Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, disruption, 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. Etymology The English word derives from the French word , meaning to "bungle, botch, wreck or sabotage"; it was originally used to refer to labour disputes, in which workers wearing wooden shoes called 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 into the machines to disrupt production. One of the first appearances of and in French literature is in the of d'Hautel, edited in 1808. In it the literal definition is to 'make noise with sabots' as well as 'bungle, jostle, hustle, haste'. The word appears only later. The word is found in 1873–1874 in the of Émile Littré. Here it is defined mainly as 'making sabots, sabot maker'. 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 of sabotaging or bungling a work') in and in 1911 he also wrote a book entitled . As industrial action 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. The IWW was shaped in part by the industrial unionism philosophy of Big Bill Haywood, and in 1910 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