Workers who go on strike are sometimes accused of holding their employer “to ransom”, the implication being that strike action is a kind of extortion. The paper provides an analytical reconstruction of this objection, before presenting and interrogating different strategies for countering it. The first says that work-stoppages can only be extortionate if they infringe an employer’s rightful claim to productive labour, but that no employer has any such claim under capitalism. The second says that work-stoppages cannot be extortionate because, by themselves, they cannot put an employer under duress. The third and most promising strategy says that an employer’s claim to the productive labour of workers is conditional upon his/her not exploiting them. This approach does not produce a blanket exoneration; it tells us that the aptness of describing a strike as extortionate depends on a prior appraisal of the conditions that the strikers work under, and the fairness with which they are treated.

罢工的工人有时被指控以勒索赎金来勒索雇主，这意味着罢工是一种敲诈勒索。本文在提出和审讯反对该异议的策略之前，提供了对该异议的分析性重构。第一句话说，停工只有在侵犯了雇主对生产劳动的正当要求的情况下，才能被勒索，但在资本主义制度下，没有任何雇主有这样的要求。第二个人说，停工不能勒索，因为它们本身不能使雇主受到胁迫。第三个也是最有希望的策略是，雇主对工人的生产性劳动的要求以其不剥削为条件。这种方法不会产生全面的免责。