The Right to Strike and Self-Organization

• In Event: Strikes, Labor Unions, and Political Theory

Abstract

Workers have a right to strike because they have a right to resist the oppression they experience in a capitalist division of labor. Why and in what sense a right to strike? Rights are a special piece of political morality. They refer to the permissible, coercive restriction of freedom for the sake of freedom. That coercion cannot be a mere unilateral act of power by the agent doing the coercing. All particular rights presuppose a rightful condition. A condition of right is that political circumstance in which there is a common authority able to enforce rules for the purpose of limiting freedom for the sake of equal freedom. The institutionalization of rights – the existence of shared, public rules enforced by an organized, common authority – is partly constitutive of what it is to have rights. The particular rights-bearer exercises their coercive authority in the name of universal rules to which all are subject.
But on this view, a right to strike seems paradoxical. As I have argued elsewhere, the right to strike, as a right to resist oppression, can be and often is claimed against the legal order. This makes the right to strike appear antagonistic to the condition of right that is a precondition for and constitutive of having rights in the first place. If that is true, we have to do more than observe that workers are dominated and exploited. We have to do more even than say that strikes are in some way effective at resisting that oppression. For workers to have a right to strike, we have to give some account of the nature and form of that right’s institutionalization. The exercise of their right must take place against the backdrop of some institutional condition. That institutional condition is the self-organization of workers themselves. Workers can claim a right to strike not merely in virtue of their oppression but on the further condition that their forms of self-organization help create conditions of equal freedom where they currently do not exist. The right to strike therefore puts special pressure on workers to establish the authority of their actions. After laying out this argument for the self-organizational basis of the right to strike, I consider three possible candidates: unions, the labor movement, and a workers’ political party.

Author

• Alexander H. Gourevitch, Brown University