The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 opened a new historical phase of instability and social unrest, already preceded by a wave of protests in 2007 and early 2008 in the Global South over rising food prices. The post-2008 financial meltdown phase has had several key protest episodes, with the years 2011 and 2019 seeing the highest peaks of mobilisation. 2011 was the year of the outbreak of the Arab spring in January, the indignados in Spain in May, the Aganaktismenoi in Greece in June, and Occupy in the United States in September. For its part, 2019 saw high-profile mobilisations in a large number of countries, at least 47 according to a report by the risk assessment firm Versisk Maplecroft (Hribernik and Haynes, 2020), with Chile, Nicaragua, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico and Zimbabwe standing out in particular. It was also the year of the blooming of the strikes against climate change promoted by Fridays for Future and the actions of Extinction Rebellion.

More generally, if we review the whole period it is also necessary to mention, without being exhaustive, the anti-austerity protests in Southern Europe since 2010, which peaked in 2012 and 2013; the outbreak of Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013; the mobilisations in Brazil over the rise in transport prices in 2013; the "umbrella revolution" in Hong Kong in 2014; the first wave of Black Lives Matter in the United States in 2013-15; the feminist strikes in December 2016 in Argentina and Poland, the call for the international women's strike on 8 March 2017 (and the following years), and the explosion of the me-too movement in the US; the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement in France in 2018-19; the explosion of the second wave of Black Lives Matter in the US in 2020; the peasant mobilisations in India in 2020-21; and, finally, the rebellion in France in 2023 against the reform of the pension system.

These protests and social outbursts have deployed, if we use Tilly's (1978) well-known concept, a rich repertoire of collective action, including strikes. Although the visibility of the strike as a form of protest has often been lower than others in the media, it has been common among scholars to speak of a "return" of the strike, after decades of loss of relevance. This reappearance of the strike is therefore part of an overall phase of the return of social conflict. As Nowak (2016) points out, if in the 1960s student protests preceded the labour unrest, in the 2010s there were relevant trade union struggles before the major social outbursts against austerity and the political class or political regimes.

The return of the strike in the current phase can be traced to the general strikes in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 2009 and more clearly in 2010 with the start of the anti-austerity protests in Mediterranean Europe with Greece in the lead, the wave of wildcat strikes in China following the Foxconn suicides, and the public sector strikes in South Africa, to name a few of the most relevant episodes (Nowak, Birke and Dutta, 2018). Also, although not always highlighted strongly enough, strikes were a decisive element in the fall of Ben Ali and Murabak in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011 (Beinin and Duboc, 2015). Since then, strikes have been part of the socio-political landscape, but starting from very low historical levels in many countries. General strikes have coexisted with sectoral strikes, particularly in the public sector, and strikes in large companies. Between 2010 and 2018 there were 64 general strikes in the European Union (EU), half of them in Greece (European Trade Union Institute, 2020). The ILO put the number of strikes in 56 countries between 2010-2019 at 44,000 (Gammarano, 2019). In China, 3,220 strikes were estimated between 2011 and May 2018 according to Chunsen (2020). Led by the new migrant working class, they express a combination of social malaise and a lack of institutional channelling of workers' grievances (Friedman, 2014). Elfstrom (2021), borrowing conceptual categories from McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001), points to the existence of different patterns of labour conflict in the country: a 'contained' conflict in capital-intensive industries, and a more 'transgressive' and 'boundary-spanning' one in light industry, construction, and transport, and in areas of higher immigrant density.

In Europe, the return of strike action was initially associated with large-scale anti-austerity strikes in the public sector in Southern Europe, but also with significant protests in Britain and Belgium (Gall, 2013). This dynamic was the result of a situation in which the public sector was at the centre of austerity policies, provoking a broad movement of contestation of which trade union strikes were one component (della Porta, 2015). At the same time, it also expressed a process of historical weakening of workers and trade unions in the labour market and the workplace. The fight against austerity deepened a trend which had already begun in the 1980s, of decline in strikes in companies to the detriment of sectoral or interprofessional conflicts directed towards governments (Hamann and Kelly, 2013a),

In contrast, in the first post-2008 phase, between 2010 and 2012, almost all countries in the Global South experienced major strikes in the most important industries (Nowak, Birke and Dutta, 2018). Examples are the wave of protests in China in 2010 in the automobile, metal and coalmining industries; the miners' protests in Marikana in 2012 and in the platinum mines in 2014 in South Africa; the construction strikes in Brazil in 2014; in the automobile industry in India in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2016; in the garment industry in Cambodia in 2014; in the automobile industry in 2015 in Turkey; and in the copper mines in Chile in 2015-16. This is not to say that anti-austerity protests in the public sector were not relevant in some countries, such as the aforementioned public sector strike in South Africa in 2012, or the electricians and teachers in Mexico in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

If the great anti-austerity protests in the Mediterranean region marked the beginning of the return of the strike in Europe, recent years have seen a revival of strikes in countries such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, having to do with the high cost of living and the deterioration of working conditions in sectors such as health, education or care (Akkerman, Brandl, Lehr and Vandaele, 2023). The wave of strikes in Great Britain in autumn 2022 is perhaps the most relevant example, without forgetting the "mega-strike" in transport in March 2023 in Germany, or the general strikes in Greece and Belgium against the rising cost of living.  This coexists with some major general political conflicts, such as the great uprising against pension reform in France in 2023 – arguably the most serious political crisis in that country since the return of social unrest with the strikes of November-December 1995 against the reform of social security – and also with the general strike of March 2023 in Greece in response to the Tempe train accident, a result of the deterioration of public services. Protests against the rising cost of living and the deterioration of working and living conditions have also been the driving force behind the strikes of teachers in New Zealand and public employees in Canada in 2023, the nationwide strike in South Africa in 2022, or the wave of strikes in Turkey in 2022.

Another significant development has been the increase in strikes in the logistics and platform economy (wherein both customer and employment relationships are mediated by digital and online interfaces or  “platforms”), manifested in riders' struggles in companies such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Glovo, especially since 2016, and in the strikes of workers in Amazon's fulfilment centres in several countries, from Germany and Poland in 2013 onwards. Road transport has been another sector with major strikes, such as truckers in Brazil in 2018 and Argentina in 2023. As we discuss below, this has led to important debates on logistics and platforms as strategic sectors for the future of strikes, unions and workers’ power.

In the United States, too, the return of the strike has been meaningful, albeit from a historically low level, and without major nationwide general strikes. The strike reinstated itself, although insufficiently, in public debate and regained legitimacy and social support, beginning with the mobilisations of teachers in West Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma in 2018. Then, after social unrest grew during the COVID pandemic, and following the massive Black Lives Matter mobilisations, there was a relative revitalisation of strike activity in October 2021, with the so-called Striketober and, most notably, a broad protest against working conditions through the Great Resignation – not to mention notable union successes at Starbucks and, to a lesser extent, Amazon in 2022. In November 2021 4.5 million workers walked off the job. As Kallas, Friedman and Grageda (2022) point out, individual walkout (sometimes semi-collective and public in areas such as catering and shopping centres) is a rational action in the absence of concrete prospects of improving the situation through strike action. The Great Resignation shows a mix of hybrid protest, individual and collective, overt and latent, testifying to both the accumulated malaise and the weakness of union structures. Overall, as Moody (2021a) points out, the upward trend in strike action reflects grievances built up over the past decade and intensified by the pandemic. The concatenation of strikes in Los Angeles in the summer of 2023, with the coexistence of the Hollywood actors' and screenwriters' strike, the city workers' strike and the hotel workers' strike, is a good example of the revitalisation of the strike in the country.

