The first group includes landless agricultural workers, construction workers, and dockers, all of whom were disproportionately represented in several countries' syndicalist movements. Because they frequently changed jobs, such workers did not have close relationships with their employers and the risk of losing one's job as a result of a strike was reduced. Moreover, because of the time constraints of their jobs they were forced to act immediately in order to achieve anything and could not plan for the long term by building up strike funds or powerful labor organizations or by engaging in mediation. Their working conditions gave them an inclination to engage in direct confrontation with employers and apply direct action. The second group includes miners, railway employees, and certain factory workers. Their occupations were deskilled by technological and organizational changes. These changes made workers from the second group similar in some respects to the first group. They did not entirely result from the introduction of new technology, but were also caused by changes in management methods. This included increased supervision of workers, piecework, internal promotions, all designed make workers docile and loyal and to transfer knowledge and control over the process of production from workers to employers. Frustration with this loss of power led to formal and informal resistance by workers. Altena disagrees with this explanation. According to him, it was workers with significant autonomy in their jobs and pride in their skills who were most attracted to syndicalism. Moreover, he argues, explanations based on workers' occupations cannot explain why only a minority of workers in those jobs became syndicalists or why in some professions workers in different locations had vastly different patterns of organization. The small size of many syndicalist unions also makes observations about which workers joined statistically irrelevant. Syndicalism came to be seen as a viable strategy because the general strike became a practical possibility. Although it had been advocated before, there were not sufficient numbers of wage workers to bring society to a standstill and they had not achieved a sufficient degree of organization and solidarity until the 1890s, according van der Linden and Thorpe. Several general or political strikes then took place before World War I: in 1893 and in 1902 in Belgium, in 1902 and in 1909 in Sweden, in 1903 in the Netherlands, in 1904 in Italy in addition to significant work stoppages during the Russian Revolution of 1905. Darlington cites