this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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How does going on strike work when you pay the landlord? what, exactly, is the point of the whole exercise?
Jointly negotiate rent increase or deny payment until maintenance is kept up?
You just get evicted and maybe even prosecuted. The end.
Well the idea is the landlord can't evict everyone in the building at once. They lose a ton of money and it's very hard to go to court that much.
Of course it isn't really like a real union. They can easily replace tenants; it's not a skilled position. Co-ops are better, since you actually own the building.
That's dependent on the landlord owning the building rather than a single dwelling - which is not the norm where I'm from.
Direct actions are possible outside of withholding rent payments. The tenant association/union can provide legal assistance etc and file formal complaints. There's a lot of processes that can be done to force landlords, they're just not something the average tenant might know about.
The effective move is to have everyone pay into escrow. Most areas have renters rights laws that guarantee minimum standards, if you provide written notice that these aren't being met you are typically allowed to pay into escrow and withhold the payments until issues are fixed.
I did this in college after we negotiated them adding a dishwasher and got it written into our lease, then a few months later were fed up when it hadn't been installed yet. I also helped a friend do this when they found cockroaches, and in their case after three months of it not getting fixed they were granted leave to break their lease and were awarded the escrow money on top.
Not all places have the same laws and it definitely helped we went to our university legal council and they laid out the options and wrote up the notice. But almost all places have at least basic standards
Here in the UK once you withhold any payment you lose all your rights.
Depends on contract and leverage. In contract for example, maintenance can be as much responsibility of owner as payment is of renter. In leverage for example, if cashflow from properties are crucial to an owner and all the tenants are in the same union, evicting all will hard.
I don't know where you live, but what I can see over here is that tenants are fighting each other for the opportunity not to live on the streets. There's literally no cash flow issues, just boot everyone who disagrees out and you'll have a line of people at your doors waiting to pay as much as you say. Heck, some properties get rented out even without any viewings these days.
Rent strikes are a thing