Finally, the return of the strike transcended the confines of the labour movement, and the very concept of the strike was expanded and reframed by the rise of feminism and the global women's strike from 2017, the US immigrant strikes in 2017 (and their 2006 precedent), the climate change strikes in 2019 and, perhaps less explosively, by the strikes (or attempted strikes) of tenants in multiple countries in response to the housing crisis.

This return of the strike has, not surprisingly, led to renewed interest in its study, which is the focus of this special issue. In it, through the nine articles that comprise it and this presentation, we do not deal with all aspects of strikes, but rather with some specific issues whose features will be described in the course of this introduction.

Defining the strike

As Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) explain, the term "strike" in English has a nautical origin as it refers to the actions ("strike sails") of merchant sailors in the 18th century to prevent ships from delivering their cargo. This seafaring origin of the term is not accidental, as merchant seamen were the first modern working class. In French, on the other hand, the term grève comes from the custom of 17th century Parisian workers who gathered at the Place de Grève, a common place of hiring, to conspire against their masters (Tilly and Tilly, 1998).

Strike in its labour meaning refers to a collective stoppage of work activity. John Steuben (1950: 13-14), in his well-known 1950s organiser handbook defines it as: "an organized cessation from work. It is the collective halting of production or services in a plant, industry, or area for the purpose of obtaining concessions from employers. A strike is labor’s weapon to enforce labor’s demands”. Marcel van der Linden (2008: 182-3) defines it as: "forms of struggle, coercion and power in which a group of workers collectively stops working to enforce economic, social and/or political demands that matter to those directly concerned and/or others". As an act of protest, strikes are a form of defiance of authority and, beyond the concrete demands that trigger them, they are a way of expressing the dignity of workers.

There are many types of strikes and they must be seen in relation to a broader set of forms of workers' protest. In other words, the concept of strike refers to a variety of situations and practices that cannot be radically distinguished from other forms of protest, but are intermingled with them.  But among these various forms of workers' protest, strike action has historically had a prominent place. Burns (2011), for example, recalls how the literature on labour relations and labour economy written between 1950 and 1980 (referring to the North American case) showed an overwhelming consensus on the importance of strike action as a workers' weapon and an indispensable tool for collective bargaining. A consensus that, however, began to break down with the decline of unions and strikes from the 1980s onwards.

Historical perspective is fundamental to understanding the nature of the strike and its contemporary challenges. In their contribution to this special issue, "Private Strike, Public Sphere: Changing Private/Public Relations in U.S. Labor History”, Larry Isaac, Paul Lipold and Brittney Rose analyse the relationship between strikes and the public sphere in the case of the United States, comparing three stages: the Gilded Age, the New Deal era and its institutional legacy in the post-World War II period, and the neoliberal Fractured Deal period. They highlight how the transformation of the strike in recent decades shows the critical importance of the public sphere to its development and a relationship between the strike and civil society more similar to the pre-New Deal era than to the post-war period.

There are different types of strikes and their denomination derives from their objectives and/or tactics employed (Brenner, 2009a: xxxvii). They can be classified by their economic and productive scope (a single company, a sector, a national economy) and by their geographical scope (local, regional, national, international), and the two variables can intersect with each other in multiple ways. If they affect more than one company or workplace, they can be simultaneous or successive (rolling strikes). They can also be distinguished by their legal status (legal or illegal, wildcat) or by their duration (from a few hours to indefinite). They are further distinguished by the type of demands and their defensive or offensive nature, or by the forms of struggle that pair with them (picketing or not, and if so, symbolic or real; occupation of workplaces or not, and if so, management or not of production under workers' control; street demonstrations or not; demonstrations inside the workplace or not...). There are also, as Van der Linden (2008) reminds us, forms of protest that can be described as semi-strikes, such as sit-down protests and slowing down the production process, sabotage or giving the product away for free (i.e., not charging for a service).

It is also common to classify strikes according to their economic or political nature, which is related to the content of the demands and the target of the protest. It is precisely the study of political strikes that is the focus of one of the contributions to this special issue, "Political Strikes in Latin America: Concept, Measurement, and Recent Trends in the Region" by Rodrigo Medel. The author analyses the return of the political strike in Latin America, a region of the world in which trade unions have been subjected since the 1990s to prolonged neoliberal adjustment, provoking several episodes of political-social unrest in which trade unions also played their part. Medel offers a conceptual definition and typology of political strikes and a detailed empirical analysis for the period 1990-2019, based on an original database. His results show that political strikes gained pre-eminence in the region, but with significant variation from country to country.

The relationship between economic and political strikes is also covered in the paper "Economic and Political Strikes: A Social Movement Unionism Hypothesis" by Katia Pilati and Margherita Sabrina Perra. The authors analyse strikes by integrating the fields of industrial relations and social movement scholarship. They develop a new typology of strikes from an empirical study based on a database of strikes in Italy between 2008 and 2018, built using protest event analysis (PEA).  Following a social movement unionism hypothesis, their analysis explores the patterns of participation of unions and organisations and the alliances established in the different types of strikes.

The study of strikes has shown that they tend to develop in waves. Strike waves are periods of intensified strike activity (Boll, 1989). The concept of strike waves should be related to the broader concept of protest cycles introduced by Tarrow (1998) in the field of social movement theory. In a more political sense, one can also speak of "class struggle cycles" (Mandel, 1996: 126-7) to refer to periods of high strike conflict. The concrete form that a strike wave takes can be highly variable, but any strike wave implies a substantial change in the level of conflict between labour, capital and the state (Cottle, 2019).

Three broad indicators are commonly used to analyse strike activity: frequency, involvement, and volume, the latter being the most commonly employed indicator in general and in comparative studies in particular. However, there are many factors that explain strikes and they cannot be understood and compared through statistics alone (Dribbusch and Vandaele, 2007). Strikes can be the result of workers' weakness or strength, offensive or defensive (Edwards and Hyman, 1994). Hence the importance of a qualitative interpretation (Dribbusch and Vandaele, 2007; Gallas and Nowak, 2016).

Finally, strikes have to be analysed in terms of their impact. This, like the impact of any social movement, is not always easy to determine. Giugni (2008) classifies the consequences of any social movement into three main blocs: political, personal, and cultural. The typology can also be adapted to the strike (by including economic and labour changes in the political bloc or adding them as a specific dimension). It is also necessary to distinguish between long-term and short-term impacts. Similarly, between external impacts (political, social and labour changes) and internal impacts (on the strike movement itself and its members). Finally, it should be noted that the impacts of strikes can be paradoxical, or at least indirect and non-linear. Brecher (1997), for example, recalls that although many large mass strikes in history ended in defeat, this does not mean that they were a failure, since they contributed to the emergence in the mid or long term of legal changes and reforms favourable to workers.

