Picture: Martin O'Neil
It is worth situating any remarks about the ethics of strike action in the legal context. In Britain, strike action is not civil disobedience, it is legal, and permitted within the framework of employment law. This situation was hard won, by generations of workers who faced terrible working conditions. At the start of the industrial revolution, workers faced day to day working conditions that were often unsanitary and dangerous, no job security, exploitative wages, no paid time off, arbitrary inequalities, and of course, no pensions. In the years following the Industrial Revolution, workers fought for the right to organize, and formed trade unions in order to use collective power to resist unfair treatment by their employers. The overall justification for a framework that allows workers to unionize, and to pursue strike action under some circumstances, is that the possibility of striking provides a safeguard against exploitation, a protection for workers in a situation of power imbalance.
Ethical Issues
1. Preconditions
