From strikes to absenteeism, the evolution of protest gestures of work interruption

Governance. Throughout the ^20th century, the strike was the decisive weapon of the dominated against the dominant. By interrupting work, it paralyzed the production process, which, with industrial capitalism, had become entangled with society as a whole. Workers regained both power and political dignity by revealing, through the voluntary suspension of their activity, how indispensable they were to the functioning of society.

By exalting the power of the powerless, the strike transformed individual weakness into a united force. It thus had a prestigious and moral dimension, less through its specific demands than through the collective momentum it manifested. This is why the general strike, a total blockage of society, occupied a large place in the imagination of 20th-century struggles. Georges Sorel (1847-1922) was its theoretician, seeing it as "the Napoleonic battle that definitively crushes the adversary" ( Reflections on Violence , 1908).

Until the end of the "thirty glorious years" and the Fordist consensus, society rested on a three-pole balance: the economic power of entrepreneurs, capable of giving or taking away work; the social power of unions, able to interrupt it by striking; and finally, the political arbitration of the State, responsible for regulating this balance of power through labor law. Between 1936 and 1970, this balance resulted in a spectacular rise in strikes: from one to seven million days lost each year.

But, starting in the 1980s, the Fordist consensus unraveled with the emergence of speculative capitalism. A new consensus emerged, based on the primacy of individual interests over collective interests, even in the workplace. Salaries, benefits, and promotions are now discussed at the individual employee level, according to their talents, skills, or ability to sell themselves. Those with less leverage to negotiate rely on the collective resources offered by labor law. Unsurprisingly, the use of collective strikes has fallen to fewer than 100,000 days per year in 2022, 70 times fewer than at the turn of the 1970s.

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