Of all the variants of the strike, the most far-reaching is the general strike. There is no single possible definition of it, but it refers to a national strike involving workers in various industries directed against political power (Hyman, 1989). They have a political aspect, but in combination with economic demands that require a political confrontation, and together with workers and trade unions they often involve protests by other social groups and organisations.

However, general strikes can be of a different nature. For example, the idea of the general strike as a central instrument for revolutionary strategy that the Wobblies and revolutionary syndicalism had in the early 20th century has little to do with the contemporary limited one-day general strikes against austerity policies. In turn, a situation of a general strike formally called by the unions, in the guise of a controlled strike (or a series of strikes), is not the same as a general strike resulting from the semi-spontaneous generalisation of struggles, as happened in France in 1968. As Moody (2012) points out: "In short, we have two very different types of 'general strikes': those that are 'called' into being by trade union officials, usually for a day or so, and can as easily be called off, on the one hand, and those that tend to be sparked by a particular struggle and spread due to specific circumstances as well as issues affecting broad sections of the working class”. Of course, there are intermediate situations between the two poles, and many real conflicts present a variable combination of both dynamics. The anti-austerity strikes that took place in Mediterranean Europe from 2008 and, above all, 2010 onwards are of the first type.

More generally, we can also distinguish between a strong and a weak version of the strike. The first refers to strikes understood as a strike "to the end”, organised with the aim of forcing a given situation to the maximum, and which usually involve an active attitude on the part of the striking workers, and the carrying out of several strong actions complementary to the strike, necessary for its success (non-symbolic pickets, marches, occupations, etc.). The second is the more ritualised, symbolic, demonstrative and self-limiting version that became the standard in modern industrial relations systems. Burns (2011) calls the first type "traditional strike”, taking as a reference the strikes of the 1930s in the United States, which laid the foundations for the subsequent improvement of workers' living conditions, and recalls how the weak version is the one that ended up being definitively consolidated after the neoliberal turn of the 1980s.

A particular variant of the strike is the so-called "strike by proxy" (grève par procuration), a concept that started to be used in France following the strikes of November-December 1995 against the social security reform that marked the first major social revolt against neoliberalism in Europe (Antentas, 2016a; Béroud, Moriaux and Vakaloulis, 1988). The term attempted to define a situation in which the majority of public opinion was sympathetic to the struggle, and part of it participated in the protest demonstrations, while the strike only affected the public sector (Rozès, 1999; Vakaloulis, 1999).  The concept, however, has to be considered more a metaphor than an analytical category (Kouvelakis 2007). In the private sector, where trade unions were weak, working conditions made it more complex to strike. In a way, the bulk of workers "delegated" their ability to strike to public workers, with the railway workers in the lead, and felt represented by them. The number of strikers was always much smaller than the number of demonstrators, in a context of massive support in the polls for protests that transcended the scale of the strike. The strike by proxy was the result of a context of trade union weakness and the difficulties to strike (unemployment and precarity). To some extent, it has been a type of conflict present in most subsequent major socio-labour conflicts in France since 1995, based on a combination of prolonged strike in some key sectors and large demonstrations in the wake of successive days of action (Moreau, 2018). It is an example of a weak strike, even if there may be a nucleus of a strong strike at its heart.

It was in the wake of the 1995 conflict that Negri (1999) coined the term "metropolitan strike" to emphasise the role of the metropolis as a site of exploitation and the role of service users as co-producers. The strike, then, was an action produced both by workers and users of public services. The term had the merit of underlining the territorial and citizen dimension of the strike, although it ran the risk of underplaying its workplace aspect. In other words, it illuminated one part of the process but obscured another.

Return of the strike and trade union crisis

Since the 2008 crisis and in particular since 2010, we have witnessed an increase in major strikes in many countries, in a global context of a historical crisis of the labour movement as it developed in the last century (Antentas and Vivas, 2012). The revival of strike activity and the reinstatement of the strike in political debate comes after decades of trade union decline, more or less pronounced depending on the country. The trade union crisis has many facets, such as the fall in membership, the loss of functionality in the workplace, and the decline in their social and cultural influence. This is part of a depletion of mainstream trade union practice and discourse, which has been undermined by neoliberal restructuring (Hyman, 1999). In this sense, we can read the trade union crisis as a strategic crisis of project and identity (Antentas, 2008a; Hyman, 2001), which is different depending on each organisation and region of the world. Trade union decline is due to a combination of exogenous causes, such as globalisation, flexibilisation and productive reorganisation, and endogenous causes, such as trade union inaction and lack of connection with young people or social organisations, and dependence on forms of action typical of large industrial factories or the public sector (Bryson, Ebbinghaus and Visser, 2011).

From a European perspective, the trade union crisis that began in the 1980s is the crisis of a certain trade union and industrial relations model (itself very heterogeneous) that reached its zenith in the 1970s (Visser, 2012). The "industrial union" based much of its power on the ability to strike strategically, whether for defensive or offensive purposes (Visser, 2012). Streeck (2005) calls this union model "political industrial union" to emphasize that union power in this model was also associated with alliances with left-wing political parties (including Christian sectors). For his part, Hyman (1996 and 2012) defines the strategy and identity of the majority European trade unionism of the post-war period as "political economism”. To his definition it would perhaps be appropriate to add the term "bureaucratic”, i.e., "bureaucratic political economism”, given the structural relevance of the bureaucratic character (an aspect analysed by Hyman himself) of this trade union model and the importance of this fact to understand its crisis and inability to react to the neoliberal turn after the 1980s.

The retreat of trade unionism makes it imperative, as Nowak (2019) remarks, to have a comprehensive theory of the strike that goes beyond the analysis of trade unions, to pay attention to other forms of organization, and to combine the analysis of the workplace with that of the community, the neighborhood, or family relations. This is especially necessary if we take into account a global perspective that includes the Global South, where unions are weak in most cases. In fact, the development of strikes is not always associated with the existence of strong union organizations and often these have taken place in contexts of great weakness or virtual absence of unions – the Mumbai textile strike in 1982-83, involving more than 24,000 workers and lasting 18 months, being a classic example (Van der Linden, 2008). Nowadays, as Nowak (2019 and 2021) points out, the minor role of unions in strikes can be seen in the wave of strikes that occurred since 2010 in many countries of the global south, such as China, India, Brazil, or South Africa. In short, analyzing and theorizing the strike from a global perspective requires according to him going beyond the theories on industrial relations developed in reference to the European or North American context after World War II.

Independently of the unions’ situation, the development of strikes can be affected positively or negatively by the existence or not of a certain militant base or network, even with informal organizational forms. In the United States it has been common in the history of the labour movement to use the expression "militant minority" to refer to this militant base relevant for strikes and conflicts. Blanc (2019: 104) defines it as: "individuals with a class struggle orientation, significant organizing experience, and a willingness to act independently of (and, if necessary, against) the top union officialdom”. His comparative study of teacher strikes in West Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma in 2018 shows how the existence of a very weak militant minority in the latter state was a key negative factor in the development of the conflict.

Profiles of the strike

The return of the strike has resulted in a wide disparity of situations. It is possible, however, to draw a general profile of the composition of contemporary strikes.

