Peimei wrote:
No Gbaji. Strikes are legal in Canada. In fact so are protests.
False dilemma. I didn't say that strikes or protests were illegal. I said that blocking traffic is illegal regardless of whether one is striking/protesting or not.
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They can hold up each car for up to 5 minutes but rarely do.
Really? It's legal in Canada for a non-police person to just decide to block traffic as long as they only do it for 5 minutes for each car? Or is there some special law giving special powers to people as long as they're "on strike"? If so, that's the dumbest law ever.
Having the right to do something doesn't include granting those doing it special powers they would not have otherwise.
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What other course of action are they suppose to take?
Huh? I thought a strike was about refusing to work? I thought it was about showing the employer that the workers are more able to stand not getting paid than the employer is not having them labor for him. That's what it's supposed to be about, anyway. You strike because you believe that there's some work condition that is unfair, or unsafe, or that compensation isn't high enough. And you strike based on the assumption that your labor is valuable enough to your employer that he'll be willing to change whatever it is you're striking over rather than have you not work.
I'm not sure where disrupting traffic comes into this at all. If you don't have sufficient labor leverage to successfully strike without creating additional disruption, violence, damage, etc, then
the thing you're striking for isn't legitimate. It's somewhat axiomatic.
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Give in and let there pensions, benefits and full time positions diesappear to be replaced with 1 year part time contracts? Maybe we should go back to the days where weekends didn't exist and once you could walk you could work in a factory.
If their labor is worth being paid those pensions, benefits, and full time positions, then their employer will give in to their demands. Strikers resort to actions other than simply refusing to work when they know that their labor *isn't* worth what they're demanding. The idea that the government would (according to you) pass special laws allowing striking workers to do more to disrupt a business than simply not doing their jobs seems to be unfair to the employer and frankly just plain moronic all the way around.
I'm all for labor fighting to get their "fair share". But that's got to be defined based on the value of their labor itself. It's no longer a fair share if they're allowed to legally apply additional costs or pain to the employer unrelated to the cost of replacing their labor. The only consideration an employer should have to calculate when dealing with a strike is whether or not the cost of hiring and training replacements is less than the cost of giving the workers what they want. Anything beyond that amounts to extortion and should not be legal IMO.