Sabotage
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an expression which is believed to have had its origin in the practice, in France, during the early period of industry, whereby the weavers tendereby sabotwin the machinery to destroy it. From its common usage among French workers, the term has acquired a broader and an international significance among organized workers. It signifies a systematic impeding of the wheels of industry by destruction or disabling of machinery, for definite tactical aims. Emery dust is thrown into complicated machinery, tools are dulled , material is destroyed, all for the purpose of bringing the employer to terms in a labor dispute. Another method with the same aim is the obeying of rules to the letter, as in the railroad industry, causing delay in traffic. Systematic slackening of effort in the workshops is also another practice which comes under the term of sabotage. As a substitute for the strike as a means to bringing the employer to terms, sabotage was at one time generally recognized among the radical labor elements as a legitimate weapon to attaining their ends. Within recent years , however, there has been a decided reaction against this form of "direct action." In 1912 the Socialist Party of the United States definitely declared itself, at a national convention, against all forms of direct action, including sabotage. It is still regarded as a legitimate weapon by the Industrial Workers of the World, who, on the other hand, consider political action futile as a method by which to achieve benefits for the working classes. SABOTIÈRE, a French apparatus for making ices. It differs little from the common American ice-cream freezer. The space between the wooden pail and metal container is filled with pounded ice and salt, or sulphate of soda and hydrochloric acid.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 treated sabotage as a labour tactic above all, and repeated the story that French weavers threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery. Etymologists now generally reject that picture: the verb saboter meant to botch or work clumsily, as a clog-wearer clatters, and the wooden-shoe tale looks like folk etymology attached later. The meaning has also moved off the shop floor — after the Second World War, when Britain's Special Operations Executive and resistance groups across Europe made sabotage a branch of warfare, the word came to mean covert destruction generally, and it now covers digital attacks such as the Stuxnet worm that wrecked Iranian centrifuges around 2010. The IWW, described here as still holding sabotage a legitimate weapon, was broken by wartime prosecutions and the 1919–20 raids and survives today only as a small union; the milder tactic Collier's noted, obeying rules to the letter, endures as the work-to-rule.
Written for this edition, 2026.