Labor 101, or why strikes are okay

[wolfpup]

@Kimstu

On balance I find myself agreeing with the several other posters in this thread who don’t see eye to eye with you on the interpretation of what it means to “support unions”.

There must be a name for the creative style of argumentation that I’m seeing here, which seems to consist of a nifty two-step process: (1) take a selected comment completely out of context, so that the original intended meaning is lost, and then (2) subject what remains to the most cynical and uncharitable possible interpretation.

My point about sick days was made in the larger context of the principle of civil disobedience, of when such actions may be justified and when they are not, and of the validity of using Martin Luther King’s statements about it as blanket support for illegal strike actions. Specifically, this is what I said, with the proper context restored:

@wolfpup

All the examples that we’ve seen so far of Martin Luther King’s statements and his acts of civil disobedience were in opposition to barbaric racism where Black people were literally being treated as subhuman. There should be no question of the moral right to oppose such horrific oppression regardless of the legality of such opposition. Similarly, Mahatma Gandhi, whose policy of non-violent resistance is often associated with the first use of civil disobedience as a political tactic, initially fought horrible racial oppression in South Africa, and later back in his native India against the tyranny of British colonizers.

One must surely recognize the qualitative difference between civil disobedience in this existential struggle for fundamental human rights, and the malfeasance of this particular union in pursuit of more paid sick days (and other similar fringe benefits).

So it wasn’t really about “sick days” at all, but about the threshold to which injustices must rise before it’s morally justifiable to defy the rule of law. In this case, the union demand was even more frivolous than I misstated in my example; they were apparently content with the allocation of sick days, and were demanding the right to bank them from year to year. They also had a few other goals related to seniority and job security, all of which were small potatoes in the larger scheme of things and certainly not monumental social causes, yet they staged numerous illegal strike actions that sometimes endangered public safety.