Measuring the Evolution of Strike Movements

Abstract

Strike activity is clearly the least studied aspect of the history of labor movements, yet it may be the most revealing index of the situation and outlook of actual workers. Moreover strike activity has an important history of its own, related to but not described by the history of organized labor. Strikes have evolved. Various groups of workers developed an ability to mount new kinds of strikes at different times. In order to grasp this evolution we need some clear means of measurement. What follows is an effort to suggest some criteria, many of them obvious enough. The essay results from an ongoing study of workers in France, Belgium, Germany and Britain in the two decades before World War I. But while examples are chosen primarily from this area and period, the effort is meant to be quite open-ended. There is no need to expect uniform patterns of strike activity in a given stage of industrialization; but there is every reason to hope that sufficiently general standards of measurement can be developed to measure key differences and to specify problems that require deeper study in terms of fundamental causation.

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