Sabotage

Here’s a free graphic for use wherever you might have a need for a historical footwear reference in place of an image of someone screaming their demands into a megaphone: a sabot, the wooden shoe from which the French word forms the base of the English sabotage.

As an icon of working class history, the story goes that sabots were thrown into early industrial machinery when workers’ demands weren’t met. The term saboter, however, originally referred to the noisy footsteps of clog-clad rural workers, and thus their low-rung, unskilled labor within newly mechanized industrial factories. The word evolved from there to mean the slowing or bungling of a job on purpose: work stoppage.

This graphic is scanned from an original linoleum-cut print.

A linocut image of a wooden clog, replete with pointy toe-end. A shadow reinforces its weighty presence.