down tools

present singular third person downs tools · participle present downing tools · participle past downed tools · past downed tools

1. UKidiomaticinformalTo stop work, especially when taking industrial action.

   In Coventry, 300 GMB members plan to down tools over long hours, bad management and a 50p-an-hour pay rise[.]

   2023 January 22, Heather Stewart, “First industrial action at Amazon UK hopes to strike at firm’s union hostility”, in The Guardian

   1 more example

   But when railway workers downed tools almost a year later, on September 26 1919, Britain was in many ways still a country at war.

   2020 January 2, Conrad Landin, “Strife and strikes in post-war Britain”, in Rail, page 51