Counter-Accounting, Refusal, and the Future of the Strike

In this episode we speak with Abe Walker and Callum Cant about how workers produce knowledge of their own exploitation – and when making that knowledge visible risks strengthening the systems of management and control they oppose. Beginning with Walker’s work on counter-accounting, the conversation explores workers’ attempts to challenge official narratives through alternative records, inquiries and measures. While such practices can expose wage theft, impossible workloads and managerial deception, they may also reproduce the assumptions of productivity, efficiency and accountability embedded in management’s own tools. This leads to a wider discussion of workers’ inquiry, strategic opacity and the problem of becoming legible to fellow workers without becoming more governable by employers. The discussion then turns to quiet quitting, deception, sabotage and other informal refusals that often emerge where collective organization is weak. Against the tendency to dismiss these as merely individual withdrawal, Walker and Cant consider how hidden or dispersed acts of non-compliance might develop into shared forms of struggle. Drawing on Cant and Matthew Lee’s work on the 1926 General Strike, the episode revisits the role of rank-and-file workers who expanded the strike beyond the intentions of official leadership. From small militant networks to mass pickets, workplace marches and solidarity extending beyond particular trades, the strike became a means of creating new collective subjects across workplaces and communities. The conversation concludes by asking what these histories offer workers confronting platform capitalism, algorithmic management and increasingly authoritarian workplaces today: how can workers use employers’ knowledge against them, build power from seemingly minor forms of resistance, and transform refusal into collective action? Abe Walker – Holding labor to ac(count): quiet quitting and the limits of the anti-work imaginary   Callum Cant and Matthew Lee – The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026