This Harms Americans and Depresses Wages.

In France, a strike is not treated as a civic emergency. It is treated as part of civic life. Trains stop, schools close, fuel depots slow, and the country argues—loudly, publicly, and often angrily—about the terms on which ordinary people should be expected to live. In the United States, by contrast, a strike is usually narrated as a disruption, a nuisance, or a desperate last act. The difference is not that French workers are naturally more combative, or that Americans are uniquely passive. The difference is power: legal power, social power, and the power that comes from knowing that missing work will not immediately mean losing a livelihood, a doctor, or a home.

What France Still Understands

The French right to strike rests on a premise that American law once gestured toward but never fully embraced: collective action is not an exception to democracy; it is one of democracy’s instruments. France’s 1946 constitutional preamble recognizes the right to strike, and in the private sector a lawful strike generally does not require advance permission from the state or the employer. The basic requirements are straightforward: workers must stop work collectively, make professional demands, and direct those demands to the employer or public authorities. That simplicity matters. A right surrounded by procedural traps is not much of a right at all.

France is not a worker’s paradise. Its unions are not universally beloved, and its strikes can be inconvenient, costly, and politically polarizing. But the country has preserved an idea that the United States has allowed to wither: that workers can use disruption as a legitimate democratic language. A strike is supposed to inconvenience power. That is the point. If labor can be withdrawn only in ways that are quiet, isolated, and easily absorbed by management, then the law has protected the appearance of protest while disabling its force.

How America Made Striking Hard

American workers did not lose the right to strike all at once. They lost it through narrowing interpretations, legislative backlash, employer innovation, and a political culture that recast collective power as a threat to individual freedom. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 promised workers the right to organize, bargain collectively, and engage in concerted activity. But the promise was compromised almost immediately by the structure of American employment. The typical worker remained dependent on a single employer not only for wages, but often for health insurance, retirement security, immigration stability, and professional reputation.

Then came the counterrevolution. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 restricted labor’s most powerful tools, including many forms of solidarity action and secondary boycotts. These restrictions mattered because they isolated workers at the very moment when the economy was becoming more interconnected. A warehouse worker, a driver, a cashier, a contractor, and a platform worker may all be part of the same economic chain, but U.S. labor law often treats them as separate islands. Employers may coordinate across subsidiaries, suppliers, franchises, and contractors. Workers are frequently forbidden from doing the same.

American law also permits employers to permanently replace many economic strikers. This is a devastating rule. A strike is already a sacrifice; workers give up pay in the hope of winning better terms. But if striking can mean losing one’s job permanently, the right becomes a dare that only the financially secure can accept. Add at-will employment, weak penalties for illegal retaliation, drawn-out union election procedures, and employer-dominated anti-union campaigns, and the result is a system that formally recognizes worker rights while practically exhausting them.

The Hidden Strikebreaker: Fear

The hardest barrier to striking in America is not always a statute. It is fear. Fear of losing employer-sponsored health insurance. Fear of being replaced. Fear of rent. Fear of debt. Fear that a boss will remember who walked out. In a country where medical coverage is commonly tied to employment and savings are thin for millions of households, the decision to strike can feel less like a democratic act than a gamble with one’s family.

This fear is not accidental. It is the product of policy choices. The United States built a welfare state that often routes basic security through employers. That arrangement gives employers influence far beyond the workplace. When a worker risks a job, she may also risk medical care, child stability, and access to the narrow respectability that comes with being continuously employed. French workers can strike more readily in part because the state, not the boss, bears more responsibility for basic social protections. American workers are told they are free, but too often their freedom is collateralized by their dependence.

The Cultural Story We Tell Ourselves

Americans are often taught to imagine work as an individual bargain: one worker, one employer, one ladder to climb. This mythology has emotional appeal. It flatters ambition and turns economic vulnerability into a personal test. But it is a poor description of modern work. Wages are set by institutions, markets, monopsony power, scheduling software, subcontracting arrangements, and legal rules. The individual worker negotiating alone with a large employer is not a sovereign citizen making a free contract; he is often a price-taker in a system designed to call dependence “choice.”

France tells a different story. Its labor politics begin from the assumption that workers are a class with shared interests, not merely a collection of private strivers. That does not make French politics gentler. It may make them more honest. When pensions, wages, transit, schools, and public services are debated as common goods, strikes become one way the public argues over the distribution of national life. In the United States, similar conflicts are often privatized into burnout, resignation, GoFundMe campaigns, second jobs, and quiet despair.

