Sarah Bond
The evidence we have suggests that strikes and collective action were not as regular an occurrence in the ancient world as they are today. I don’t want to promote the idea that every single day there was a large-scale strike. But at certain time periods, we have evidence of both formal and informal groups using their power and their necessity to the state to try and improve their working conditions.
The most famous example is the one we’ve already discussed: the Struggle of the Orders and the various secessions of the plebs. Those secessions were boycotts by another name. Even though the term “strike” was not coined until the eighteenth century, we can see the same forms of behavior we associate with strikes and boycotts happening in antiquity.
The plebeians took advantage of the fact that they were needed for the Roman army to expand the Roman imperial purview. They removed themselves in these secessions at various times — there were four, five, or perhaps even six secessions, depending on which author you’re reading.
I also look at some lesser-known examples of strikes and collective action around 200 CE. In the city of Ephesus, we have a case of bakers who were told by the governor of Asia that they had to stop meeting as a faction. They were told that they couldn’t withhold bread and had to keep order within the city. We can figure out from the inscription that tells us about this episode that the bakers were probably either hiking the cost of bread or withholding their bread in order to get better prices or a better contract with the Roman government.
In that case, we have the governor of Asia stepping in and saying, “You have to stop this behavior as a faction or association.” These bakers appear to have been trying to make use of their monopoly on bread, which represented a very large proportion of the dietary…
Auteur: Sarah Bond
