Do Strikes Still Speak to Power?

India woke up this week to another Bharat Bandh, and the familiar question returns with ritual regularity. Do strikes still matter, or have they become political theatre, predictable noise in a crowded republic? Are they still capable of shifting the mind of the state, unsettling corporate comfort, or forcing public conscience to pause, or is it simply an attention-seeking disruption?

It is tempting, especially among policymakers and boardrooms, to treat the strike as an artefact of an older industrial age. The factory whistle has faded, union density has thinned, supply chains have globalised, and labour itself has been atomised into contracts, platforms, and informal arrangements. In such a world, what power can the collective withdrawal of work still command?

The answer begins with first principles. A strike is not primarily an economic tactic. It is a democratic signal. It is the most elemental form of collective refusal available to those who otherwise possess little leverage. Its purpose is not politeness. Its purpose is disruption.

A strike that causes no inconvenience, no pause, no disturbance to the machinery of daily life is not a strike in its full meaning. It is an appeal. And appeals are easy to ignore. The strike exists precisely because systems often do not listen until the routine is interrupted. History has shown, across countries and decades, that change arrives not when power is politely requested to reconsider, but when power is compelled to notice.

Historically, strikes have been the language through which invisible labour became visible. The eight-hour workday, workplace safety norms, collective bargaining rights, and social security frameworks were not handed down as gifts of enlightened governance. They were wrested into being through organised disruption, through moments when societies were forced to confront the dignity of labour as something more than an input cost.

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the strike’s relevance depends only on nostalgia. The strike has endured because it speaks to a structural truth. In every economy, labour remains the silent architecture of prosperity. When that architecture withdraws, even briefly, power notices.

What has changed is not the strike’s moral force, but its mechanics.

The twentieth century strike was often long, industrial, concentrated. Workers gathered at factory gates, unions negotiated with identifiable employers, and the battlefield was tangible. The twenty-first century strike is more fragmented, more strategic, often shorter in duration, and sometimes harder to recognise.

Work itself has changed. Millions now labour outside formal contracts, in informal markets, on digital platforms, across dispersed service sectors. The gig worker does not stand beside a blast furnace. The warehouse worker is monitored by algorithm. The delivery rider is managed by an app. The employer is sometimes an abstraction.

And yet, even here, collective action has not disappeared. It has adapted.

Platform workers have demonstrated that even decentralised labour can coordinate, often through the very digital tools that govern them. Short, sharp stoppages, targeted disruptions at peak demand moments, collective log-offs, and consumer-facing protest have emerged as the new grammar of industrial action. The strike is no longer only a shutdown of production. It is a disruption of expectation. Systems built on seamless service are often uniquely vulnerable to coordinated withdrawal.

To understand the strike only through the lens of organised labour is to miss its wider democratic evolution. The modern strike is no longer confined to factory gates or unionised sectors alone. It now appears in classrooms, on highways, in hospitals, across digital platforms, and even in the language of global civic protest. Student walkouts on climate anxiety, coordinated stoppages by transport workers, farmers halting supply lines, platform workers collectively logging off, and even consumer-driven boycotts all belong to the expanding universe of disruptive collective action. The strikes of the modern era are less a single industrial weapon than a broader civic instrument, a way in which dispersed constituencies reclaim agency when institutional channels feel unresponsive.

This is why strikes continue to possess signalling power. They do not merely demand concessions. They expose fractures.

They reveal where trust has broken down between citizen and state, between worker and employer, between economic reform and social legitimacy. Even those who disagree with every demand must recognise the deeper message. When people choose disruption over endurance, it is rarely because they enjoy inconvenience. It is because they believe no other channel is listening.

Of course, not all strikes are equal. Some become predictable performances, called more from political habit than strategic necessity. Some are undermined by fragmentation, competing unions, or public fatigue. Some impose costs on the vulnerable rather than on the powerful.

The legitimacy of the strike depends on responsibility as well as disruption. Democracies cannot function if collective action becomes casual sabotage. The strike must remain anchored in proportionality, clarity of purpose, and the willingness to negotiate.

But the burden of responsibility does not lie only with those who strike. It lies equally with those who govern.

For the state, the strike is not merely an inconvenience to be managed, but a signal to be interpreted with seriousness. Regulators and policymakers often view stoppages through the narrow prism of law and order, treating disruption as administrative noise rather than democratic communication. Yet a mature governance framework recognises that collective withdrawal is frequently the symptom of a deeper breakdown in trust between citizens and institutions.

The challenge is not simply to contain strikes, but to ask what conditions make them necessary. When reform is pursued without adequate consultation, when grievance mechanisms lose credibility, and when negotiation is replaced by unilateralism, the strike becomes the last remaining language of participation for those outside elite corridors. The question, therefore, is not whether strikes should exist, but whether the state is willing to engage with them as part of the democratic architecture, rather than as an interruption to it.

That is precisely the context in which today’s Bharat Bandh must be understood. It is not only about a list of demands or a disputed reform agenda. It is about the perception of being unheard.

For economists, the strike poses an enduring dilemma. How does a modern economy balance the need for productivity with the need for voice? How do labour markets remain flexible without becoming precarious?

For regulators, the strike is a reminder that governance is not only rule-making, but relationship-making. The social contract cannot be coded into legislation alone. It must be renewed through listening.

The deeper truth is this. Strikes persist because they occupy a unique democratic space. They are disruptive, yes. They are inconvenient, certainly. But they are also one of the last collective instruments available to those without institutional power.

A strike is society’s way of forcing a conversation that polite mechanisms have failed to hold.

So, do strikes still speak to power?

They do, when they are strategic rather than ritual. When they are disciplined rather than chaotic. When they are rooted in dignity rather than spectacle. 

Sometimes disruption is the message.