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In his 1924 encyclical “Quadragesimmo anno” on reconstruction of the social order, Pope Pius XI discarded strikes and lock-outs as a recourse if the social parties cannot settle their disputes. He rather prefers the public authority to intervene in the conflict, so that the various classes work together peacefully and socialist organisations and their activities are repressed.
On the contrary, the European Social Charter was the first international human rights instrument explicitly recognising the right to strike in 1961.
Following a similar line, the 2000 EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, under its article 28, proclaims the right to strike, in cases of conflicts of interest, to take collective action to defend the interests of workers.
More recently, the European Parliament has published a study on a potential EU-wide right to politically strike. This is not any more focused on workers seeking pressure on their employer, but on their government. The object of the strike against the government can, therefore, be both social or merely political. So far, such a right to a merely political strike is not recognised under either international or national law.
Five Member States, namely, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Spain explicitly forbid strikes with an exclusive political object. Workers can address their respective government through strike, but with a social or economic goal, not purely political. If they did so, they can even be sanctioned.
A large group of seventeen Member States do not explicitly outlaw exclusively political strikes, but they do define strikes as related to trade disputes between employees and employers. However, we can subdivide this majority of Member States into two smaller clusters: three of them (Germany, Poland and the Slovak Republic) link strikes to negotiating collective agreements, thus excluding implicitly political strikes; whereas the remaining fourteen out of the seventeen (Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal and Slovenia) link the right to strike to the protection of social and economic interests of workers, and hence also exclude implicitly political strike.
On the other end of the spectrum, five Member States (Austria, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden) explicitly allow merely political strikes.
Therefore, from the point of view of the national law of the different Member States, it can be concluded that out of the twenty-seven European nations included in the Union, a vast majority of over eighty per cent of them do not support purely political strikes, while only five have done so.
And what about the European Union? Does article 28 of the mentioned EU Charter of Fundamental Rights provide for a recognition of the right to a political strike? Neither its ambiguous wording nor the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (judgments Viking, of 11 December 2007, and Laval, of 18 December of the same year) allow for such statement; the European Committee of Social Rights, the monitoring body of the European Social Charter of 1961, has not gone further either.
With regards to international law, the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights refers to economic and social interests of workers, thus seeming to exclude purely political interests once more.
Finally, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), in its Conventions nos. 87 (on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise, signed in 1948) and 98 (on Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining, signed in 1949), does not provide for an explicit recognition of the right to strike, albeit to a political strike. However, some voices within the ILO have expressed a will to accept the right to strike against a government’s economic and social policies, perhaps the way towards the future recognition to political strikes elsewhere.
Source of image: Wikipedia