Is a strike a kind of force? A crane operator’s case for the right to stop

I drive a gantry crane at the container port in Marseille and I am a union delegate. When we stop work, the newspapers usually find a shopkeeper whose stock is stuck on a ship and a politician who calls it hostage-taking. Prise d'otages is the phrase. I have heard it so often that I started to wonder whether they were right. Is a strike a kind of force? And if it is, what entitles us to use it?

I want to argue that a strike is something different, a collective refusal, and that the difference matters morally, even though a strike can do real harm.

The case that a strike is coercion

The argument against us is not stupid, and I want to state it fairly. In a market, the story goes, I sell my labour freely and the company buys it freely. If I don't like the price I can leave. A strike is different from leaving. We stop working while keeping our claim on the job, and we stop together, precisely so that the company, and everyone who depends on the port, will suffer until they give us what we want. That looks like a threat: pay us, or the damage continues. And the people who pay are often not the company at all, but a fruit importer, a family waiting for a delivery, a small business that never did anything to us.

Put like that, a strike looks like something we would condemn anywhere else: using harm to third parties as leverage.

What the market story leaves out

The first thing to say is that the free exchange in the story was never between equals. Adam Smith saw this clearly in The Wealth of Nations. Masters, he wrote, are always and everywhere in a kind of tacit but constant combination not to raise wages, and the law of his day had many acts against workmen combining to raise their wages and none against masters combining to lower them. Smith was no friend of combinations. He was simply describing a bargain in which one side was already organised.

Marx, in Capital, put the point more bluntly in his chapter on the working day. The buyer of labour-power has a right to use what he has bought; the seller has a right to limit that use so that he can work again tomorrow. Right stands against right, Marx says, and between equal rights force decides.

I don't accept everything that follows from that sentence. But it changes the question. If the employment relation already contains force, and unequal force, then the question is not whether workers may bring coercion into a peaceful market. It is whether they may answer one kind of pressure with another.

Refusal, not attack

Here is the distinction I think matters. Coercion in the ordinary sense is threatening to do something to you that you have a right that I not do: break your windows, hurt your family. A strike threatens only to withhold something you have no right to demand, which is our work. Nobody owns my hands. When I stop the crane I take nothing from anyone. I refuse to give.

Not everyone on my side accepts this. The political theorist Alex Gourevitch has argued that strikes really are coercive, and that their justification lies in the domination workers face, not in an innocent right to quit. I think he is right that a strike is meant to put on pressure, and that pretending otherwise is dishonest. But a pressure made of absence is still different from a pressure made of violence. One docker who stops is replaced by lunchtime. Six hundred who stop are a question the company has to answer, and the question is posed by nothing more than our not being there.

That does not make the harm to third parties disappear. The fruit importer is real. But we accept that kind of harm in many places where someone withholds what they are not obliged to give. A shop that closes on Sunday harms the person who needed milk. A doctor who leaves a practice harms her patients. We judge those refusals by whether the reason is serious and the harm proportionate, not by whether harm occurs. That is the test I would accept for a strike, and it is a test some strikes fail.

What Weil saw

The philosopher who has helped me most here is Simone Weil, who spent most of a year working in factories in the 1930s so that she would know what she was writing about. In June 1936, during the great wave of factory occupations in France, she wrote an article about the strikes from inside the world she had worked in.

What struck her was not the wage demands. It was the joy. Workers who for years had moved to the rhythm of the machines, who had been timed and shouted at and made to feel like things, walked through the silent workshops at their own pace. For once, she wrote, they were present in the factory as human beings and not as parts of it.

Weil's point is easy to miss in the arguments about coercion. A strike is not only a tool for getting something. It is, for a few days, the experience of not being an instrument. That is why people strike for things that cost them more in lost wages than they could ever win back. Albert Camus, who knew our sea, put a related thought in The Rebel as a formula: I rebel, therefore we exist. The refusal creates a "we" that was not there before.

None of this gives a union permission to do anything it likes. If a strike is a refusal, it has to stay one. Blocking others from working, sabotage, threats to colleagues who cross the line: those are attacks, and the language of refusal does not cover them. And because the harm falls on people outside the dispute, we owe them something: notice, so they can prepare; a clear demand, so they know what would end it; and a reason serious enough that we could say it to their faces.

I have had that conversation at the port gate with a man whose oranges were going soft. He did not agree with us. But he understood that we were not taking his oranges. We were refusing to lift them, for a while, until someone listened.