STRIKES

The strike, the collective withholding of labor in pursuit of specific economic or political goals, became the most pervasive form of labor protest in nineteenth-century Europe. It derived its centrality from capitalist transformations in the nature of work and labor relations and the emergence of new political and legal frameworks for workplace bargaining and negotiation. The strike evolved after the early nineteenth century in complex relations with other forms of worker protest and organizations, especially trade unions and workers' political parties. From the 1860s to 1914, Europe witnessed unprecedented rates of industrial militancy in which the strike proved to be the principal means of interest articulation for wage earners in urban manufacturing and rural production: it became the most effective means of securing higher wages, defending workplace autonomies and skills, redressing perceived indignities suffered at the hands of factory foremen or company owners, and securing basic civil and political rights.

labor protest in the early nineteenth century

If understood strictly in terms of temporary work stoppages designed to force concessions from employers, strikes were not new to the nineteenth century. Rather, what was new was that strikes became distinct from other forms of popular protest during this period and evolved into a new form of industrial action and the most common means of worker self-assertion by the end of the century. As historians have shown, popular protest took many forms before the nineteenth century: food riots, tax revolts, resistance against conscription, battles over the rights to the forest and its resources, religious rebellions and pogroms, and charivaris, customs involving the collective "shaming" of someone deemed in violation of local moral or sexual codes. These protests tended to be local, temporary, hastily organized or spontaneous actions, often involving physical violence, and they drew upon the participation of men and women (and often children) and socially heterogeneous groups from the lower ranks of society. The most closely related form of labor action in the early nineteenth century was machine-breaking. From 1811 to 1816, textile workers in the hosiery and lace industries of the East Midlands, the woolen industry of the West Riding in Yorkshire, and the cotton industry of southern Lancashire and northern Cheshire began to destroy shearing machines, gig-mills, and power looms in order to protest declining wages and unemployment. Similar actions also took place in France: in Vienne in 1819, in Saint Étienne in 1830, and in Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Saint Étienne in 1831; and in the German states: in Solingen in 1826, in Krefeld in 1828, in Saxony in the 1830s, and during the massive Silesian weavers' rebellion in 1844. Machine-breaking also entered the English countryside during the "Captain Swing" rebellion of 1830, when agricultural workers in the South East, Hampshire and the West Country, the Midlands, and East Anglia protested declining wages by threatening landowners and local public officials and destroying threshing machines. Indeed, many early nineteenth-century strikes, particularly among textile workers, took on several aspects of these forms of protest: in France, for example, they usually involved sudden work stoppages, followed by the formation of a crowd outside the workshop or factory, marches from factory to factory in order to recruit other workers from the same industry, street demonstrations, often to the accompaniment of drums and flags, and sometimes window breaking at offending workshops. Generally these protests, which served as public demonstrations of outrage and discontent, ended either with arrests by local authorities or the return of workers to the factory. By contrast, other workers, especially artisans, engaged in activity that bore the marks of the later nineteenth-century strike: the preplanned and calculated withdrawal of labor, often involving workers' organizations, in order to pressure employers for specific economic gains: higher wages, improved working conditions, shorter working hours, changes in hiring practices, and regulations over the trades. The turn to this form of protest was already visible in Britain in the 1820s, in France in the 1830s and 1840s, and in the German states in the late 1840s.

Historians once commonly explained this process as a transition from "preindustrial" to "modern" forms of labor protest. According to this perspective, the adoption of the calculated strike, supported by trade unions, was part of a "learning process" by which workers embraced more "rational" forms of interest articulation commensurate with "modern" changes in the manufacturing process and industrial bargaining. This kind of "modernization" approach has been challenged in a number of ways. Social historians have demonstrated the ways in which popular protest before and during the first half of the nineteenth century, including machine breaking, involved complex interactions between crowds and authorities and negotiations over basic questions of fairness and morality and thus constituted entirely "rational" responses to dearth, high prices, unemployment, and declining livelihoods. In addition, they have pointed not only to the persistence of these forms of protests, especially subsistence and food riots, well into the twentieth century; they have also demonstrated the conjunctural specificities, rather than historical continuities, of mass direct actions. Finally, labor historians have emphasized the ways in which the organized strike emerged alongside and often in conjunction with other forms of spontaneous direct action taken by workers. Understanding the growing centrality of the "modern" strike as a form of labor protest, therefore, requires thinking about its historically contingent economic and political conditions of emergence and possibility in the nineteenth century and what made it the preferred form of industrial action.

