That’s why they exist though, they’re to keep the plebs down not protect us.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
63 points (93.2% liked)
General Discussion
12058 readers
249 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧭 Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: !lemmy411@lemmy.ca!
Also keep an eye on:
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
- !new_communities@mander.xyz
- !communityspotlight@lemmy.world
- !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca!
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- !casualconversation@lemm.ee - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- !movies@lemm.ee - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to !fediverse@lemmy.world or !lemmydrama@lemmy.world communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.