the union meetings and delaying the impact of winning the strike vote. The community of workers was successively restricted. From who could strike (just those in the union, in a specific workplace), to who could be on a picket line, to attacks on the communities of strikers (for example withdrawing access to welfare payments from miners’ families during the Miners’ Strike 1984-85). Perhaps most egregious was the ending of the secondary picket – the disabling of the mechanism of workers solidarity. Finally, we could say that the strike, a practice that had its origins in social and political revolt, was rendered entirely economic. The strike was reduced to a matter of the trade of labor for wages.

This progressive confinement of the strike mirrors the confinement of the worker. But the proletariat has long struggled against this confinement and knows work as the cage of the strike. 

The feminist strike refuses the containment of the strike in two directions. It exceeds the workplace (and brings the strike back into the realm of the domestic), and the very category of work, reduced to its valorized, waged component. It returns the strike to its origins in the street, contesting capitalism's structural separation of production from reproduction (Cavallero and Gago 2021). The Wages For Housework (WFH) Campaign launched in 1972 with a manifesto declaring that “the women of the world are serving notice.” The WFH manifesto and the autonomist feminist tradition that it was born from, expanded our conceptualisation of the strike: "We are serving notice to you that we intend to be paid for the work we do. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every painful childbirth, every indecent assault, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don't get what we want, then we will simply refuse to work any longer" (Federici 2021:44).

The feminist strike is the most recent expression of this refusal to be caged. In the Feminist International, Veronica Gago (2020) writes from the situated experience of the Argentinian Ni Una Menos feminist strike. Continuing in the tradition of Wages for Housework, she expands. usefully troubles, and proposes the strike as a lens in a double sense. Maria Rosa Dalla Costa (2019:87), one of the co-founders of the Wages for Housework Campaign. reminds us: “They have always refused to recognize housework as work, precisely because it is the only work that we all have in common. It is one thing to confront two or three hundred women workers in a shoe factory, and quite another to confront millions of housewives.” Yet, the feminist strike also turns our gaze to the waged work of social reproduction. And in doing so reveals some of the limits of the strike as traditionally imagined (Curcio 2020; Mezzadri et al. 2017). The limits are revealed as nurses ask the hard questions of what it means to refuse care or to put patients' lives at risk. What does it mean to disrupt a hospital? This is not a moral question, but a structural one. It is our ability to care that is mobilized in this work; but it also often exceeds the work we do. How can we not care?

These questions are central to any feminist struggle around work, precisely because the commodification of social reproduction has intensified with the acceleration of late capitalism, and, at the same time, it has been incorporated and further elaborated through public services and government dictate. As the welfare state began to encompass every aspect of our lives after WWII, enfolding us in a total bureaucracy, it has to be asked how to be against the State despite needing it as the provider of essential reproductive services (LEWRG 1980)? How do we strike against the State when to do so harms not the State, but our comrades, neighbors, and friends who are dependent upon public services? When we stop a hospital or a school, the boss only suffers a blow to their legitimacy, something of diminishing concern to those that maintain power through coercion and state violence. It is us – or people like us – who suffer. When we strike, the student or patient suffers. Even now, in the ruins of the welfare state, the question of care pushes us to once again reimagine what the strike could be (English and Brown 2023).

Just as the slaves, sailors and commoners of the eighteenth and nineteenth century birthed the collective strategy of the strike, the recent waves of feminist strikes beginning in Abya Yala (Latin America) and crashing as a wave across all continents push forward our demand for the reorganization not only of production but also of reproduction (Gago 2020). Capitalism relies on and needs both unwaged and waged reproductive labor and our care work, and at the same time we urgently need to dismantle the current system that requires and relies on our lives being valued differently, and our work not being valued at all. To do so requires us to unravel and contest the multitude of ways that our power to strike has been constrained and limited.