Sabotage

Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity or corporation through subversion, obstruction, disruption or destruction. In a workplace setting, sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency generally directed at causing some change in workplace conditions. One who engages in sabotage is a saboteur. Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identities because of the consequences of their actions.

Any unexplained adverse condition might be sabotage. Sabotage is sometimes called tampering, meddling, tinkering, malicious pranks, malicious hacking, a practical joke or the like to avoid needing to invoke legal and organizational requirements for addressing sabotage.

The word "sabotage" appears in the beginning of the 19th century from the French word "sabotage". It is sometimes said that some workers (from Netherlands for some, canuts from Lyon for others, luddites in England, etc.) used to throw their "sabots" (clogs) in the machines to break them, but this is not supported by the etymology.

One of its first appearances in French literature is in the Dictionnaire du Bas-Langage ou manières de parler usitées parmi le peuple of D'Hautel, edited in 1808.

The verb "saboter" is also found in 1873–1874 in the Dictionnaire de la langue française of Émile Littré. But 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". In 1897, Émile Pouget, a famous syndicalist and anarchist wrote "action de saboter un travail" (action of sabotaging a work) in Le Père Peinard and in 1911 he also wrote a book entitled Le Sabotage.

At the inception of the Industrial Revolution, skilled workers such as the Luddites (1811–1812) 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.

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