There are grounds in law for workers to refuse work that contributes to Israel’s war on Palestine.
Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, many trade unions have taken collective action in support of the victims of international crimes, and to oppose the perpetrators in their efforts to continue to carry out those crimes. Dockers in the United States refused to unload cargo from the Soviet Union to protest its invasion of Afghanistan. Shop workers at Dunnes Stores in Ireland carried out a three-year strike for selling goods produced in apartheid in South Africa. And, Dutch dockers refused to unload a tanker with a consignment of diesel to Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. There are many other examples of courageous workers taking industrial action in support of peace and justice abroad.
Most recently, with growing consensus that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and practising apartheid in the West Bank, among other things, these collective actions have turned to opposing the ongoing international crimes against the Palestinian people. In the tech sector, for example, workers at Microsoft and Google have protested against their employers, whose products are allegedly used to facilitate crimes committed by the Israeli military.
But it is not only workers in the tech sector.
Those working in logistics, such as dock workers, have taken collective secondary action by refusing to handle ‘hot cargo’. The Italian trade union, Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) called a 24-hour strike at the port of Genoa’s PSA-GP terminal after it received information that a vessel carrying military cargo to Israel was due to call at the port. Within just four days of the strike threat, the union announced that the shipping company had chosen to avoid the strike and return to its port of origin. The call by the USB for a secondary boycott of arms shipments to Israel follows similar actions by dockers’ unions in Morocco, France, Greece, and Spain, among others.
As USB argued, stopping war logistics is not only a political and moral choice, but also a fully exercisable right.
But is it a fully exercisable right as a matter of labour law?
With the right to strike under attack globally, taking industrial action can mean unions and their leaders will be held liable for damages and individual members being disciplined or dismissed. As such, defying legal requirements in pursuit of justice for Palestinians may not always be a viable or consequence-free option. Nevertheless, unions continue to test the boundaries of national (and international) law in pursuing strike action.
A strike is usually framed in national law as either a positive right or a freedom from liability. However, contrary to international law, many jurisdictions restrict the right to the context of collective bargaining and/or a trade dispute resolution. Unions representing workers producing or dealing with goods and services that contribute to human rights violations in Gaza may find it difficult to lawfully refuse handling such goods through primary industrial action, unless they have negotiated hot cargo provisions in their collective agreements. Such provisions are rare. Otherwise, any strike action would ostensibly fall outside the strict scope of collective bargaining or a trade dispute.
However, unions do have a role to play where their members refuse unlawful or illegal orders from their employers, including through industrial action. This is especially relevant for workers in sectors including weapons manufacturing, technology, and banking, whose employers are directly or indirectly supporting international crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza. As noted in the report From economy of occupation to economy of genocide by United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, numerous companies are implicated in human rights violations and international crimes in Palestine. The special rapporteur highlights how both national criminal and civil laws can be invoked to hold corporate entities or their executives accountable for such violations.
Therefore, it is entirely conceivable that unions could call for industrial action where their members are being asked to carry out tasks that contribute to gross human rights violations. However, in practice, the evidentiary burden may be especially high with companies using legal loopholes to bypass arms export bans, for example. Nevertheless, unions should at least demand that employers ensure that their members are not complicit in international crimes. Unions could also trigger protected public interest disclosures through domestic whistleblowing mechanisms where an employer fails to acknowledge complicity in such crimes. A number of unions, including those with members in arms manufacturing, are now explicitly supporting worker-led boycott and divestment campaigns.
When it comes to secondary industrial action, especially secondary boycotts or sympathy strikes in the transport sector, unions around the world continue to challenge the limits of the law. Under international law, a sympathy strike, in which a union strikes in order to support the strike of the union against its primary employer, will be legal so long as the primary strike is legal. In many cases, such strikes would be within the same jurisdiction, but international sympathy strikes are becoming more common. A recent case in point is that of the Swedish Dockworkers Union.
In January 2025, the Swedish Dockworkers Union notified port employers of its intention to blockade all military cargo to Israel during the ongoing war on Gaza. The union cited direct requests for support from Palestinian trade unions and a regional trade union body to which it belongs. The union stated that it intended to implement the blockade based on the precautionary principle, i.e. that they would refuse to handle any cargo that would lead to further human rights violations in Gaza. The employer association challenged the proposed boycott in the labour court. In a preliminary decision, the court ruled that the union’s six-day boycott of military cargo was lawful as the action had a trade union connection and a general trade union purpose since it was triggered in response to a solidarity request to support workers and trade unions in Palestine. The court also found that the union’s carefully crafted and limited six-day precautionary boycott would have only had a minor impact on the employer’s prerogative to manage their business. It would appear that the union’s boycott strategy coupled with the call for support from a higher-level trade union body convinced the court that the action fell within the limited scope for political strikes in Sweden. Despite the lawful nature of the boycott action, the leader of the union was dismissed purportedly for national security reasons.
In late June 2025, Italian union USB declared a strike after it received information that its members would be called on to handle a shipment of missiles. The following day, Italy’s Guarantee Authority on strikes held that the action amounted to a violation of the rules on essential public services. By classifying the transportation of arms as an essential service, the authority strayed from the permitted grounds for restricting the right to strike under international law. Following this decision and ahead of the proposed USB strike in Genoa mentioned above, a group of constitutional and labour lawyers, among others, published a manifesto for a labour law of peace. Grounding their analysis in the Italian constitution, the authors argue that if Italy rejects war and that if Italy is a democratic republic founded on labour, then it should follow that workers have a constitutional right to refuse work that has a direct or indirect connection to the war economy. They further contend that such a right should be free from any supervision from the Guarantee Authority since the transportation of arms, especially abroad, can in no way be considered an essential public service.
In relation to calls for general strikes against Israel’s war on Gaza, the question again falls on what is permissible under national law. Under international law, while purely political strikes may be prohibited or restricted, unions should be able to use strike action to support their position relating to major social and economic policy trends which have a direct impact on workers. Therefore, where a union can make a link between their government’s direct or indirect financing of the war effort and its correlation to adverse socio-economic outcomes domestically, a strike in opposition to such foreign policy could be protected. Unions also have an unequivocal protected right to strike under international law where they call for action to protest state-run sovereign wealth or pension funds investing in companies implicated in human rights abuses. Since these funds are directly linked to workers’ retirement benefits, such strikes invariably concern the labour consequences of a government’s social and economic policy.
While the right to strike is fundamental to democracy, the restrictions on this right are all too apparent for workers of conscience around the world trying to do their part to end the suffering of Palestinians. Indeed, we need to use the current moment to reimagine and re-ground the right to strike in the protection dignity, democracy, and other vital public interests. For now, as the number of starvation-related deaths among Palestinians in Gaza continues to rise, unions around the world continue to push the boundaries of labour law and to heed the call of Palestinian unions to “elevate the level of their political pressure, strategies, and tactics to demand an immediate end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza”.
Ruwan Subasinghe writes in his personal capacity
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