Legalizing the right to strike channels workers away from earlier tactics

Evidence

What is more, creation of specialized legal status for unions and strikes means that government officials play a significant part in determining which workers have the right to strike, whether a striking union actually represents the workers in a given plant, whether a strike constitutes a threat to national interests, and what actions strikers do and do not have the right to perform. As a result, establishment of the right to strike regularly forced workers to abandon forms of collective action (for example, attacks on employers’ property) they had previously used quite effectively (Perrot 1974). — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1198

Categorization

• XREF: This is close to the core institutional-absorption asymmetry the reader is testing: conferring a bounded legal right simultaneously forecloses other contentious forms. Directly relevant to whether constitutional/statutory incorporation defuses politicization of subordinate groups by channeling contention into legal fora. — connects to: Workers can subvert intake restrictions by exploiting legal application venues — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 205; Frontline workers can preserve discretion through legal loopholes that bureaucrats cannot close; A progressive bourgeois law was repurposed to suppress workers’ associations — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1948
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the craft-shop admission that rights regimes both absorb and discipline — workers gained a right while being forced to abandon effective prior tactics, a trade exactly parallel to how colonial subjects or other subordinate groups traded direct action for legal standing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1198

Broader Connections

• A progressive bourgeois law was repurposed to suppress workers’ associations #expands (0.74) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1948
• Workers can subvert intake restrictions by exploiting legal application venues #complicates (0.72) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 205
• Frontline workers can preserve discretion through legal loopholes that bureaucrats cannot close #complicates (0.72)