Gaza, —
Gaza City began a second two-day commercial strike in support of doctors who refuse to pay the Israeli Government a 12 percent tax on their income.
Israeli troops patrolled the empty streets of the occupied city but made no attempt to force shopkeepers to open up.
Gaza City carried out a two-day business strike earlier this week to protest the tax, which the municipality claims is not applicable in occupied territories.
The residents of the city demanded an end to the occupation and statehood for the Palestinians.
In Rafiah, 15 miles south of Gaza City, students threw rocks at a police car sent to remove signs urging local businessmen to join the strike, the police said.
Often in tax resistance campaigns, not everybody is able to be a tax resister, for instance because not everybody is responsible for the tax being resisted, or because the point of the resistance is that some of the people being taxed ought not to be (and so only that class of people is resisting).
In such cases it can be useful to inspire those who cannot themselves resist the tax to show solidarity for the movement in other ways, and it can also help to provide or suggest roles that non-resisting sympathizers can play in the campaign.
Today I’ll mention some examples.
The Rebecca Rioters knew how to make their tollgate destruction popular among people who couldn’t (or even wouldn’t) participate directly.
For example:
One night, Rebeccaites destroyed the Rhos Gate, the Rhydyfuwch Gate, and the gate on the Llangoedmore road near Cardigan.
“ was market day in Cardigan, and every one who drove in was exempted from paying the usual toll, except those who came over the coach-road.
The people, looking at things from that point of view, were filled with Rebeccaite enthusiasm.
On that day nothing was heard at public-houses but proposals of good health and long life to Rebecca.”
On another occasion, they pointedly left intact the gates on “the Queen’s high road” but destroyed those on roads that the various parishes were required to maintain.
“This rendered Rebecca not unpopular amongst some farmers and others, many of whom paid the fine, rather than be sworn in as special constables.”
The Rebeccaites also sometimes resorted to threats to induce reluctant people to participate.
In one example:
All male inhabitants being householders of the hundred, were to meet , at the “Plough and Harrow,” Newchurch parish, to march in procession to Carmarthen — to defy the Mayor and magistrates, and to destroy the gate on their return.
Rich and poor were to be compelled to attend, and in case of illness a substitute must be found.
All owners of horses were to ride.
All persons absent without a sufficient excuse or substitute were to have their houses and barns destroyed by fire.
and in another:
[I]n order to ensure a full attendance of her followers, the church doors in the neighbourhood of Elvet were covered with notices in the dead of night, signed by “’Becca,” commanding all males above the age of sixteen and under seventy to appear at the “Plough and Harrow” on under pain of having their houses burnt and their lives sacrificed.
The time and place of meeting were also published by word of mouth at most of the Dissenting meeting-houses throughout the hundred, and wherever a disinclination was known to exist on the part of any person to join in the procession and to take part in the intended proceedings, he was privately admonished if he wished to protect his property from the firebrand of the midnight incendiary, and to excuse himself from personal injury, that he had better join the procession — “or else.”
This species of intimidation had the effect of drawing together immense numbers to the place of rendezvous.
despite the threats:
[Their cheers] were lustily responded to by groups of spectators who had by this time completely filled Guildhall Square, so that the Rebeccaites could hardly pass through.
At one point they explicitly threatened an attorney to make him join them on one of their destructive sprees, “so that if any proceedings were subsequently taken, he as local solicitor might be made a party to them.”
They sometimes also forced the toll house operators to take part in the destruction of their own toll houses.
When Palestinian Jews practiced tax resistance against the British occupation government in the at least one Jew back in London stopped paying his income tax as well.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
Some men who were sympathetic to the tax resistance of the Women’s Tax Resistance League found that they could participate in the campaign by exploiting a legal technicality that made them responsible for paying their wives’ income taxes.
If their wives refused to pay, and they were unable to pay and had no property to seize, they might be imprisoned for tax refusal — and some were.
American revolutionaries who were using boycotts and other means to try to cut off the support of taxed and British-monopoly products found allies back in the home country in the form of manufacturers and exporters who begged Parliament to rescind the taxes so as to bring the boycotts to an end.
War tax resister Vickie Aldrich recently got some pro bono legal assistance from law students in her battle with the IRS.
When residents of Beit Sahour launched a tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Israel put the town under seige.
Christian groups around the world attempted to bring humanitarian aid to the city, or even to visit (including the heads of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox churches), but were turned away by the Israeli military.
The success of the anti-Poll Tax movement in Thatcher’s Britain relied on mass popular support.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions “had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role,” said movement chronicler Danny Burns.
“In order to sustain a long and protracted struggle, it was necessary for as many people as possible to feel responsible for some aspect of the movement, however small.
In the fight against the bailiffs and sheriff officers, the kids hanging around the streets passed on the word as soon as they saw a suspicious-looking character.
Parents and pensioners who were not out at work organised telephone trees and were ready to be at each others’ houses at short notice.”
Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities.
In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made.
Here are several examples:
Labor strikes
In Germany, in , “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days.
The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
A tax strike in aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in , refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
In Savannah, Georgia, in , the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay.
The city then 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.
During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in .
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.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in :
The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax.
Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down.
… The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional.
The citizens all side with the strikers.
Hartals and business strikes
“Bushel Bob” Williams’ produce stand
When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in , farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
For a week in , a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in , “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
In in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax.
The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed.
Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions.
Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.”
That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.
A Parisian cafe owner holds down the fort during a one-day business strike during the Poujadist campaign.
When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes:
“The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…”
The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
In , Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
In the Dutch West Indies in , “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in , people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
In , cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike:
“We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in , there were often business strikes:
…all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…
…merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…
Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…
In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of , businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:
The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French…
The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke.
They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.
This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.
Consumer strikes
In Cairo in , a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay.
This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
In Melbourne, Australia, in “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer.
They were patrons of the lower-priced seats.
The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.”
One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.
(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)
