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Tax Strike Tactics

Other Ways Employers Can Support Resisting Employees

There are a number of other creative ways employers can support the tax resistance of their employees. Here are some that have come to my attention:

Example Kenyan Democracy Movement

Charles Kanjama anticipated a short tax resistance campaign to pressure the Kenyan government to enact democratic reforms and to invalidate the sham presidential election of 2008. So, rather than refusing outright to pay taxes, he suggested that more timid tax refusers quietly restructure the terms of their employment: “participating employers and employees can enter into a voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several months.”

Example Catholic Worker

The Catholic Worker movement had a fail-safe strategy for supporting the tax resistance of its employees. “The C.W. has never paid salaries,” wrote Dorothy Day. “Everyone gets board, room, and clothes (tuition, recreation included, as the C.W. is in a way a school of living). So we do not need to pay federal income taxes.”

Example The Other Side

An employer does not have to eliminate salaries entirely to facilitate tax resistance—just keeping salaries sufficiently low can help. The Christian activist magazine The Other Side did this. Staff member Dee Dee Risher explained: “We’ve built into our workplace certain small disciplines to remind ourselves that we are on this path of conversion. Our salaries are structured to allow staff members to do war tax resistance and are intentionally low to remind us of the struggles of the poor and sharpen our willingness to sacrifice.”

Examples War Tax Resisters

When war tax resister Steve Soucy told his employer that he would have to quit his job if the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began to attach his salary, his employer agreed to reduce his hours, and therefore his salary, below the level that the IRS would attach. (IRS policy allows even people with tax debts to have some minimum amount of take-home pay.)

“I eventually tapered my hours from the maximum allowed before withholding to just a few hours per week,” Soucy says, “while increasing my employment in my other jobs to cover the loss in income and benefits. The most rewarding part was talking to my co-workers, whom I found quite sympathetic to my reasons for tax resistance. In a way it was like coming ‘out of the closet,’ and gave them the opportunity to be supportive.”

Another American war tax resister reported: “Rent is always my biggest expense and thus the biggest burden on my practice of war tax resistance. Usually, I try to arrange housing as a component of one of my jobs. By doing this, I significantly reduce the amount of cash I need to earn. I currently work as the caretaker of buildings and grounds at a camp for people with disabilities. The camp provides me with a residence on the premises so I can keep watch over the facility and so I can be available on short notice for critical maintenance needs. Although our arrangement is a barter of services in exchange for housing, the value of this particular type of barter is excluded from my income under the Internal Revenue Code.”

A woman who worked for the gambling bookmaker William Hill asked her employer to stop withholding taxes from her, on the grounds that under international law it would be illegal for her to pay for war crimes being committed by the government. She describes what happened next:

[T]o my amazement, I got a response inviting me to a meeting with the area manager and a chap from Personnel, and we sat down and we discussed the legal implications of paying tax to the U.K. government. And of course they raised all the normal concerns about the legality of not paying tax, and they showed us a copy of a letter that they had received from the Inland Revenue—so William Hill actually wrote to the Inland Revenue, bringing this matter up, and got a response!

Example Voices in the Wilderness

Corporations can also refuse to pay taxes or other requisitions that they themselves owe. For example, in 2005 the activist group “Voices in the Wilderness” was fined $20,000 for bringing food and medicine into Iraq when that country was under a blockade. They refused to pay, saying:

Voices will not pay a penny of this fine.… We chose to travel to Iraq in order to openly challenge our country’s war against the Iraqi people. We fully understood that our acts could result in criminal or civil charges. We acted because when our country’s government is committing a grievous, criminal act, it is incumbent upon each of us to challenge in every nonviolent manner possible the acts of the government….

We choose to continue our noncooperation with the government’s war on the Iraqi people through the simple act of refusing to pay this fine. To pay the fine would be to collaborate with the U.S. government’s ongoing war against Iraq. We will not collaborate.

And many organizations and congregations in the United States began resisting the federal excise tax on their office phones during the Vietnam War.

Notes and Citations