Curiously, the vast majority of people uphold the right for employees to strike. Somebody who puts this right into question, is quickly likened to Hitler.
Because I know at least a few people who don’t understand what the right to strike really means, I must explain it: It doesn’t have anything to do with the right to leave your job at any time, before your job contract ends or when your employer has unreasonable demands to you. You can always leave your job in violation of your job contract. Theoretically, your employer can sue you for damages, if he can prove that they were caused by your absence from work, but for most jobs this is most unlikely. You just get fired without previous notice.
The right to strike means the right not to work in violation of your job contract while your employer can’t fire you for it. This is the reason why in most legal environments strikes are judged as such only if labor unions have approved of them.
Now to maintain a right to strike doesn’t make an inch of sense for society. With every strike, wages are not being paid, deliveries not met, the economy gets damaged and economic creation of value is being prevented. There is always a net economic loss for the national economy as a whole. But furthermore, the outcome of the strike – the wages and work conditions to be negotiated between employers and employees – doesn’t depend on what’s just or what is best for the economy, but just by which party is stronger in this conflict.
Let’s imagine two parties were at odds and going to court against each other. Now the judge decides to have both parties literally fight against each other – with fists or guns or whatever – with the winnig party winning the trial, too. Does this make sense to you? Is there any justice in this kind of legal practice?
It doesn’t matter if you are on the side of the employers or of the employees. In neither case does a strike or the right to strike make any sense. If you want to decide about wages and labor conditions yourself or if you want only one of the concerning parties or anybody else deciding about it, then this could easily be implemented without the strike and without its economic damage.
However, most people always side with the employee, automatically and unconditionally, regardless of their demands. In their world view even highly paid employees, like air traffic controllers, are always the underdogs. It doesn’t matter to them that only some employees enjoy a position in which they can successfully defeat their employers by industrial action. These people refuse to understand that not their pay rise will not be paid from the employer’s profit, but from the prices the customers have to pay through increased prices. Employers can make a profit only by maintaining a winning margin over their competitors. But these very same people immediately understand this, when the increase of the production cost is not caused by a pay rise for the employees, but by a rise of VAT.
It just doesn’t make a sense that an organized group of people are given entitlement to hold a society at ransom. Of course, people with any sense left knew all this before. Still, the vast majority of people, as I said, liken anyone to Hitler who puts the right to strike into question. People…
