Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a politygovernmenteffort, or organization through subversionobstruction, demoralizationdestabilizationdivisiondisruption, or destruction. One who engages in sabotage is a saboteur.
Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identities because of the consequences of their actions and to avoid invoking legal and organizational requirements for addressing sabotage. The English word derives from the French word sabotermeaning to "bungle, botch, wreck or sabotage"; it was originally used to refer to labour disputes, in which workers wearing wooden shoes called sabots interrupted production through different means.
A popular but incorrect account of the origin of the term's present meaning is the story that poor workers in the Belgian city of Liège would throw a wooden sabot into the machines to disrupt production. One of the first appearances of saboter and saboteur in French literature is in the Dictionnaire du Bas-Langage ou manières de parler usitées parmi le peuple of d'Hautel, edited in In it the literal definition is to 'make noise with sabots' as well as 'bungle, jostle, hustle, haste'.
The word sabotage appears only later. The word sabotage is found in — in the Dictionnaire de la langue française of Émile Littré. It is at the end of the 19th century that it really began to be used with the meaning of 'deliberately and maliciously destroying property' or 'working slower'.
InÉmile Pougeta famous syndicalist and anarchist wrote " action de saboter un travail " 'action of sabotaging or bungling a work' in Le Père Peinard [4] and in he also wrote a book entitled Le Sabotage. At the inception of the Industrial Revolutionskilled workers such as the Luddites — used sabotage as a means of negotiation in labor disputes.
Labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World IWW have advocated sabotage as a means of self-defense and direct action against unfair working conditions. The IWW was shaped in part by the industrial unionism philosophy of Big Bill Haywoodand in Haywood was exposed to sabotage while touring Europe:.
The experience that had the most lasting impact on Haywood was witnessing a general strike on the French railroads. Tired of waiting for parliament to act on their demands, railroad workers walked off their jobs all across the country. The French government responded by drafting the strikers into the army and then ordering them back to work.
Undaunted, the workers carried their strike to the job. Suddenly, they could not seem to do anything right. Perishables sat for sabotage vägen, sidetracked and forgotten. Freight bound for Paris was misdirected to Lyon or Marseille instead.
This tactic — the French called it "sabotage" — won the strikers their demands and impressed Bill Haywood. For the IWW, sabotage's meaning expanded to include the original use of the term: any withdrawal of efficiencyincluding the slowdownthe strikeworking to ruleor creative bungling of job assignments.
One of the most severe examples was at the construction site of the Robert-Bourassa Generating Station inin Québec, Canada, when workers used bulldozers to topple electric generators, damaged fuel tanks, and set buildings on fire. The causes were not clear, but three possible factors have been cited: inter-union rivalry, poor sabotage vägen conditions, and the perceived arrogance of American executives of the contractor, Bechtel Corporation.
Certain groups turn to the destruction of property to stop environmental destruction or to make visible arguments against forms of modern technology they consider detrimental to the environment. The U.