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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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General Discussion
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At the same time it's troubling to say that the state can force you to work against your will through the threat of punishment. That's a bit too slavery adjacent for my taste.
Different human rights end up butting against each other sometimes. Let's say that there's a strike at the nuclear power plant. Would you be okay with just saying "no that's slavery" and letting the plant melt down and kill everyone who isn't involved with the labor conflict? Those people have human rights as well, and arguably the right to not be killed due to a labor action you're not related to is greater than the right to engage in labor action.
An alternative to forcing some union skeleton crew to continue manning the plant would be to loosen the labor monopoly the union has and to entitle the owner to bring in contract labor to run a skeleton crew during disputes.
Unlike the nuclear plant example, the supreme Court case did not endanger lives. All it did was threaten profit. Big difference.
It specifically damaged property on purpose.
Your right to strike isn't a right to damage stuff that doesn't belong to you as a bargaining tactic.
They didn't damage property on purpose. They chose a time to strike that would maximize the impact to the employer. Glacier Northwest knew full well that their contract with the union was expired. Without a contract, labor is under no obligation to continue working if they do choose, no matter how inconvenient or costly. Management still chose to send out full cement trucks with non-contracted drivers who had every right to walk away at any time. Management suffered from their own poor choices.
It's probably a good thing that the rest of the world doesn't think in this way.
Imagine if you hired a contractor to work on your kitchen, and the money ran out, and they left all your taps on with the drain plug in because they knew that that would damage your house. If a contractor did that, and cause damage to your house, of course they would be liable for what they just did. "We didn't damage your house, we just chose to stop working at the moment that would have maximum impact!"
Under virtually any other circumstance, nobody would have accepted that logic. Its probably unlawful, and it's definitely immoral.
Contractors can and do leave people with their water shut off and their electrical ripped out if they are not compensated sufficiently for their work. What the unions did is no different. All the business had to do is sufficiently compensate the workers to avoid the problem.
There's a difference between leaving a job undone and leaving a job in a situation that's going to cause damage. Contractor might leave the water off, they're not going to leave the water on filling up a basement that doesn't have any drainage.
They returned the cement trucks to the yard and left the drums turning. The owner had plenty of time to prevent damage. The strikers could have just parked the trucks wherever and turned off the drums so they solidified immediately. The owners got off lucky that they just wasted a bit of concrete. It's no different than cooks walking off the line and the restaurant dealing with food spoilage because of it.
But the reality is they shot people over steel production and coal mining (and other non-threatening situations).
They even ordered a bunch of people running passenger trains back to work. And that wasn't 100 years ago, that was this year.
I think that's exactly the sort of situation that I'm talking about, there's no need for that. Even in the case of something like a coal mine, you need to have a very bare minimum number of people to keep pumping running or there won't be a mine to go back to, well there's no reason why you couldn't just continue to send your staff (non union employees) to the mine site to do that bare minimum of work during strikes.
Of course, act of violence or sabotage shouldn't be tolerated. And that's where police should be able to step in if something is going on other than just a work stoppage. What happens quite often is the government steps in because it's politically inconvenient to have a strike happen.
In this regard, I think the government stepping in to do something like that is a violation of basic human rights. You can't just force people to work, and you certainly can't punish people for an otherwise legal expression of speech just because the speech is inconvenient for you.
The inconvenience is people realizing that there's power in solidarity. The reason our geriatric overlords are still in power is because of a collective sense of inability to effect change.