In terms of social composition, in many countries of the South, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China or South Africa, many of the conflicts were led by industrial workers, although there have also been important struggles in services, such as the public sector strikes in South Africa in 2010 or Brazil in 2012 (Nowak, Birke, Dutta, 2019). In the traditional industrial sectors in many cases the protagonists have been the most precarious sectors such as car workers in India, miners in South Africa, or migrant workers in China (Gallas and Nowak, 2016).

The picture of labour movements in the Global South is very varied. Ness (2016) emphasizes the formation of a new industrial and urban working class in China and India.  However, the political-union potential of the new working class in formation is complex to discern. Contrary to very optimistic analyses, Friedman and Nair (2021) define autoworker militancy in both countries as 'fractured militancy', based on the existence of a multiplicity of actors involved in labour struggles in the workplace, but without the emergence of a collective trans-local movement. At the same time, the emphasis on the formation of a new industrial and urban working class captures only one dimension of the situation in the Global South. For, at the same time, there is a wide range of experiences of organization and protest among informal workers, often on the margins of trade unions and outside the workplace (Bieler and Novak, 2021a and 2021b).

In the Global South, urban workers' strikes coexist with peasant mobilization, generally represented by small and medium landowners and in some cases by landless peasants, in the face of agribusiness. Many of them have been framed in the international network of La Via Campesina, created in 1992 and which had its moment of maximum prominence at the turn of the millennium during the height of the alter-globalization movement (Desmarais, 2007; Antentas and Vivas, 2009a and 2009b). Their forms of action, rather than strikes, tend to be marches, blockades, occupations, encampments, or tractor-trailers. In recent times, the farmers’ protests that took place in India in 2020 in opposition to a set of liberalizing laws by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government stand out. In this case, the protests were led by large landowners, but within the framework of a broader inter-caste coalition that also included Dalits. This coalition, still fragile, reflects the transformations of the last decades in the rural areas and the relative reduction of inter-caste contradictions within it. A more active role of women has also been noted with respect to previous protests, such as that of the 1980s, although their presence was secondary to that of men. The protests involved barricades, roadblocks, tractor-trailers, encampments and the support of workers' unions that called for a general strike (Baviskar and Levien, 2021).

For their part, the major strikes in the Global North have been led by the service sector, public and to a lesser extent private, and also in transport or logistics. The public sector has played a decisive role in many of the major contemporary conflicts, and was the axis of the anti-austerity protests not only in Mediterranean Europe in 2010-2012 but also, as Nowak, Birke and Dutta (2018) recall, in contexts as disparate as South Africa, the United States, Canada or Nigeria.

The role of the service sector in strikes in Northern countries is part of a more fundamental trend, the result of productive transformations and neoliberal restructuring, of what has been called the "tertiarization of conflict" (Accornero, 1985; Bordogna and Primo Cella, 2002). It has also implied the feminization of strike activity largely due to the greater weight of women in the services (van der Velden, 2007). This feminization is even more important and visible in the case of strikes in care work, such as teaching and education, which have been one of the central targets of post-2008 austerity policies (Nowak, Birke and Dutta, 2018). In terms of age, many of the labour protests that have taken place in European countries or the United States have been organized by young people or young adults, mostly millennials, already socialized under neoliberal policies and suffering from a glaring contrast between expectations and reality, or between education and actual working conditions. Perhaps that is why one can speak of a millennial strike wave. The strikes in the services express the "proletarianization" (job insecurity, excessive workload, and new forms of control) of a fraction of the qualified middle classes, such as university professors, lawyers, architects, etc., which affects in particular the younger generations, and early-stage career (although "early" in a flexible sense) millennials. They express the collapse of job and life prospects of the millennial and subsequent generations.

The case, for example, of the aforementioned strike wave that began in the fall of 2022 in Great Britain is a good example of this. It was triggered by the rising cost of living, in addition to the degradation of working conditions and public services accumulated over decades, as well as labour shortages in some sectors of the labour market after Brexit and the pandemic. In it a key role has been played by sectors linked to services, such as postal workers, nurses, transport workers, and even doctors or university professors.

Another even more specific example is that of strikes in high tech in the United States. As is well known, high tech has always been driven by the so-called "Californian ideology" (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), which mixes a strong anti-union and individualistic culture with a certain social progressivism. Its basis has been a company culture that seeks to dissolve work-related contradictions and creates a strong emotional identification between employees and the company, fostering forms of work organization that apparently promote autonomy and participation. As Tarnoff (2020) explains, the movement began haltingly in 2017, in opposition to the collaboration of high tech companies with the Trump administration, developed in 2018 in protest of the partnership of Google and the Pentagon, and peaked in 2020. It represents a process of awareness, partial and limited, of skilled and white-collar employees of their status as workers, in a context of increasing work pressure and degradation of working conditions. This skilled segment entered the scene after previous protests from lower strata within high tech, first from unskilled manual workers (janitors, janitors, waiters...) and then from subcontracted skilled workers. The protests of both lower echelons had a pedagogical and demonstrative effect. As Tarnoff remarks, it was the women and/or black workers, who occupy the lowest places among the skilled wage earners, who constituted the backbone of the movement. In other words: it was through gender and race that these intermediate cadres came to class and to develop an identity, still contradictory and limited, as workers, possessing a relatively privileged but threatened position.

Finally, in terms no longer of the composition but of the characteristics of the strike, Nowak, Birke, Dutta (2018) remark that in the post-austerity cycle after 2008 general differences in strike patterns can be detected in the Global South and the Global North. In the Global South, strikes were more sectoral and economic and were often characterized as protracted conflicts. The authors take up a definition by Rosa Luxemburg (to which we will return later) and define these types of strikes as "fighting strikes".

In the North, strikes have been more demonstrative and limited in time and have a more ritualized dimension. A good example of this are the one-day general strikes that formed the backbone of the anti-austerity protests in southern Europe. This model of strikes, as Nowak and Gallas (2014) point out, combines the radical symbolism of the "general strike" with a moderate form of disruption (a strike limited in time) and allows a large participation of workers because it demands few sacrifices. It is a demonstration of strength that covers union weakness.  This does not mean that there are no long conflicts over time in northern countries. In sectors such as logistics there have been protracted conflicts, and also in some cases in public services, often with a stop-and-go dynamic, which has combined frequent short strikes and large demonstrations (e.g., the conflict over public health in the Madrid region in Spain during 2023). Specific mention should be made of the popular rebellion against pension reform in France in 2023, in which, however paradoxically, strikes, as pointed out by several analysts (Penissat, 2023), have played a minor role compared to street protests.

Return of the strike and transnational action

One of the particularities and weaknesses of contemporary strikes is their feeble international articulation. After 2008, a cycle of transnational protest emerged but not a transnational movement as was the anti-globalization movement at the turn of the millennium (Flesher Fominaya, 2014; Antentas, 2016b). In general terms the rebirth of social contestation within the national-state framework was weakened as a response to governmental adjustment programs, giving rise to a unsynchronized defensive rhythm of social resistances at the national scale. The very magnitude of the legitimacy crisis of representative political systems nationalized social political contestation (Antentas, 2022), and debates on democracy and citizenship were defined in a national framework (Gerbaudo, 2016).  As I have analysed elsewhere (Antentas, 2022), in the phase after 2008 and 2011 there has been an important mutual identification and inter-influence in the struggles, but very little capacity for international joint action. That is, there has been a diffuse and contextual internationalism, but not articulated or strategic. The movement against climate change in 2019, around Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion and, also the international women's strike, would be the most relevant exceptions to this dynamic.

