The difficult economic conditions at the end of the war left workers with many grievances; they also felt that the voting system disenfranchised them with its inbuilt bias towards the bourgeois parties.

More than one quarter of a million workers took part in a general strike which started on November 11th 1918. However, in the face of huge troop deployments the strike crumbled on 13th.

Most of the workers' demands were rejected, but among the gains of the strike was the reduction of the working week to 48 hours.