The strike and the lock-out are of frequent occurrence in the industrial history of the nineteenth century. What is their meaning? What their significance?

The strike is the refusal of the workman—be he labourer or skilled mechanic, miner or railway man, docker or engineer—to perform his task under conditions that to him and his fellows are intolerable. In every normal case of a strike of any large body of men the ground of the refusal is always stated plainly; either the wages paid are insufficient, that is, are less than a living wage, or the hours of labour are too long. The strike, to put it briefly, is the effort of the labourer to get a larger share of the wealth which he has created; for all material wealth—food and fuel, clothing and dwelling houses, and the thousand and one comforts and adornments of social life, all the conveniences (the ‘damnable conveniences,’ as Father Vincent McNabb has styled them) of civilisation—are created by the application of human labour to the earth and its waters. By no other means can material wealth be created.

The lock-out is the refusal of the employer to allow work to be performed unless it is performed on the conditions he lays down. And, again, in most cases the employer—master-builder or farmer, colliery proprietor or factory owner (in our own times the employer is usually a limited liability company), locks out the workman because the latter will not agree to work on a reduced wage or for a longer number of hours.