4 ms·
> Every kind of strikes was illegal before it became legal. I don't think withdrawing your labour was illegal before someone legalised it - the whole workforce
by chrisseaton 5y ago
> Every kind of strikes was illegal before it became legal.
I don't think withdrawing your labour was illegal before someone legalised it - the whole workforce was not enslaved.
- masklinn 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars The reason why US unions are so antagonistic is that US corporations are antagonistic and destructive, any hint of collective action brings out the guns, historically literally. This very essay talks about their approach to countries with constructive unions / labour, so does the behaviour of Amazon in Germany these days. US unions have just been living in that environment with little support (quite the opposite) for 150 years, so anything they can get they will everything else be damned. They have no incentive to be cooperative and agreeable because corps will try to destroy them regardless.
- jadbox 5y agoI've only taken a recent interest in history (specifically labor), but if you look at the grand scale of either direct physical enslavement or designed econeomical indirect enslavement (surfs to their rulers), you find so much of history dating back to the Egyptian empire of kingdoms that relied their econemy in significant part with labor enforcement. You could try to argue about the right of withdrawing label just in context to American history, but I think we'd still wind up with a compelling case that so much of history had periods of significant unjust-by-most-standards labor compulsion.
- standardUser 5y agoStrikes were prosecuted as illegal conspiracies before the labor rights movement. The law was generally strongly pro-employer, hence the labor rights movement.