—In the late 1800s, the French anarchist Émile Pouget submitted a report at a labor congress in France in which he advocated for work slowdowns, a strategy that had proved successful in Britain. The British unionists referred to the slowdown policy as Ca’Canny, which did not translate directly into French. However, the French had long likened slow and clumsy work to that of a man wearing wooden shoes, or sabots, and Pouget, in his report, coined the term sabotage.
