sj_zero 1 year ago
The whole idea in the recent supreme court case where I think it was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who made the absurd argument that apparently it's ok to destroy equipment if you're a union because if you're striking then the union deserves it was actually legit evil.
No, unions shouldn't be above the law. If you harm people, if you damage something you don't own, then you should be held to account.
Now, I might agree that the government shouldn't have the ability to legislate workers back to work during a strike notwithstanding potential harm to people or equipment at the very bare minimum required to mitigate that, but that's a different question than saying police may never get involved with a labor dispute.
ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
sj_zero 1 year ago
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.
ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Unlike the nuclear plant example, the supreme Court case did not endanger lives. All it did was threaten profit. Big difference.
sj_zero 1 year ago
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.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
But the reality is they shot people over steel production and coal mining (and other non-threatening situations).
sj_zero 1 year ago
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.