In this regard, it is important to note two critical changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the transition to capitalist markets in goods and labor and new divisions of labor and schemes of subcontracting; and the general reconfiguration of the political and legal frameworks by which labor relations were governed. The latter involved the dismantling of the manufacturing guilds and manorial systems, the banning of artisans' organizations, and the legal recodification of labor relations as strictly economic matters between individual wage earners and employers. This explains both the economic and political aims, necessitated by state involvement in instituting economic changes, of strikes in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, strikes in Britain and France from the 1810s to the 1840s were aimed at securing workplace gains. On the other, many strikes evolved into wider political mobilizations seeking state intervention into the economy to curb unbridled competition and the degradation of the trades as well as political change in the direction of popular sovereignty. This applies as much to the strikes of French workers from the 1830s to 1848, which advanced the cause of republican socialism, as it does to the first nationwide strike of the nineteenth century: the 1842 general strike in Britain. The latter, which was centered in Lancashire but extended to the industrial regions of Scotland and Wales, involved five hundred thousand workers calling for "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work" and for the fulfillment of the demands for democratic reform and the requirement of "liberty" contained in the People's Charter.

industrial transformation, mass politics, and the strike

Past explanations for the subsequent rise of the strike as the foremost industrial action in late nineteenth-century Europe, which rested on theories of working-class misery or deprivation, social dislocation associated with rural inhabitants being thrust into an urban context, and the more or less straightforward responses of workers to cyclical changes in the economy, have largely been abandoned. Most historians now explain the preeminence of the strike in terms of a combination of factors, including transformations in the industrial economy, the evolving social-structural conditions of residence and community, and the rise of workers' organizations and mass politics toward the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the second half of the nineteenth century was marked by the dramatic expansion of strike activity that can be analyzed in two distinct phases: a first phase from the 1860s to the 1880s and a second phase from 1890 to 1914. The transition from the first to the second phases was marked by the increasing organization and standardization of the strike as a form of industrial and political action. But this transformation is best understood not in terms of inevitable learning processes or entailed and "more rational" responses to economic changes but in terms of contingent social struggles over the conditions of work and the political relations which sustained them in the late nineteenth century.

After the collapse of the revolutions and mobilizations of 1848 and the general period of conservative repression in the 1850s, labor militancy rose exponentially toward the end of the 1860s. In addition to the sudden expansion of capitalist economies, this period brought new laws permitting the formation of workers' organizations and, in some cases, guaranteeing the right to strike: this happened, for example, in France in 1864, in Germany in 1869, in Spain in 1868, and in the Netherlands in 1872. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of strikes in a favorable economic conjuncture from the late 1860s to the early 1870s. In Britain, the number of strikes jumped from 30 in 1870 to 343 in 1872; in France, they increased from 72 in 1869 to 151 in 1872; and in Germany, they rose from 98 in 1869 to 223 in 1873. Indeed, the period from 1868 to 1873 witnessed the first transnational strike wave involving thousands of workers across industrializing Europe. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this early phase of labor militancy was the complex relationship between strike activity and workers' organizations, namely the skilled craft unions forming during this period. Many of the strikes, especially in the 1870s, involved unorganized workers. In France, for example, of the 1,695 documented strikes from 1870 to 1890, some 51 percent were not planned in advance, 41 percent were launched by nonunionized workers and usually led by elected strike committees; and fully 82 percent of the sudden strikes were led by women workers, who were systematically excluded from formal organizations. In Britain, most of the strikes in the 1870s were also led by unorganized workers; here the strike became an effective recruiting mechanism for the unions: membership in the Trades Union Congress grew from about 250,000 to 1.2 million from 1870 to 1874 as a result of the strikes.

