Sabotage as a Tool of Solidarity
Hotel workers gather outside their strike headquarters in New York City in 1912. ,The Hotel Trades Council
Workplace sabotage has historically been a powerful organizing tactic. Is the time ripe again?
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.
“Nobody to blame, everybody innocent”
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.
“A submerged, impenetrable obstacle to management sovereignty”
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.