How should Jewish workers balance the issues of being treated fairly in the workplace, with maintaining necessary services and infrastructure? A case in point is the recent protests in France by hundreds of thousands of workers who felt mistreated, but whose actions threatened to lead to strikes that could cause gasoline shortages, cuts in train and air travel, bedlam at schools, and cuts to electricity. How does one balance the competing values of self-care with maintaining communal services?

Jewish ethics do not permit workers to be held to “specific performance”; in other words, workers cannot be forced to work, no matter what.  That would constitute slavery. However, workers can be held liable for the financial damage caused by their refusal to live up to a previously agreed contract.  They have the right to unionize, but unionization does not include the right to strike without regard to the economic consequences for their employer, so long as their employer is fulfilling the terms of all agreements between them.

The category “vital services” does not have an exact parallel in Jewish sources.  The tradition does distinguish a category of workers whose work constitutes a religious commandment, such as firefighters, doctors, and teachers of Torah.  In theory, such work should be done by volunteers.  However, such work often requires extensive training and availability that necessitates professionalization, and once professionalization has occurred, contracts made with such workers are enforceable by both sides.  There is extensive discussion in the response literature of whether teachers of Torah have the right to strike in nondire circumstances. 

However, it seems to me that workers in oil refineries and other “vital service providers” do not fall into the category of “mitzvah workers” outlined above.

Accordingly, I do not see any Jewish reason to object to the French workers' strike, assuming that the damage it causes is purely economic.  However, since they are, as best I understand, striking to protest a general government policy rather than a breach of their specific contracts, then if they are breaking an existing contract, under Jewish law they can be held liable, either personally or through their unions, for the economic damage they cause.  They also have no specifically Jewish entitlement to reclaim their jobs of they are replaced while striking, although I suspect that there are specific provisions of French law on that subject.

The Talmud (Yoma 38a) reports on what might be considered the first recorded strike in human history.  The House of Garmu held the secret of how to prepare the show-bread that was prepared for the Temple.  They refused to perform their function unless they received higher wages.  In order to break the strike and end their monopoly, other workers were brought in but the substitutes were not as competent and unable to reproduce the same quality bread.  Ultimately, the House of Garmu returned to their jobs.

It is particularly since the establishment of the modern state of Israel that workers rights have intersected with essential services.  That is to say, should utility workers strike, the entire State may be in jeopardy and the needs of the majority cannot be trumped by the demands of the minority.  (See Moshe Silberg’s excellent study Talmudic Law and the Modern State.) Workers rights to organize has been validated by sources as early as Maimonides (Laws of Sale 14:10) and as recent as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Iggerot Moshe, Hoshen Mishpat 1:58, 59).  Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook orally ruled that workers in Israel have a right to organize, press for better working conditions, and even strike if necessary.  Yet Rav Kook and Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg advocated submitting any labour dispute to a rabbinic court for resolution.  It seems as if rabbinical authority anticipated that some matters have grave consequences and cannot be held hostage by demanding workers. 

In effect, workers benefits and communal services must be fairly balanced.