This relationship between trade unions and strikes, in which strikes encouraged union membership, was also visible during the second phase of strike activity from the late 1880s to 1914, when industrial transformation and mass union and working-class political mobilization altered the conditions and scope of strike activity. This era was marked by the unprecedented increase in the scale of labor militancy and the frequency of strikes. Britain was buffeted by two massive waves of industrial militancy, from 1889 to 1890, when the great London dock strike of 1889 was accompanied by some 2,400 strikes, and from 1911 to 1913, when British workers launched a staggering 3,165 strikes, resulting in a total of sixty million workdays lost. In Germany, the massive miners' strikes in the Ruhr in 1889–1890 began a steady increase in the number of strikes, from less than two hundred per year to over twenty-five hundred per year from 1900 to 1914. France experienced sudden increases in 1890 and 1899–1900, after which strikes peaked in 1906; overall, the frequency of French strikes increased by four times between 1885–1890 and 1910–1914. In Italy, the northern industrial regions registered a rapid increase in strike activity between 1901 and 1905; and the northern countryside witnessed an exponential increase in the number of strikes among agricultural workers during the same period. Aside from new laws permitting association and strikes in countries such as France and Italy after 1880, this increase in industrial actions was related to several factors. First, the economic changes of the Second Industrial Revolution, which brought new workplace hierarchies, divisions of labor, and increasing mechanization to large industrial plants, challenged the position of skilled workers and introduced increasing numbers of "semiskilled" and "unskilled" workers, including many women, to the disciplinary regimes of the factory or workshop. In this context, the insecurities of industrial employment and the grievances associated with workplace discipline combined with favorable economic conjunctures and the high demand for labor to encourage militancy. Second, the new mass or industrial unions, with national congresses, in northern and central Europe and the federations of syndicates and chambers of labor in France, Italy, and Spain provided vital resources for workers in their efforts to organize and sustain strikes. Third, social segregation in European cities and towns during this period led to the formation of working-class subcultures—whether in industrial Lancashire or the Wedding district of Berlin—which enabled workers to maintain strike solidarity. Finally, workers' political organizations and parties were integral to this strike activity: the mass social democratic parties of north-central Europe and the anarchosyndicalist organizations in southern Europe often lent their support or direction to workers' strikes.

Nevertheless, that support could also put the brakes on strike activity during this period, when the organization and codification of industrial relations prompted trade unions to impose control over strikers, and industrial bargaining involving employers' organizations and state officials led to the increasing standardization of labor conflict. Thus, as employers formed their own associations in order to combat the trade unions, governments attempted to implement measures and institutions for labor conciliation after 1890. New codes and institutions for industrial arbitration were introduced haltingly in Germany in 1891 and more vigorously in France in 1892, in Italy in 1893, and in Britain in 1896; combined with negotiations between unions and employers, they contributed to an increasing number of collective bargaining agreements in countries such as Britain. But in this context, many trade unions also increasingly turned to gradualist strategies of workplace negotiation, carefully guarded their "war chests," and imposed discipline on an often restless rank and file. This was particularly the case with the German labor movement, which became increasingly bureaucratized in the decade before 1914. But state intervention could also facilitate

trade-union militancy and strike activity. In the case of France, for example, episodic state-directed efforts at conflict resolution increasingly encouraged workers to launch massive immediate strikes, rather than long-prepared and drawn-out strikes, because government officials feared large and disruptive disputes and were thus more likely to put pressure on employers to seek compromises with workers.

Indeed, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the strike in the late nineteenth century was its political dimensions. On the shop floor, workers often struck a factory not just for higher wages or safer working conditions but over issues related to control over the work process and the authority of foremen. In some cases, these actions, for example those of the knife grinders of Solingen or the public gas stokers in Paris, could shape the work process and employer decisions about the introduction of new technologies. In a more formal political sense, the general strike became a weapon to secure not only workplace improvements but political change as well. The general or political strike became a much-debated strategy in the organized labor movements of Europe. The syndicalists in France, Italy, and Spain viewed the strike as the principal means of worker self-assertion and political activity, and the social democratic parties of northern and central Europe began debating the merits of the general strike, particularly in response to the outbreak of a war in Europe, in the context of the Second International. If the latter avoided an official endorsement of the general strike, individual parties put it to use for the purpose of securing basic democratic aims within their own countries. In this regard, workers launched general strikes in Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Italy, and Austria at various times from the 1880s to 1913 in attempts to secure universal suffrage or democratic reforms. Indeed, the strike waves throughout Europe during and in the immediate aftermath of World War I not only helped to bring down the monarchies of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany; they also provided support for the new suffrage laws and state welfare commitments in nearly all European countries after 1918.

See alsoAnarchosyndicalism; Captain Swing; Industrial Revolution, First; Industrial Revolution, Second; Labor Movements; Machine Breaking; Socialism; Syndicalism.

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Dennis Sweeney