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Tax Strike Tactics

Coordinate with Labor Strikes

Some tax resistance campaigns included labor strikes. These restrict government resources, demonstrate solidarity, and free up the time of resisters so they can put more work into the campaign. In some cases, they are also a form of tax resistance—reducing the income or sales tax base by reducing the amount of income earned or sales made.

Example Venezuelan Oil Industry

A strike can deprive a government of funds, and can thereby work in harmony with a tax strike that is being used as a nonviolent resistance tactic. For example, a tax strike in 2003 aimed at Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez government’s economic lifeline”—the state-run oil industry—“costing it millions of dollars a day.”

Example Indians in South Africa

Gandhi led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in 1913 to protest against a poll tax on Indian immigrants. Hundreds of strikers were arrested during the course of the strike, which eventually drew in participants from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.” It succeeded in forcing the government to rescind the tax.

Example American Prisoners

Slave laborers in several prisons in the American state of Georgia went on strike in 2010, refusing to contribute to the profit of the prison system. They coordinated their daring strike between the prisons by using contraband cell phones. “We’re hearing in the news that they’re putting it down as a prison riot, so [the authorities say they] locked the prison down,” one striker said. Not true: “We locked ourselves down.”

Example Georgia Dockworkers

A strike can also be an additional pressure tactic in a campaign to have a tax abolished. In the U.S. city of Savannah, Georgia, in 1867, the government tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves.” The workers refused to pay and the city locked them out of the wharves.

This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3. This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.

Example French Ship Stokers

Ship stokers in France went on strike in 1923 when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits (like the meals they ate while on ship) as income. The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.

Example Irish Civil and Public Service Workers

The threat of a strike can also dissuade the government from taking reprisals against tax resisters. During the Household Tax revolt in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government were to try to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.

Example Poll Tax Rebellion

During the resistance to Thatcher’s poll tax, government workers who were called upon to help enforce the tax would sometimes refuse or go on strike. According to one account:

[D]ole office workers in London have been on strike in protest at management plans to get them to pass claimants details from DSS [Department of Social Security] files straight to poll tax officials. They’ve been joined by other groups of dole office workers who plan to refuse to process “arrestments” of unpaid poll tax from non-payers who are signing on. And in Edinburgh, a group of local government workers are among the latest to announce plans to mount walk-outs if any employee in their department is penalised for non-payment.

Notes and Citations