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Adapted from “The Right to Strike: A Radical View,” American Political Science Review.

Every liberal democracy recognizes that workers have a right to strike. That right is protected in law, sometimes in the constitution itself. Strikes are also one of the most common forms of disruptive collective protest. Even with the dramatic decline in strike activity since its peak in the 1970s, work stoppages can still have a significant impact on our lives. Just over the past few years in the US, illegal strikes by teachers paralyzed major school districts in Chicago and Seattle, as well as statewide in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado; a taxi driver strike influenced debates and court decisions regarding immigration; and demonstration strikes by retail and food-service workers were instrumental in getting new minimum wage and other legislation passed in states like California, New York, and North Carolina. Yet strikes present a dilemma for liberal societies. For most workers to have a reasonable chance of success, they need to use some coercive strike tactics, like mass picketing. But those tactics violate the law and infringe upon what are widely held to be basic liberal rights. On what basis, then, can the right to strike be justified?

The Dilemma A strike is a work stoppage to achieve some end. But “work stoppage” means different things in different parts of the labor market. Higher skilled, low-supply workers — who are harder to replace and as a consequence typically enjoy better wages, hours, and conditions — can carry off a reasonably effective strike with little coercion and no significant law-breaking. So long as they exercise adequate discipline, they can slow or stop production altogether. Take the 2016 Verizon strike. While the telecom company tried to use replacement workers those replacements could not do the job effectively. After seven weeks, the company still was unable to service existing lines, let alone install new ones. It ended up conceding on important worker demands. Lower skill, high-labor-supply workers in sectors like service, transportation, agriculture, and basic industry are in a different situation. These kinds of workers, in part because they are in such great supply, tend to have less bargaining power and therefore usually face lower wages, longer hours, and worse working conditions. They are also more vulnerable to forms of illegal pressure, wage theft, and other abuses. These are the workers we intuitively think should have the strongest case for a right to strike. Yet even if all of those workers walk off and respect the picket, production will continue rolling because replacements are much easier to find, train, and put to work. The collective refusal to work doesn’t pack the same punch. This is one reason why McDonald’s and Walmart workers have stuck to single-day strikes — they’d be replaced otherwise. To have a better shot of succeeding, the majority of easily replaced workers often have to use some type of coercive tactics. They must prevent managers from hiring replacements, prevent replacements from taking struck jobs, or prevent work from getting done in some other way. To be clear, by coercive, I don’t mean violent. Historically, it has not been workers but the state and employers’ private thugs who have committed most of the strike-related violence. Workers have suffered violence when exercising perfectly legitimate forms of coercion. The classic coercive tactics are sit-down strikes (occupying the workplace to prevent work from being done) and mass pickets (surrounding a workplace so no people or supplies can get in or out). Both tactics fly in the face of liberal capitalism. A basic principle of political morality in any liberal capitalist society is that all persons enjoy basic liberties on the condition that they extend the same basic liberties to everyone else and that these liberties are enshrined in law. You are free to exercise your basic liberties so long as you do not coercively interfere with others in the enjoyment of their liberties. Coercive strike tactics are inimical to a number of these basic liberties. They violate the property rights of owners and their managers, they abridge the freedom of contract and association of replacement workers, and they threaten the everyday, background sense of public order of a liberal capitalist society. It is no surprise then that these tactics are almost entirely illegal in the United States, as are many other solidaristic tactics that were once a standard feature of American labor activism. But again, in many cases, if workers can’t engage in mass pickets or sit-downs, then they have little hope of exercising a meaningful right to strike. The only way to resolve this dilemma is to ask what, here and now, has priority: the basic liberties of liberal capitalism, as they are enforced in law, or the right to strike? And if it’s the right to strike, what kind of right is this and how can it be justified?

The Right to Resist Workers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce, or even overcome, that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a double sense. First, resistance to that class-based oppression carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for freedoms not yet enjoyed. A higher wage expands workers’ freedom of choice. Expanded labor rights increase workers’ collective freedom to influence the terms of employment. Whatever the concrete set of issues, workers’ strike demands are always also a demand for control over portions of one’s life that they do not yet enjoy. Second, strikes don’t just aim at winning more freedom — they are themselves expressions of freedom. When workers walk out, they’re using their own individual and collective agency to win the liberties they deserve. The same capacity for self-determination that workers invoke to demand more freedom is the capacity they exercise when winning their demands. Freedom, not industrial stability or simply higher living standards, is the name of their desire. Put differently, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to freedom. It has intrinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self-emancipation. And it has instrumental value insofar as the strike is an effective means for resisting the oppressiveness of a class society and achieving new freedoms. But if all this is correct, and the right to strike is something that we should defend, then it also has to be meaningful. The right loses its connection to workers’ freedom if they have little chance of exercising it effectively. Otherwise they’re simply engaging in a symbolic act of defiance — laudable, perhaps, but not a tangible means of fighting oppression. The right to strike must therefore cover at least some of the coercive tactics that make strikes potent, like sit-downs and mass pickets. It is therefore often perfectly justified for strikers to exercise their right to strike by using these tactics, even when these tactics are illegal. Still, the question remains: why should the right to strike be given moral priority over other basic liberties? The reason is not just that liberal capitalism produces economic oppression but that the economic oppression that workers face is in part created and sustained by the very economic and civil liberties that liberal capitalism cherishes. Workers find themselves oppressed because of the way property rights, freedom of contract, corporate authority, and tax and labor law operate. Deeming these liberties inviolable doesn’t foster less oppressive, exploitative outcomes, as its defenders insist — quite the opposite. The right to strike has a stronger claim to be protecting a zone of activity that serves the aims of justice itself — coercing people into relations of less oppressive social cooperation. Simply put, to argue for the right to strike is to prioritize democratic freedoms over property rights.