Sabotage as a Tool of Solidarity
Workplace sabotage has historically been a powerful organizing tactic. Is the time ripe again?
Shaun Richman
Striking waiters in 1913 threw fistfuls of the eye-watering spice asafoetida into the air to clear out customers. Shutterstock
Striking waiters spent a week in January 1913 throwing fistfuls of asafetida in the fancy dining rooms of New York City hotels. The spice, commonly used a pinchful at a time in Indian cuisine to replace entire onions, has a powerfully fetid odor and cleared most dining rooms (save for a few customers, the New-York Tribune joked, who were “suffering from severe colds”). The workers were on strike since New Year’s Eve – their second city-wide walkout in six months – and the playful act of sabotage raised workers’ spirits and became a frequent laugh line at union rallies.
The striking workers were ultimately defeated. Hotel bosses eventually found scabs to replace enough of the seasonal workforce, and the workers’ cause lost much of its middle-class support due to a remark by Industrial Workers of the World organizer Joseph Ettor, sent by the IWW to support the independent unionists, that was interpreted as a mortal threat to diners. He declared before an audience of thousands of strikers and dozens of reporters, “If you are compelled to go back under unsatisfactory conditions, go back with a determination to stick together and with your minds made up that it is the unsafest proposition in the world for the capitalist to eat food prepared by members of your union.”
The union that lost the 1913 strike regrouped, waging more industry-wide strikes in 1918 and 1934, and ultimately gaining a union contract as today’s still-powerful New York Hotel Trades Council through a neutrality card check agreement in 1938. New federal and state laws protecting workers’ rights to form and join unions played a role in hotel employers making peace with the union, but so, too, did the decades-long refusal of a militant minority of hotelworkers to be governable.
With the Supreme Court on track to consider the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, union activists must contemplate a potential future in which no union activity is protected by law, and, therefore, all tactics – from sit-down strikes to secondary boycotts to, yes, sabotage – are on the table and morally justified. Let’s look at what sabotage was – and was not – when it was a more commonly applied trade union tactic.
The hotel waiter saboteurs of 1913 belonged to an independent union, which partly explains both the appeal of expressing such contempt for the bosses and the lack of a moderating influence to prevent them from bragging about such a disreputable activity. The official AFL craft union, the Hotel & Restaurant Employees, was more of a bartenders union. The union had successfully enrolled more than half of the nation’s bartenders through a top-down strategy of convincing local tavern owners to hang a “Union Bar” sign outside their establishments to encourage a steady flow of good union customers looking for good union beer. But the massive scale of full-service hotels – factories of pleasure, increasingly managed by national chains, employing thousands of workers – intimidated union leaders the way that early steel and auto factories stymied other AFL craft unions.
When their independent “International Hotel Workers Union” launched its first strike a few days after May Day 1912, New York’s hotel workers became a cause celebre for the Socialist Party and New York Call newspaper. The famous millionaire Socialist Rose Pastor Stokes volunteered as a strike leader, focusing her efforts to get hotel housekeepers – a mostly female workforce, where the waiters and cooks were almost exclusively men – to join the strike. Inspired by Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, strikers began exposing the poor sanitary conditions – reused food, rebottled glasses of wine, bloody fingers, and vermin infestations – that bosses fostered in hotel kitchens. At mass meetings, Stokes encouraged workers’ more whimsical (and less deadly) suggestions for sabotage, like replacing sugar with salt and water with vinegar.
What were jokes in 1912 became deeds in 1913, culminating in Joseph Ettor’s speech egging them on. Ettor was widely quoted and thoroughly denounced in the press. The New York Times quoted one lawman as saying, “Better men have been electrocuted than this evil, serpentine advisor,” and Ettor had to beat a speedy retreat to Lawrence, Mass., while the hotel strike rapidly lost its middle-class support. By cable, Ettor tried to walk back his comments. “I did not make the remarks alleged,” he protested. “Your cause is not to be won by any policy that endangers human life.” Since the workers’ own talk of sabotage had focused more on shirking and recipe mix-ups, it’s quite likely that Ettor did in fact call dining in non-union establishments the “unsafest proposition.” But it’s equally likely that he was riffing on the workers’ playful fantasies of making food inedible by overcooking.
