‘Walking down the stairs’: the significance of strikes for labour movements

From a North Atlantic vantage point, it may be tempting to think that strikes are a relic from the industrial revolution, and that they share the fate of food riots or machine wrecking and play a marginal role as a mode of protest in contemporary societies. A superficial look at existing data suggests that there has been a steep decline in strike activity in Europe and the US in recent decades. According to the European Trade Union Institute, the weighted European average of days not worked due to industrial action was 62.7 per 1,000 employees in 2000 and 26.4 in 2020. Likewise, numbers for the US from the Bureau of Labor Statistics say that ‘days of idleness’ due to strikes were 34 times higher in 1970 than in 2021 (see also Brecher, 2009: 75). It is tempting to conclude that workers rarely choose the strike weapon as means of negotiating of wages and working conditions or of protesting more generally. In fact, some commentators suggest that labour relations have been pacified (Pakulski and Waters, 1996: 86; Meyerson, 2012), rendering the collective act of refusing to work meaningless.

Unsurprisingly, scholars sympathetic to labour disagree with this assessment. There are roughly five responses to the claim that strikes are superfluous, which are not mutually exclusive.