For Steiner the strike is a symptom, not a weapon: a purely economic act pressed into political service because state life and economic life have been fused.
The Strike in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for an economic act that has been handed a political task it cannot carry. Speaking to the employees of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart on 23 April 1919, in the lectures collected as The Reorganization of the Social Organism (GA 330), Steiner called the strike eine reine Wirtschaftssache, a purely economic matter with purely economic effects, then observed that workers reach for it anyway to force a result in the sphere of rights. That reach is possible only where state life and economic life have been intermingled, the Verquickung his threefold social order was written to undo. Because economic life stays healthy only when production is never interrupted, every strike wounds the body it was raised to defend. Steiner did not blame the striker. He called the strike a necessity produced by a malformed social organism, and put the remedy in the democratic state rather than on economic ground.
The strike sits oddly in Steiner's social writing. He refused to celebrate it, and refused to condemn the workers who used it. He treated it the way a physician treats a fever, as a reading taken off a sick organism that tells you where the sickness lives. His question was never whether a strike is justified. It was why the strike became necessary at all.
In Steiner's Own Words
A strike is a purely economic matter and only has an economic effect. But often a state effect, a political effect, is also to be achieved. This can only be the case in an unhealthy social organism in which the separation between state and economic life has not yet occurred. Anyone who looks into economic life knows that it can only be healthy if production is never interrupted. With every strike, you stop production. Those who believe they have to strike are acting out of necessity, which has arisen from the intermingling of state and economic life. It is a great misfortune that we are forced to destroy life today by this unfortunate amalgamation of what should be three separate spheres.
What it Means Today
Germany answered Steiner's question with statute rather than with threefolding. The Works Constitution Act (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz), passed in 1952 and rewritten in 1972, gave every workplace with at least five permanent employees an elected works council, and then did something Steiner would have recognised: section 74 forbids the works council and the employer from taking industrial action against one another. Disputes inside the firm go to a conciliation board, the Einigungsstelle, not to the picket line. Strikes stay lawful, but only one level up, in the industry-wide bargaining round between union and employers' association. The Codetermination Act (Mitbestimmungsgesetz) of 1976 pushed further, seating worker representatives on the supervisory board of every company with more than 2,000 employees, after the 1951 coal and steel law had already granted full parity in those industries.
The effect is close to what Steiner predicted. Germany records among the lowest strike-day rates in western Europe, far under France or Belgium, because the fight over rights has largely been lifted off the shop floor. Thalira synthesis: codetermination works by moving the rights question into the enterprise, while Steiner wanted it moved out of the enterprise entirely, into a democratic body that fixes the length and terms of work before the worker ever reaches the gate, so German industrial peace still rests on a bargaining partner's goodwill rather than on a right the worker already holds.
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