This general situation in the post-2008 phase is compounded by the traditional historical difficulty of trade unions in the transnational arena, anchored in a model of union diplomacy and bureaucratic internationalism (Hyman, 2005). Multiple studies pointed out already since the 1990s the problems, as well as the positive experiences, of international trade union action facing globalization (Moody, 1997; Bronfenbrenner, 2007; Bieler and Lindberg, 2011; Bieler et al., 2015; Fox-Hodess, 2016; Antentas, 2007 and 2008). The fact is that the bulk of international trade unionism headed into the 2008 crisis without having recovered its pulse or developed an effective transnational action capacity (Antentas, 2022).

For all these reasons, the international dimension of the return of the strike has been limited. Unions, even in similar countries or countries sharing comparable conjunctures, demonstrated the highest strategic incapacity to articulate their struggle on an international scale. They did not perceive the multiplier effect that the transnationalization of their mobilizations could have had. Despite the interinfluence among many of these national strikes, there has been very little active relationship between them and between their promoters (Nowak, Birke and Dutta, 2018; Nowak, 2019). The most striking case is undoubtedly that of Mediterranean Europe, where the period 2010-2013 saw widespread protests and strikes against austerity policies. All of them obeyed a national calendar, without any transnational articulation, despite the (relative) similarity of their socio-political and economic situations. A good example of this lack of transnational articulation is the sequence of general strikes and large trade union mobilizations that swept through Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and France between September and November 2010. Despite the similarity of the motives of the trade union calls and the historical relations between the labour organisations of these countries, they were unable to concentrate their actions on a Euro-Mediterranean date. It is not difficult to see the qualitative change that this would have entailed in terms of visibility and mutual strengthening of the protests.

A partial exception was the general strike of November 14, 2012, which was initially called as an "Iberian general strike", including Spain and Portugal, and subsequently, as a European Day of Action, with strikes in Italy, Cyprus, Malta, and demonstrations in France, Belgium and Greece. However, the Iberian or European dimension of the day had just a limited visibility in the trade union calls. At most, as Nowak, Birke and Dutta (2018) point out, it can be considered as a tentative effort – with rather unsuccessful results and no strategic follow-up.

Without forgetting the traditional example of dockworkers, a sector with a strong capacity for international action (Turnbull, 2007; Brookes, 2019; Fox-Hodess, 2017), a notable exception in this panorama of international disarticulation of strikes is constituted by several initiatives at company or sector level in the field of the emerging platform economy – one of the best known cases being the Amazon Workers International network, created in 2015 by Polish and German workers. And also the international coordination of riders' struggles, with joint protests in Europe, Latin America and the United States in 2020, after relevant struggles in several countries (Marinaro, 2020).

Precisely, the international action of riders is the subject of the contribution, "Building a glocal collective actor: The European General Assembly of couriers", by Anne Dufresne in this special issue. Her article is a case study on the European General Assembly (EGA) of riders in October 2018, done through fieldwork based on participant observation and interviews. The author defines it as a "glocal" actor and highlights the importance of coordinating demands at different levels (local, national and, especially, transnational) to extract a common substratum. Finally, she discusses its limits and potentialities at the European level.

Many of the cross-border action initiatives have been in areas where the internationalization of the protest was an essential condition for aspiring to a victory and in which informal and/or grassroots union collectives have played a leading role (not necessarily exclusively) on the margins of (or in complex interaction with) the traditional majority union structures (Grohmann and Alves, 2020; Cant, 2019). In a way, these experiences connect (symbolically but not organically) with a long tradition of rank-and-file internationalism in multinational firms that developed in the 1970s, although then mostly in sectors such as automobile.

Experiences in more traditional multinationals can also be mentioned, such as the sustained struggle of McDonald's workers, and the fast-food sector in general, for a living wage. In 2012, as a result of mobilizations in several establishments in New York, the Fight for $15 campaign was born, in defence of a $15 an hour minimum wage and union rights ('$15 and union'). A decade later, the campaign, still without having succeeded in raising the federal minimum wage, achieved legislative changes and wage increases in many U.S. states. More broadly, it also changed the public debate on the minimum wage. It has, however, been less successful in unionizing the sector. The North American campaign has not become a transnational movement, but it did serve to inspire struggles in other countries and articulate some global days of protest, such as those of May 15, 2014 or November 12, 2019 (Rosenblum, 2017; Luce, 2022). Oswalt (2016) uses the term "improvisational unionism" to define many of the dynamic, creative and militant union strategies, with frequent use of strike action, used in the Fight for $15 and other similar struggles.

Mass Strikes

Several authors, such as Gallas and Nowak (2016), McNally (2020), Nowak, Birke and Dutta (2018), Nowak (2019), Moody (2012 and 2021b) have analysed the return of the strike after 2008 as the return of the mass strike taking up Rosa Luxemburg's (1925[1906]) well-known concept. A number of the contributions in this special issue also refer to her analyses.

Under the impact of the events of 1905 in Russia, Rosa Luxemburg in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), dissociated herself from both the anarcho-syndicalist conceptions of the general strike and the social democratic view of trade union action, which had in common, at their core, a mechanistic undertone that conceived of the general strike as something that could be decreed and technically called. She uses the term mass strike to differentiate it from the more common general strike that was also more strategically codified in the jargon of the workers' movement. Her specific strategic orientation thus required a particular terminology.

In her analysis, Luxemburg points out the multiform and variable character of the mass strike and its disruptive logic, which overflows the confines of the workers' movement itself. Thus she writes that: "Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena" (Luxemburg, 1925 [1906]). She stresses that in them economic and political struggles intermingle; she conceives them not as isolated events but as a chained set of actions that make up an entire period of class struggle and transcend the confines of the organized labour movement.

Mass strikes, as Brecher (1997) points out, unify the different segments of the working class in a logic of polarization and generalized social confrontation. This unification is, in fact, a typical phenomenon of the great processes of social struggles whether they include strikes or not. It refers to Gramsci's well-known analysis in his Notebook 25 (1971; Q25§2) of the episodic unification of subaltern classes whose ordinary existence is fragmentary in nature.

Mass strike and the already analysed term strike waves are not synonymous (Nowak, 2019). The latter refers to a chain of strikes during a given period, but whose nature in terms of impact or force does not necessarily have to be that of a mass strike. That is, a strike wave may include within it mass strikes or it may itself be a mass strike. If strike wave itself refers to the serialization of strikes in a given period, mass strike refers to its overall disruptive logic and its polarizing impact on the political life of the country. Nowak remarks that in the dynamics of strike expansion, mass strikes imply a greater internal connection of ongoing strikes than does a strike wave, which simply refers to the chaining and coexistence in time of inter-influenced strikes

The return since 2008 of the great episodes of contentious politics and, among them, of mass strikes sums up well a situation that Luxemburg (1925 [1906]) describes as "a huge, colorful image of a general confrontation between labor and capital". Mass strikes signal, in short, moments of intensification of the class struggle in which, as Mandel (1980) remarked, economic, social and political protests are mixed.

