Withdrawing one's labour

A strike is not an absence of work. It is a refusal, collective and announced, by people who could work and choose not to until something changes. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights writes the right into international law, and most constitutions repeat it, as a right of workers rather than a property of a production process. Automation is the answer employers often reach for, and this register is full of tasks that moved for exactly that reason. That is the point rather than the objection. A machine has no leverage to withdraw because it was never giving anything, and where the work becomes fully automated the strike disappears along with the job. What disappears with it is the bargain the strike made possible.