That two-step of encouraging acts of sabotage while stressing that no harm should come to the health and safety of actual people was a dance that the IWW led beginning in 1910. “Grain sacks come loose and rip, nuts come off wagon wheels and loads are dumped on the way to the barn, machinery breaks down, nobody to blame, everybody innocent,” the Industrial Worker newspaper advised agricultural workers in 1910. The paper published “a series of 12 editorials fully explaining the methods of sabotage and when they should be used” in 1913 alone, according to Melvyn Dubofsky, with most of them stressing non-violence. Most IWW soapboxers, Dubofsky wrote, “asserted that sabotage simply implied soldiering on the job, playing dumb, tampering with machines without destroying them — in short, simply harassing the employer to the point of granting his workers’ demands.”
Despite the caveats of non-violence, Wobbly leaders self-defeatingly refused to deny that sabotage might theoretically ever involve acts that could endanger the physical safety of scabs, bosses or customers – even in the face of a mail ballot campaign to expel IWW leader “Big Bill” Haywood from the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee. Haywood’s 1913 expulsion signified that the Wobblies were too radical even for most radicals.
The Wobblies aside, sabotage has rarely – if ever – been advocated by union officials. But it used to be practiced a lot more, often by rank-and-filers.
The Wobblies believed that workers understand the job better than the bosses and should be determining the pace and length of the workday, regulating health and safety and directing the production process. Denied such democratic control, their protests of sabotage included concerted effort to work at the same slower pace, to halt productions over valid safety concerns, to overload and break equipment to gain a break while repairs are made, or to “work-to-rule” by following the bosses’ instructions to the letter while withholding one’s own better judgment and shortcuts. The Wobblies called this kind of sabotage “direct action,” as in “direct action gets the goods.”
But sabotage – be it malicious compliance, passive resistance or mechanical interference – to wear employers down to win union demands or more money or control over the pace of work was practiced far more widely than by just the IWW in the early 20th century. The historian David Montgomery documents how craft unions like the Machinists and early steel workers resisted employers’ “scientific management” through sabotage. Protesting corporate efforts to de-skill their jobs by breaking them down into distinct, timed tasks to speed up production, early unionists essentially made a contract with each other to agree upon and enforce what they considered a fair pace of work. Workers called this a “stint.” Bosses derided it as “soldiering on the job.” Montgomery called this ongoing effort “a submerged, impenetrable obstacle to management sovereignty.”
Work-to-rule job actions remain the most common form of sabotage today. When I first suggested that labor activists should carefully expand the tactic, in 2020’s Tell The Bosses We’re Coming, I stressed that even minor acts of sabotage reveal to workers how much power they have through their mastery of the job, and how much the boss depends upon their willingness to participate in teamwork and continued tolerance of adverse situations. It also helps raise morale if the actions are fun and funny.
Examples abound, when you look for them. Lizabeth Cohen showed how Chicago meatpackers who protested the Armour company’s refusal to recognize their union in the 1930’s called their “illusion that workers were producing normally” while shirking the company’s quotas the “Rizz-ma-tizz.” Postal workers resisting speed-ups in the 1970’s would record mail as lacking a zip code to clog the process up and enforce downtime, or send most of the mail from one overworked facility to another where workers were similarly sabotaging the system with wildcat slowdowns. Many authors have explored General Motors’ Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant, where its young workforce turned the state-of-the-art 1970’s facility into a case study of discontent. Despite generous and rapidly rising wages, the workers rebelled against an inhumanely sped up, “scientifically managed” assembly line. A wildcat strike in 1972, following an officially sanctioned one in 1970 did not slow down the pace of work, but sabotage did. Time magazine reported in 1972 that new cars at Lordstown “regularly roll off the line with slit upholstery, scratched paint, dented bodies, bent gearshift levers, cut ignition wires, and loose or missing bolts.” The discovery and remediation of these defects forced supervisors to halt the assembly line. It also turned Chevy’s pioneering “small car,” the Vega, into a notorious lemon.