Mass strikes are variable phenomena. But some general patterns can be identified: the defiance of the authorities, the tendency of workers to take control of their activities, and the development of a dynamic of collective solidarity (Brecher, 1997). It is pertinent, therefore, to try to pose some typology of mass strikes that will allow a better understanding of the nature of each specific situation. Nowak and Gallas (2014) propose a typology of mass strikes according to four criteria: aim (political or economic), extension (partial or general), direction (offensive or defensive), form (demonstrative, 1 or 2 days of strike, or fighting strikes, long and sustained). Based on their classification, the authors define the wave of general strikes in Europe since 2010 as political, defensive and demonstrative, and based on general strikes.

In a later work, Nowak (2019) proposes three categories of mass strike: demonstrative mass strikes, centrally coordinated fighting mass strikes, and worker-led fighting mass strikes. He does not establish any hierarchy to any of the three variants and specifies that the "political quality" of the strike does not derive from its organizational form. At the same time he also points out three patterns of diffusion of mass strikes: sectoral copycat strikes, national cross-sectoral mass strikes, and regional mass strikes.

The use of the Luxemburgian term "mass strike" requires, however, some precisions since the present context is very different from that of the beginning of the 20th century when Luxemburg was writing. The current general conjuncture is defensive, and the starting point is the generalized weakness of the workers' movement on an international scale. The lack of control of strikes by the trade union bureaucracy is much more in the current cycle than in the period analysed by Luxemburg, or in the sixties and seventies. The fragmentation of workers, job insecurity and unemployment are at the root of this. However, as Gallas and Nowak (2016) point out, tensions between established unions and strikers have been clearest in the Global South, such as in Brazil, China, Egypt and South Africa.

Riot vs strike?

In his work Riot, Strike, Riot, Clover (2016) argued that we are in the era of the "riot" and the loss of relevance of the strike. Clover laid out a stylized history of capitalism in three phases: first, the riot was the preeminent form of protest; then, with the consolidation of industrial capitalism, the strike became the standard; finally, since the 1970s with the neoliberal turn, the strike would have gone into decline to the detriment of the riot. Between phases, there would be a period of transition, of coexistence between old and new forms of struggle (riot and strike respectively). The current era would be that of the "circulation struggles", defined as "struggles to control space and movement through it" (Clover, 2016: 138), of which the riot would be the matrix.

Clover's theorisation, however, presents several problems. First, the riot is not the only relevant form of protest today. Not only are strikes still relevant, but they have been reinvigorated in many cases and their significance has been extended by feminism and by the housing, immigrant and climate change movements. Today's major protest episodes have also included large demonstrations or occupations (in both cases sometimes accompanied by riots). The riot is one aspect of contemporary contention. Rather than subsuming forms of struggle under the riot, it is useful to insert the riot into a broader context of multiform struggles. Clover, as Toscano (2016) points out, absolutises the riot. He has the merit of dignifying riot, an often-undervalued form of protest, and captures one of the trends in contemporary protest, but obscures the others. In a similar vein to Clover, the 2018-19 protest cycle is defined by Dyer-Witheford, Reyes and Liu (2020) as a "cycle of riots", largely assuming his theorisation. The problem with this analysis is that it conflates the concept of 'upsurge' with that of 'riot', when it seems more correct to do the opposite and consider 'riot' as one aspect of a more general process of upsurge. The protests of 2018-19 include marches, blockades, etc., a series of actions that together indicate situations of upsurge, but which cannot be circumscribed in the term "riot". The "riot" is one aspect of the struggles of 2018-19.

Secondly, Clover makes an overly sharp distinction and contrast between strike and riot. He simplifies the complexity of the forms of struggle in the past and in the present: the era of strikes was more complex and today there is more than just riots. Clover, as Armstrong (2016) points out, undermines, for example, the role of the picket line in the strike, which at the same time intervenes in the sphere of production and circulation, and which was often associated with riots and confrontations. It is also worth remembering that some nineteenth-century riots were not spontaneous but rather were planned actions to put pressure on employers. Hobsbawm (1964:7), for example, uses the term "collective bargaining by riot" to refer to Luddite revolts. The elegance of Clover's stylised periodisation means that it avoids excessive analytical complexity. The contrast between strike and riot is a partially false dualism. There is a tendency towards the territorialisation of conflict and its "disorganised" and transgressive expression (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, McAdam, 2001), the fruit of an era of malaise, low organisation, repression, and rising inequality. But this does not mean that today's protests are reduced to riots.

Third, the very concept of "circulation struggles" deserves to be discussed. As Moody (2018) has pointed out, Clover seems to consider production and circulation as two separate spheres when in fact it is better to consider them in an integrated manner as did Marx. The concept of "circulation struggles" is useful for emphasising the importance of the disruption of commodity circulation within the global supply chain, but not as a counterpoint to "production struggles". Disruption of circulation is in fact much more effective through strikes than through riots. Blockades or riots without strikes have less anti-circulation effectiveness. More generally, the debate on circulation-production must be put in relation to social reproduction, analysing the effects of the blockade of commodities on social reproduction and the social effect of the interruption of reproductive activities.

Social Reproduction Strikes

It is useful to analyse the return of the strike through the prism of social reproduction. The term refers to the set of activities, processes and institutions related to the maintenance of everyday life and intergenerational relations (Arruzza and Cirillo, 2018).  From this perspective it is common to consider that one of the dimensions of the contemporary crisis is precisely a crisis of social reproduction (Fraser, 2016; Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, 2019).  Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), which has experienced a new impetus in recent years, stresses the contradiction between "value creation and life creation" (Ferguson, 2020: 141). It analyses the worker's own production process (Bhattacharya, 2017), noting that the relationship between the production of human labour power and value is necessary, but also contradictory because the satisfaction of human needs is subordinated to the needs of accumulation (Ferguson, 2017). It can be understood as an approach that analyses how "our embodied labour powers are made and sustained" and "situates this highly gendered work of reproducing embodied labor powers in light of a broader social totality riven by many forms of oppression" (Jaffe, 2020: 26). In other words, public services, schools, healthcare, or the food system are necessary for the production of labour power, but access to them is mediated by relations of exploitation and social oppression (Bhattacharya and Ferguson, 2017).

Social Reproduction Theory, and its relation to the return of the strike, is discussed at length in one of the contributions to this special issue, "From Social Reproduction Theory to Social Reproduction Strikes" by Aaron Jaffe, and also appears in other contributions. Jaffe begins by summarising the features of SRT and its critical nature. He then analyses the meaning of the social reproduction strike, noting that social reproduction struggles involve demands that transcend the workplace (even if they also contain labour demands), connect concrete realities to the "broader fabric of capitalist violence", and are rooted in the solidarities generated in their communities. He points out that social reproduction strikes disrupt capital's accumulation of value, and discusses the relationship between the "point of production" and the "point of reproduction", recalling that they are not polar opposites.

Many contemporary strikes have been located in the field of social reproduction. As Moody (2019) recalls, it is an expanding arc due to increasing social needs, mostly feminised, and with significant deterioration of working conditions, usually involving emotional stress.  The social services sector, as he also points out, has some structural characteristics that make strike activity easier, such as its concentration in urban areas or the immobile and non-offshoring nature of its facilities and perhaps the greater structural ease of strike action typical of the public sector.

