ost Western countries partially legalized striking in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.

Strikes are sometimes used to pressure governments to change policies. Occasionally, strikes
destabilize the rule ofd the more neutral words "work stoppage" or "industrial dispute".

Pre-industrial strikes[edit]
The first historically certain account of strike action was towards the end of the 20th dynasty,
under Pharaoh Ramses III in ancient Egypt ont strikes are undertaken by labor
unions during collective bargaining as a last resort. The object of collective bargaining is for the
employer and the union to come to an agreement over wages, benefits, and working conditions.
A collective bargaining agreement may include a clause which prohibits the union from striking
during the term of the agreement, known as a "no-strike clause." No-strike clauses arose in the
United States immediately following World War II.[15] Some in the labor movement consider no-
strike clau 14 November 1152 BC. The artisans of the Royal Necropolis at Deir el-Medina walked
off their jobs because they had not been paid.[5][6] The Egyptian authorities raised the wages.
An early predecessor of the general strike may have been the secessio plebis in ancient Rome.
In The Outline Of History, H.G. Wells characterized this event as "the general strike of
the plebeians; the plebeians seem to have invented the strike, which now makes its first
appearance in history."[7] Their first strike occurred because they "saw with indignation their
friends, who had often served the state bravely in the legions, thrown into chains and reduced to
slaveryat the demand of patrician creditors."[7]

During and after the Indu

a paeadership marshalled a growing working class tradition to politically organize their followers
to mount an articulate challenge to the capitalist, political establishment. Friedrich Engels, an
observer in London at the time, wrote:
by its numbers, this class has become the most powerful in England, and woe betide the wealthy
Englishmen when it becomes conscious of this fact ... The English proletarian is only just
becoming aware of his power, and the fruits of this awareness were the disturbances of last
summer.[9]
As the 19th century progressed, strikes became a fixture of industrial relations across the
industrialized world, as workers organized themselves to collectively bargain for better wages
and standards with their employers. Karl Marx has condemned the theory of Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon criminalizing strike action in his work The Poverty of Philosophy.[10]
In 1937 there were 4,740 st
rticular political party or ruler; in such cases, strikes are often part of a broader social movement
taking the form of a campaign of civil resistance. Notable examples are the 1980 Gdańsk
Shipyard, and the 1981 W

o 's Republic of China and the former Soviet Union
o 3.3France
o 3.4United Kingdom
o 3.5United States
 4Strikebreakers
o 4.1Union strikebreaking
 5Antistrike action
o 5.1Strike preparation
o 5.2Strike breaking
o 5.3Union busting
o 5.4Lockout
o 5.5Violence