Labour Strikes: What exactly are they?

     

In order to understand better how Labour Strikes work, we must first define what exactly Labour strikes are and how they came to be. Essential among workers especially employees covered by unions, the methods involved in the process of a Labour Strike must be given attention. Above anything else, it must be noted by employee and employer alike that a Labour strike is a work stoppage which results from the mass refusal of employees to work. Such activities as these usually occur as response to employee grievances. More often than not strikes are also used nowadays to bring into the attention of authorities the demands of the working class. Furthermore, governments also become objects of mass strikes for them to be pressured to work on certain policy changes.

Techniques such as strikes in order to call the attention of authorities have very long histories. Since the start of the Labour industry, issues concerning the welfare of the workers arose and so did Labour strikes. Though violence was evident in earlier Labour uprisings, strikes eventually evolved into peaceful negotiations which included nothing more than the stoppage of work.

Through the long run, Labour strikes gained many revisions. All these different types eventually ended up with strikes classified into various categories. Strikes maybe specific to particular workplaces or such may encompass an entire industry.

Among the least expansive strike is the sympathy strike wherein a group of Labourers join another in sympathy for their demand. A jurisdictional strike is a concerted refusal to work undertaken by a union to assert its members’ rights to particular job assignments and protest the assignment of disputed work to members of another union. Another kind of strike is known as the Student Strike which includes students as may be supported by the faculty who do the strike in order to catch the attention of the media and therefore publicize their demands from the institution. Still a form of strike usually found in prisons as political protest is the Hunger Strike in which they refrain from eating for a particular time to degrade the image of their authorities.

Indeed the concept of a Labour strike evolved and became more expansive than the original. Yet it must be noted that the word “strike” does not only refer to the stoppage in Labour but to different other forms of peaceful protest through boycott.