What Must Change

Restoring worker rights in the United States requires more than celebrating unions in speeches. It requires rebuilding the legal architecture of collective power. First, Congress should ban permanent replacement of strikers. A right to strike that allows the job to disappear is not a right; it is a trapdoor. Second, lawmakers should repeal or substantially narrow bans on secondary boycotts and solidarity strikes. Workers should be able to act along the same supply chains and corporate networks through which employers exercise power. Third, the United States should establish just-cause employment protections so workers cannot be dismissed without a legitimate reason. At-will employment is often defended as flexibility, but in practice it gives management a background threat that shadows every organizing conversation. Fourth, labor law must impose meaningful penalties for retaliation. If firing a union supporter merely requires years of litigation and eventual reinstatement with limited back pay, illegal union-busting becomes a business expense. Rights need remedies strong enough to change behavior.

Fifth, union recognition should be faster and fairer. When a majority of workers demonstrate support for a union, employers should not be able to turn the period before an election into a campaign of fear. Card-check recognition, first-contract arbitration, and stronger rules against captive-audience meetings would move the system closer to democratic choice. Finally, the country must decouple health care from employment. No worker should have to choose between collective action and chemotherapy, insulin, prenatal care, or a child’s medication.

A New Labor Bill of Rights

The next labor reform agenda should be broader than the right to unionize one workplace at a time. The United States should move toward sectoral bargaining, allowing workers and employers to set minimum standards across entire industries such as retail, logistics, fast food, health care, education, and domestic work. This would prevent responsible employers from being undercut by competitors that win through low wages and instability. It would also recognize a basic reality of the modern economy: many workers face industry-wide problems that cannot be solved shop by shop.

Labor law should also follow work wherever companies have moved it. Gig workers, franchise workers, temp workers, and subcontracted workers should be presumed to have organizing and bargaining rights unless a company can prove genuine independence. Joint-employer rules should make lead corporations responsible when they control wages, scheduling, technology, standards, or working conditions through intermediaries. A corporation should not be able to outsource responsibility while keeping control.

The country should make first contracts real. Too many newly organized workers win a union election only to watch the employer delay, litigate, and wait for hope to fade. Mandatory mediation and binding arbitration after a fixed period would ensure that a successful organizing campaign leads to an actual agreement. Democracy at work should not end at the ballot box.

Public-sector strike bans should also be reconsidered. Teachers, transit workers, sanitation workers, nurses, and other public employees provide essential services, but essential work should not mean voiceless work. States can protect the public through emergency staffing rules and minimum-service plans without imposing blanket prohibitions that reduce collective bargaining to a polite request.

Transparency should become part of labor democracy. Employers should be required to disclose anti-union spending in real time, including payments to consultants, law firms, public-relations advisers, and supervisors trained to discourage organizing. Workers should know when the “information” they receive is part of a paid campaign designed to make collective action seem dangerous, futile, or disloyal.

Reform should also protect the most vulnerable workers from being used as examples. Immigrant workers involved in labor disputes should receive strong safeguards against retaliation tied to immigration status, and companies that threaten or exploit that status should face severe penalties. In workplaces where fear is unevenly distributed, rights will always be unevenly exercised.

Finally, worker voice should reach the boardroom. Large corporations should include worker representatives in governance, giving employees a formal role in decisions about layoffs, automation, outsourcing, executive compensation, and long-term investment. The workplace is where democracy spends much of its life. It should not be governed as a private monarchy.

A Democracy Worth Interrupting

The American debate over strikes usually begins with inconvenience: the canceled flight, the delayed shipment, the closed school, the appointment postponed. These costs are real. But a society that notices disruption only when workers cause it has already accepted a deeper disruption as normal—the slow erosion of wages, stability, dignity, and voice. A strike makes visible what the economy prefers to hide: that the people who clean, teach, drive, nurse, stock, code, deliver, and care are not background machinery. They are the country.

France has not solved the problem of work. But it has preserved a public memory that America badly needs: rights unused become rituals, and rights made too risky become myths. The right to strike is not merely a labor policy. It is a test of whether democracy extends into the place where most adults spend most of their waking lives. If Americans want a freer economy, they must recover the freedom to stop working together.

The restoration of worker rights would not make every strike wise, every union virtuous, or every demand affordable. Democracy never promises that collective power will be tidy. It promises that power will not belong only to those who already possess it. A country that allows capital to move, merge, lobby, outsource, automate, and threaten must allow labor to answer in kind—not with violence, but with solidarity; not with nostalgia, but with law; not with permission, but with power.

Dr. Beaux Bonhoeffer

Find me also @beauxbonhoeffer.bsky.social and at beauxbonhoeffer.substack.com