Tournament: UT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Garland DA | Judge: Arthur Weissman
Framework
The value is morality, due to the world "ought" in the resolution
My value criterion is maximizing expected wellbeing for society
You should prefer this framework for the following reasons:
The resolution questions what decisions governments should make, when conveying an unconditional right to strike. This means evaluating ethics through a utilitarian calculation since policymakers have to evaluate tradeoffs.
Woller, Gary BYU Prof., "An Overview by Gary Woller", A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, PESH AK
Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's expense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often ~These~ fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
Just governments must weigh consequences of their actions to determine their worth
Harries, Owen. "Power and Civilization." National Interest (1994): 107-107. PESH AK
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, "In principle, do you believe in one standard of human rights and free expression?", Lee immediately answers, "Look, it is not a matter of principle but of practice." This might appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in politics, it is "the ethic of responsibility" rather than "the ethic of absolute ends" that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost, governments must always weigh consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once they enter the realm of politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests, including such basic things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will vary with circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them always at the top and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of implementing and promoting them will always have to be considered.
Observation 1: The affirmative has the burden of defending the potential right to strike, unconditionally, for all workers. This means that, as long as the negative can provide one instance of striking creating more harm than good, overall, then the negative wins the debate.
The thesis of the Negative is that providing an unconditional right to strike would lead to more overall harm than good for society
Contention 1 is Healthcare
Subpoint A is Nurses
Nursing strikes lead to an overall increase in mortality for patients at hospitals
Gruber, Jonathan, and Samuel A. Kleiner. 2012. "Do Strikes Kill? Evidence from New York State." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 4(1): 127–57. DOI:10.1257/pol.4.1.127 © 2012 AEA
Pp 155
A long-standing concern with strikes as a means of resolving labor disputes is that they may be unproductive, and recent research in some production sectors has demonstrated reduced productivity during strikes. But a sector where strikes may be particularly pernicious is hospitals, where the consequences are not just lower quality products but life and death. To address this question, this study utilizes a unique dataset collected on every nurses' strike over the 1984 to 2004 period in New York State. Our restricted-use dataset allows us to match our strike data with exact dates of patient admission, discharge and treatment, and allows for a rich set of demographic and illness severity controls. Each striking hospital over this period is then matched with the set of hospitals in their geographic area, and the evolution of outcomes is examined before, during, and after the strike in the striking versus nonstriking hospitals. We find a substantial worsening of patient outcomes for hospitals struck by their nurses. Our mortality results show a 18.3 percent increase during strikes relative to their baseline values, and our estimates imply a 5.7 percent increase in readmission rates for patients initially admitted during a strike. Our results show no difference in the characteristics of patients admitted during strikes, and little difference in length of stay for these patients. The results do suggest that a reduction in major procedures performed during a strike may be partially driving the deterioration in outcomes, though our subgroup analysis cannot confirm this. We find that patients with particularly nursing-intensive conditions are more susceptible to these strike effects, and that hospitals hiring replacement workers perform no better during these strikes than those that do not hire substitute employees. Our results imply that strikes were costly to hospital patients in New York. In our sample, there were 38,228 patients admitted during strikes, and we estimate that 129 more individuals died because of strikes than would have died had there been no strikes. By a similar calculation, 298 more patients were readmitted to the hospital than if there had been no strikes. Moreover, these poor outcomes do not reflect less intensity of care. So this is very clear evidence of a reduction in productivity; hospitals functioning during nurses' strikes do so at a lower quality of patient care
Subpoint B is doctors
People don't go to hospitals to receive medical care when doctors strike
Metcalfe, David, et al. "What Are the Consequences When Doctors Strike? Comparative Effectiveness and Provider Induced Demand Collaboration (EPIC) View Project Quality of Care View Project." BMJ Clinical Journel, 2016, 10.1136/bmj.h6231. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.
Although doctor strikes do not seem to increase patient mortality, they can disrupt delivery of healthcare. The extent of such disruption depends on the healthcare setting, strike duration, and the extent of doctor participation. Most strikes have led to widespread cancellation of elective operations and non-urgent hospital consultations. Service disruption can be substantial, even when comparatively few doctors participate, as in the 2012 UK strike over pensions. Although elective admissions fell by only 12.8, ~and~ outpatient cancellations increased by 45.5 on the day of the strike. This disruption was exacerbated by managers needing to overestimate strike participation and to ensure adequate staffing of essential services.
