This chapter scrutinizes the last resorts of the workers in the face of extreme exploitation and oppression. Although the organized labor movement declined with the state’s increasing power from the second half of the 1920s, this did not mean that the working-class protests, violence and even informal and spontaneous strikes in the form of walkouts ended. On the contrary, the working people resorted to more informal and individual daily strategies such as intimidation tactics, threats, fights and attacks when laborers felt exploited. It also examines collective protests and walkouts beyond the few well-known strikes of the time. This chapter shows that despite the lack of trade unions and organized movements, such methods were not inconclusive in negotiating working conditions and wages.

In this chapter, I explore the link between government food taxes and urban unrest. I analyze an event dataset on social and political disorder in cities across the developing world matched to cross-national data on consumer food taxes between 1965 and 2009. I estimate panel regressions of the effect of food taxes on unrest. I find no simple relationship between food policy and political instability in cities. However, when the effects of food taxes are allowed to vary by political regime type, I find that higher taxes are significantly associated with greater levels of unrest under anocracy. I also estimate instrumental variables regressions that exploit exogenous variation in the composition of a country's agricultural sector to identify the causal effect of food taxes on unrest. The results of these models align with those of the panel regressions. I find that higher food taxes are significantly correlated with greater unrest, but only under anocracies, which combine a lack of democratic accountability with a relatively permissive political opportunity structure.