Martin Sprouse captured what Sabotage in the American Workplace looked like in 1992. Many of the volunteered stories that Sprouse collected were from individual non-union workers, hoping to spark some sense of solidarity, like a waiter at a small cafe who would find ways to sneak free meals for friends (“It was a thrill to recognize that other people were doing it”) or a farmhand who intentionally jammed up his International Harvester combine giving him and dozens of his comrades in the wheat fields a few hours of idle time while the machine was repaired. Management never even suspected sabotage. “I think this is true for most non-unionized off-the-street labor,” Sprouse noted. “They generally assume that you will never pull any stunts.”
Sabotage, in the form of quickie job actions and puckish acts of subversion, remained in the DNA of New York’s hotel workers to this day. Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s, job actions – over enforcing a grievance or getting the bosses to sign a successor contract, came with little-to-no-notice and usually involved elevator operators locking the manually-operated guest elevators on random high floors and “losing” the keys. When I worked for the union in the early 00’s, during a fight with the Hilton corporation we jammed the fax machine lines of the Waldorf-Astoria with individual health-and-safety information forms signed by each of the 1,500 employees. It was the kind of petty nuisance that we would routinely cook up when we were “at war” with an employer.
To be clear, sabotage is not a “one weird trick” to win a union. In the case of New York City’s hotel workers, who I document in my upcoming book, We Always Had a Union, it took experimentation with a lot of tactics – quickie strikes, boycotts, selective enforcement of liquor laws – and evolved through a number of radical theories – syndicalism, Communism, amalgamationism, “boring from within” and competitive dual unionism – before the industry’s Hotel Association was worn down enough to sign a neutrality card check agreement in 1938.
If the Supreme Court follows through on the right-wing drive to overturn the NLRA, most workers will find themselves without a safety net of legal protections for any kind of union activity, and without any kind of umpire to force employers to engage with union demands. We could be stuck with the “law of the jungle” for some time.
What could this look like? How does a small conspiracy of sabotage look different from regular bad morale, overwork and understaffing? Office workers should have a tacit understanding to put hour-long invites on each other’s calendars for what are only going to be five-minute conversations, to protect each other’s time from more burdensome actual work. Fast food workers who make small “mistakes” (extra pickles, forget the secret sauce, onion rings instead of French fries) can probably expect the blame to fall on the store management or understaffing. Would it be surprising that anyone overworked in fulfillment might stick the wrong label on a package or two? What if a group of workers made similar mistakes over the course of a shift? How many customer complaints would it take to pinpoint the day and time of the problem? This might sound Pollyannaish, but I imagine the corporate bosses would be more likely to scapegoat and punish the site supervisors for “letting things get out of hand” (and maybe even offer small concessions on restroom breaks or work quotas) than to call attention to both its poor working conditions and the resulting unreliability of its advertised services.
One can easily imagine a host of anonymous internet forums springing up for workers to share stories and trade ideas. Any tactic leading to a concession or to a raising of workers’ morale for a day or two might be tried in more locations. And from these experiments, a greater culture of solidarity can grow.
A major reason why sabotage had its trendy moment in the 1910’s is that in the absence of laws protecting workers’ right to organize, unions could not muster majority support at many workplaces. So, actions that only required a militant minority – particularly actions like work-to-rule schemes, that raised morale by demonstrating that the workers know the job better than the bosses do – were particularly attractive.
For similar reasons, they could become more attractive today – particularly for non-union workers. If we lose the labor law, then what’s “protected” concerted activity under the law ceases to be a consideration when weighing potential organizing strategies and tactics. “What gets the goods?” should be the guiding principle, and “direct action” has historically been one answer.
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Shaun Richman is a labor expert at SUNY Empire State University and author of Tell The Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century.