The perspective of social reproduction is also useful for analysing struggles and resistance in dealing with precarity and/or informalisation. Precarity is a broad concept that refers not only to strict working conditions but to a wider social policy context. Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) define it as a situation of uncertainty and insecurity, in which the risks of work have been transferred to workers in a context of weak social protection. Precarity has a multidimensional meaning, so that the debate on job precarity points to a broader one on life precarity (Antentas, 2008b). Chan and Nair (2019), reviewing experiences in Canada, the United States, India and China, note the existence of a wide variety of resistances to precarity that correspond to the vast diversity of precarious situations. These often combine workplace struggles with broader demands linked to social reproduction (such as housing, health care, child-rearing problems) and varied organisational processes ranging from the formation of new unions to workers' centres or socio-political campaigns (Fine et al., 2018; Milkman and Ott, 2014).

Strikes and strategic power

The productive transformations, tertiarization and the downsizing of the traditional industrial enclaves in which unions built their strength have for decades triggered important debates on the sources of workers’ power today, such as the role of the public sector and services, the role of the territory and the community, and the vulnerabilities of just-in-time or the global supply chain.

The first issue to consider concerns the relationship between community and workplace. In his study of strikes in Brazil and India between 2010 and 2014 in the construction and automobile sectors, Nowak (2019) emphasises the need to understand the strike as a dialectic between strike action in the workplace (the capacity to block production) and actors and forms of social organisation beyond the workplace. The workplace should not be analysed in isolation, but is embedded in diverse social relations of all kinds. Research on community unionism, for example, has highlighted the importance of the local community (Holgate, 2015). Community is an essential aspect of the development of strikes. This is particularly relevant in sectors such as services, where workers have little workplace power but are stronger when they involve their communities in a struggle. McAlevey (2016: 28) graphically sums up the situation by pointing out that "in large swaths of the service economy, the point of production is the community". She therefore argues for the need for a "unified approach" (2016: 29) in which workplace and broader issues are blended, and workers are organised both inside and outside the workplace.

Many examples illustrate the importance of the community-workplace relationship. Thus, Blanc (2019) analysing the West Virginia strikes in 2018 shows how community support was a decisive element in their development. Teachers sought the support of families, framed their struggle in defence of public education, reached out to communities, and organised food drives for poor families whose children depend on school meals. But links between unions and social movements and community organisations are also crucial in other sectors such as transport and logistics. Moody (in: Alimahomed-Wilson, Fox-Hodess and Moody, 2018), for his part, recalls for example the case of the Warehouse Workers for Justice, a worker centre that fostered a coalition with the Chicago Teachers Union and neighbourhood organisations working on housing and education issues in black and Latino communities, and won improvements for temporary and part-time workers. The historical traditions of worker cooperativism and consumer boycotts likewise underline the relevance of community-based social organising. One example among many is Frank's (1994) study of the labour movement in Seattle in the early 1920s, when it attempted to use the "purchasing power" of workers to push for boycotts and establish a network of cooperatives.

 

A second relevant issue is the strategic vulnerabilities of global capitalism. Logistics has been repeatedly pointed out as a strategic sector for workers' power, due to its importance in global capitalism and the existence of vulnerabilities in the supply chain, which nevertheless depends on human intervention at crucial nodes (Moody, 2017 and 2023). For this reason, some of the trade union struggles in the sector have a strategic character whose importance goes beyond the company or field involved. This is the case, for example, of the aforementioned experiences at Amazon. It is not for nothing that Alimahomed-Wilson, Allison, and Reese (2020) define contemporary capitalism as "Amazon Capitalism" to certify the strategic importance of the company. The debate on logistics has led to the flourishing of an important literature that points to the existence of choke points (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018) in the supply chain, which constitute a source of strategic power for workers, derived from their structural or "positional" power, if we use a term coined by Perrone (1983). The term counter-logistics (Bernes, 2013) has been used to refer to the disruptive action of the supply-chain.

However, the fact that logistics is a strategic sector and that there are choke points in the supply chain should not lead to a simplistic view of workers’ power in general or of logistics workers in particular. Chua, Danyluk, Cowen and Khalili (2018) warn against a fetishisation of counter-logistics that ignores the strategies of capital and the state to control spaces and flows. Fox-Hodess (2017 and 2019) and Fox-Hodess and Santibáñez Rebolledo (2020) point out how the political and social context is decisive in understanding the development of trade union action. They show how the ability of dockers to use their strategic position is strongly conditioned by national political contexts, labour laws and the politics of each state. Cole's (2018) study of the San Francisco and Durban dockers also goes in the same direction. Nowak (2021 and 2022), for his part, points out, by way of example, how the truckers' strike in Brazil in 2018, despite its great disruptive capacity, achieved only modest successes. The reasons for its limited success must be sought in the larger political economy of freight transport in Brazil. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that logistics has ways of short-circuiting workers' action (Neilson, 2019).

Grappi (2019) points out how sometimes the discourse on counter-logistics seems to fall into a simplistic view of a minority practising blockades at strategic points. In reality, a broader political vision is needed, one that develops counter-logistics beyond the confines of the supply-chain. Trade union power is not an automatic reflection of the workers’ position, just as the political is not an automatic reflection of the social, as Daniel Bensaïd (2008) reminded us. It must be built collectively and is conditioned by political, social and cultural factors. The important point is not to isolate the debate on workers' power in relation to their workplace power from the general political context and economic structure, so as not to take a too reductionist view. This is why Nowak (2109 and 2022) argues the need to move from a restrictive theory of workers’ power, focusing on the resources that workers do or do not possess for collective action, to an integral theory, emphasising a relational view of power, state strategy and the global political economy.

Jörg Nowak and Marco Santana, in their contribution "Social Networks and Collective Action in Brazil: The Experience of Truck Drivers and Delivery Workers" in this special issue, explore precisely the field of logistics. They do so, however, from a very specific and relevant point of view: the use of social media as an instrument of workers organising and an element of collective action. They do so through the case studies of the truck drivers' strikes in 2018 and the delivery workers' strikes in 2020 in Brazil, two very different labour sectors and experiences, but in which social media played an important role. They conclude that social media have a real but ambivalent impact on workers' struggles, and that they play an effective role in initiating mobilisations, but less relevant in consolidating them in the medium and long term.

Finally, a third question to consider, after workplace-community relationship and supply-chain and logistics, has to do with the strategic importance of services linked to social reproduction and care. As we have already noted, social reproduction has been a privileged terrain in the return of the strike, on the one hand, as a consequence of the labour degradation that workers in the sector have been experiencing for a long time and, on the other, due to its growing social importance. At the same time, strikes in the sector have a rapid social impact and media visibility and acquire a political dimension.

Striking on the platform

In any debate on the strike the discussion of platform capitalism has a great strategic centrality because, although platforms employ only a minority of workers, they break the rules of the game in the field of labour relations and their rise has had a disruptive character (Vandaele, 2018). In other words, they are a "laboratory for capital" (Cant, 2019). The struggles on the platforms have had the dual objective of both pressuring the companies themselves and obtaining changes in the legal framework and new regulations (Dufresne and Leterme, 2021). Thus, many of these conflicts have had a dual economic and political nature.

