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That’s why they exist though, they’re to keep the plebs down not protect us.
It's kinda like asking the state not to state huh?
That's what the US is all about.
Our Constituon starts off, "We the people...."
People have bastardized these words. It does mean like "we the people" are fed up!
It means we the people, as in, "we the people, without reference to any king or God, form a government among ourselves."
The idea of people being in charge law and policy by way of democratic representation is asking the state, as we once had led by a king, not to state. That's the great expirement.
I think that would be hard to implement. Like, what it a picket line got violent and started burning things down? What if someone posed as part of the dispute as a cover to burn things down?
I agree standing against a labor protest is literally undemocratic, but can't think of a good way to implement that to limit abuse.
Yeah that's not realistic at all, labor disputes can get nasty and violent and the police are supposed to exist in part to stop violence between citizens. They are going to absolutely still want to be the wall between each group so that they can maintain peace and order.
Now maybe if we focus your idea in terms of forcing the police to not assist with union busting and strike breaking tactics that would be much more realistic since the cops do have a tendency to heavily favor businesses and the wealthy.
Another thought too is to have the police not arrest anyone that isn't a violent threat at the protests, anyone that isn't a violent threat just gets taken to a cool down area where they're given water and whatever else they need and can leave once they've calmed down a bit, but three times in the cool down area gets you a trip straight home. This is also something that protest leaders should be watching out and doing to keep their people from getting in trouble and to keep from causing the protests to become chaos.
Another thought too is to have the police not arrest anyone that isn’t a violent threat at the protests, anyone that isn’t a violent threat just gets taken to a cool down area where they’re given water and whatever else they need
That's an Arrest. A cop taking someone somewhere else against their will is an arrest.
Also if they're not a violent threat sounds like no crime is being commited.
tbh I'm not sure how I feel about protesting/striking in the street. It's so easy to infiltrate and cause trouble, makes it easy for authorities to identify those not sympathetic to their power. And it's so easy for the media to control the narrative. Even deciding which protests to cover gives the media power to control which ones might be likely to have success.
Not saying people shouldn't, just not sure how effective they are personally. I feel like there are more effective techniques. Striking means not working, not picketing. Work stoppage combined with an effective social media campaign might be more effective then putting oneself in danger of arrest or violence.
Similarly, if one wants to defund the police running for office so there's an anti-police candidate on the ballot (even if you can't win) and can add the topic to the conversation might be more effective than going into the street and pissing off those with a license to kill.
The government should just pass a law banning capitalism and then we wouldn't have to worry about strikes at all, but that's also never going to happen.
That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, just that it's too extreme by the standards of US politics. Unions here often still need basic protections like the right to strike at all in the first place. Check out the rules against teachers striking in Texas, they'd be banned from public sector work and lose their pensions. The only way they could possibly go on strike is with a vast enough majority to force the state government to repeal those rules.
Texans sure love their "freedom".
I think you might not realise that what you are proposing to ban is actually the primary purpose of all police forces worldwide. Everything else just keeps them busy collecting revenue in between squashing Labor uprisings.
I obviously agree, but you are asking the state to stop allowing itself to be challenged. It's not gonna happen. It's the same everywhere.
Ya, even if a law like this was passed, I don't think it would be followed if things got serious. This implies that the "class war" is a real war, it's just mostly a cold war, at least for now.
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.
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.
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.
This feels like one of those ideas that sounds good at first glance but hasn’t actually been thought out.
If police cannot interfere in labor disputes does that imply people are allowed to do anything as long as they call it a labor dispute? What’s stopping people from rioting, stealing, and harming innocent civilians as long as they say they’re protesting for better working conditions?
Ah ya, I never said I thought it out. I literally thought of it watching a yt video minutes before and posted for people's opinions.
All these replies and I don't think a single person has mentioned that states regulate police, not the federal government.
In my post I meant "state" as in "the state", like a polity claiming monopoly on legal violence in a given area. So like a blanket restriction against police, national guard, FBI, being able to be called in to break a strike on behalf of business.
Also, talking about states (now state as in Arizona) that doesn't mean that an amendment couldn't in theory do it though right? I mean state regulated police aren't legally able to violate your 4th amendment just because they're not federal agents.
Still feels like it would violate the 9th or 10th amendment. I suppose if you could convince two thirds of the house and senate and 3/4 of the states, and if nobody challenged it and the USSC didn't shoot it down, then maybe you've got a chance.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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