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Alex Gourevitch, Brown University

Center for Global Ethics and Politics on March 13, 2025

Disruptive, Divisive, Sometimes Even Illegal: What, if anything, is Good About Strikes?

Strikes are disruptive, inconvenient, divisive and sometimes even illegal. Yet they are also good. They are good because they are ways in which workers constitute themselves as agents who might not only overcome the domination they face, but could take responsibility for the management of the economy itself. However, if that is what makes strikes good, then it seems almost no strike exhibits these good features. Most strikes are considerably more local in aim and scope. In fact, though they might appeal to structural injustices to justify themselves, they can only make local changes. In which case, it seems like most strikers are caught in a dilemma. They are authorized by a structural wrong, but can only achieve a local good, which then makes it seem as if no structural wrong was at stake at all. Or, alternatively, they can seek to preserve a complaint about the basic structure while admitting that, given their local character, they are ineffective at changing those structural wrongs. Either way, it looks like workers cannot live up to the very thing that makes strikes good: strikes are either ineffective at exercising power where it matters (structural), or are effective at achieving some measure of justice but only at the level of the contract (local). Strikers might even find themselves choosing to affirm the effectiveness of strikes in a way that implies the background structure is not wrong at all. If strikes are effective at achieving fair contracts, then it appears only the contract was unjust, not the background structure itself. Strikes can easily draw workers into affirming the justice of the basic structure that they originally rebel against. Which could undermine their goodness, by serving not the end of self-emancipation but of binding workers to their own subjection. I propose a way out of this dilemma, while maintaining that it cannot easily be overcome.