Platforms offer a variable environment for strike activity depending on their characteristics. Platform capitalism gives rise to very disparate labour situations. Berg et al. (2018) distinguish two main types of situation: on one hand, outsourced digital workers, who work in an individualized and isolated way, either in highly unskilled tasks or in more skilled ones such as consulting, translation, programming, design; on the other hand, workers who perform their tasks in person, in localized contexts and with meeting points between them, as is the case of riders or care workers. This model of geographically tethered work requires, as Woodcock and Graham (2020) point out, a certain spatial proximity and temporal synchronization. It is in this second type of work that, logically, the most important experiences of organization and mobilization have emerged. For his part, Vandaele (2018) distinguishes the profiles or work situations on the platforms in terms of two variables: geographical location (offline vs online) and qualification. Another important variable should be added: the distinction between full-time and part-time workers (many of them students).

The degree of concentration or isolation of platform workers is a decisive variable in facilitating or hindering their organization. Thus, for example, one of the bases of union successes at Amazon in New York (in April 2022 ) is the high concentration of workers in its fulfilment centres (Young, 2022; Medina, 2022; Féliz, 2022). In contrast, labour atomization is the essential defining aspect of the situation for Uber drivers (Young, 2022; Woodcock and Graham, 2020).

Platforms, particularly in the rider sector, have given rise to new organizational forms and significant experimentation, with the proliferation of associations or guilds (Vandeale, 2018; Cant and Woodcock, 2019). Heckscher and Carré (2006) call the organizational forms emerging among platform riders quasi-unions. Their identity is quite "glocal”, projected to local action and international coordination, with less of a national identity than traditional unions and much less rooted in national industrial relations systems (Vandaele, 2018). Riders' organizing and protest experiences show a variable mix between grassroots collectives, alternative unions, and majority unions, often with significant external support for strikers (Zamponi, 2018). Milkman (2013) remarks how this organizational experimentation and this stammering unionism raises similarities with the early stages of unionism in the nineteenth century.

The struggles of the riders in Deliveroo, Glovo, foodora or Uber Eats, being an easily identifiable collective, present in daily life in every big city – and notoriously precarious – have enjoyed great visibility, social sympathy and media attention. Zamponi (2018) remarks that they are the most visible and easiest part of the gig economy to organize and that food delivery platforms also rely heavily on their cool image and are therefore relatively vulnerable to struggles. This does not diminish the difficulties for their organization stemming from fragmentation, the diversity of their sociological profiles (part-time students vs. low-skilled workers for example), and the discontinuities of working periods and working time regulations (Dufresne and Leterme, 2021).

Reframing the strike: integral strike

The return of the strike has signified a broadening of its meaning. The perspective of social reproduction illuminates this broadening. Four processes have contributed to this development:

First, the concept of strike has been re-signified by the immigrant mobilizations in the United States, on May 1, 2006, and February 16, 2017 – on this second occasion as a reaction to Trump's anti-immigration policy.  The choice of May 1 (a non-holiday in the United States) as the Day Without Immigrants in 2006 linked the action to the historical tradition of the labour movement and to the very idea of strike (Heiskanen, 2009), in a general protest, reminiscent of the logic of a general strike, unusual in U.S. history.

Second, the international women's strike in 2017, after the pioneering experience of the Women's Strike of October 19, 2016 in Argentina (and in other cities in Latin America), against male violence with the slogan Not One Less (#NiUnaMenos) was the first women's strike in the history of Argentina and Latin America (Ni Una Menos Collective, 2017) and served to launch the call for the International Women's Strike on March 8, 2017. The Latin American experience, following the strike held a few days earlier in Poland in defence of abortion rights, was decisive for the emergence of the international strike of 2017 (Mason-Deese, 2017).

In its traditional sense emanating from the labour movement, the strike refers to productive activity and, therefore, has a restrictive view of the very concept of work and the very scope of strike activity. Feminism has reconceptualized the strike in a broader sense, broadening the type of activity to which it refers and its scope, emphasizing care work and the whole of social reproduction (Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2019; Barbagallo, 2017). The feminist perspective entails a twofold broadening of the concept of strike and work. Although logically many of its promoters do not have an approach linked to Social Reproduction Theory, the women's strike can be conceived as a political translation of it (Arruzza, 2017).

The international women's strike is precisely the subject of Verónica Gago’s article, "The feminist strike a political innovation". Based on her book Feminist International: How to Change Everything (2020), Gago highlights as fundamental elements of the strike its political alliances and programmatic drive, and the innovative character of the initiative itself, taking a tool from the labour movement and taking away the monopoly of the unions. By broadening the very definition of workers, her analysis calls attention to labour trajectories that are usually invisibilised, linking them to the crisis of social reproduction and to extractivism.

Third, the climate strikes that began in 2018 exploded in 2019 with the emergence of the Fridays for Future movement. Elias König, in his article "Striking Fossil Capital: Towards a Theory of the Climate Strike", discusses the successes and limitations of the climate strike. The article begins by analysing the history of the climate school strike movement, interpreted as a generational reproduction strike, and frames it in the context of a broader conflict between "green" and "grey" factions of capital. König points out that one of the dangers of the movement is its absorption into ecological modernization projects that do not address the root of the climate crisis. Second, he proposes "a long history of climate strike", relating contemporary climate strikes to other forms of strike action against fossil capital, such as labour, feminist, anti-racist strikes. If we understand climate strike as an action that disrupts capital accumulation in the fossil-fuelled capitalist system, König points out, many strikes can be considered climate strikes even if they were not conceived as such. From this discussion, the author explores potential alliances to overcome the movement's impasse, including a possible broadening of the climate strike format in favour of a broader framing.

Finally, it is necessary to mention the tenants' strike movement. Without having the explosive visibility of the three previous cases, tenants' struggles have also contributed to relaunching and resignifying the very concept of strike, connecting with a rich tradition in the history of the labour movement. One of the contributions in this special issue, "Rent Strikes: Revolutions at Point Zero", by Jordi González-Guzmán and Marta Ill-Raga, analyses rent strikes in detail. The authors recall that rent strikes have generally been a blind spot in the history of social movements. Their article seeks to theoretically and historically valorise the rent strike and emphasise its importance. They provide an overview of the rich history of rent strikes in the early 20th century in Europe and the United States. They then deal with the impact of tenants' struggles on the transformation of legal protections in the private-rental housing sector. Finally, they approach the movement from the perspective of Social Reproduction Theory.

The broadening and resignification of the strike has led to the emergence of new terms to define it. One of these is "social strike" (Bilanceti and Castronovo, 2015), which attempts to offer a broader vision of the strike, and to adapt the concept to a historical situation of weak unions, work precarity, and the importance of the citizen and territorial dimension and non-productive aspects of strikes. Another possibility I would like to suggest is that of integral strike, a term that can serve to offer a comprehensive vision of the strike and integrate all its dimensions (production, reproduction, workplace, community, territory).

In any case, the return, in new and old forms, stuttering but real, of the strike is part of the return of political-social conflict after 2008, and of the ensuing multidimensional structural crisis. This special issue aims to contribute to its study, providing insights into some relevant aspects of contemporary strikes. The latter manifest the historical crisis and at the same time point to what Rick Fantasia (1989:25) called "cultures of solidarity", whose contours we are still glimpsing.

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