And when people do go to hospitals, they have worse treatments and more death occur
Metcalfe, David, et al. "What Are the Consequences When Doctors Strike? Comparative Effectiveness and Provider Induced Demand Collaboration (EPIC) View Project Quality of Care View Project." BMJ Clinical Journel, 2016, 10.1136/bmj.h6231. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.
The only report of increased mortality associated with strike action comes from South Africa. In 2010, all the doctors in one province ceased to provide any treatment to their patients for 20 consecutive days. Only one hospital continued to provide services during this period to an estimated population of 5.5 million people. Although their data are poorly reported, authors from this hospital found that the number of emergency admissions fell during the strike period but that the odds of death for these patients increased by 67.1 This may be because patients delayed seeking treatment and so were more likely to present in extremis during the strike.
Contention 2 is Transportation
Public transportation strikes increase CO2 emissions, Barcelona proves
González, L., Perdiguero, J., and Sanz, À. (2021). Impact of public transport strikes on traffic and pollution in the city of Barcelona. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 98, 102952. doi:10.1016/j.trd.2021.102952 Pp 11-14
Before analyzing the policy implications of our results, note that in 2016, the transport sector was the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in Spain, as can be seen in Fig. 6. Taking into account only emissions from the transport sector, it is important to note that cars are the main source of CO2 emissions for the transport sector, as can be seen in Fig. 7. Fig. 8 shows the CO2 emissions in Spain in 2017 from different modes of transportation, depending on the trips made. As seen above, the main source is private cars, with higher emissions from interurban mobility, followed by private cars from urban mobility. On the other hand, collective public transportation (buses, metro, and trains) are among the lowest sources of CO2 emissions. Therefore, as the figures show, we can confirm that the use of private cars increases air pollution, in this regard, not only that but our analysis found that public strikes increased pollution in air quality stations that measure pollution emitted by traffic sources. As cars are the main source of air pollution among different transportation modes, and public transport the least, a reduction in public transport availability implying an increase in pollution should be due to an increase in the use of alternative and more pollutant modes of transportation. In this regard, Bauernschuster, et al. (2017) show that there is a direct relationship between the concentration level of pollutants and car traffic, mainly due to engine exhaust gases. Further, Negrenti (1999), Int Panis et al. (2006) and Smith et al. (2008) show that the level of air pollution can increase on congested routes where speed is not constant. During strikes some people14 have to substitute their preferred mode of transportation with another, meaning that there is a chance that the use of private cars increases, which leads to congestion. Note that, in 2008, in Barcelona, the number of cars per household was 0.94, and the number of private vehicles15 per household was 1.3816. The transport interruptions recorded during our study caused an increase in the concentration of pollutants related to traffic emissions, such as NOx, CO2, and PM10. When there are public transport strikes the whole city is affected in terms of increasing pollution. Our results show that during strikes, there is an increase in NOx pollution between 3.92 and 5.45 points (between 6.6 and 9.2), an increase in CO pollution between 0.02 and 0.05 points (that is, between 4 and 11) and an increase in PM10 between 2.7 and 3.58 points (between 9.4 and 12.4). If we focus on neighborhoods near traffic areas, however, the situation is worse. Although metro and train strikes predominantly affected air quality throughout the city, in high traffic areas, not only those strikes but also bus and train-FGC stoppages affected air quality. Results confirm that during strikes, NOx pollution in those areas increase between 7.79 and 11.46 points (that is, an increase between 13.2 and 19.3). Also, public transportation increases CO pollution near traffic areas between 0.061 and 0.087 points (an increase of between 14.2 and 20.3). Finally, the impact of public strikes on the increase in PM10 concentration in traffic areas is between 1.04 and 3.9 points (an increase of about 3.6 and 13.5) Surprisingly, our results also confirm an increase on SO2 pollution during public transport strikes. Although the impact throughout the city is only significant for metro strikes, it is important to note that for vicinities near traffic areas any public transport strike increases SO2 pollution. In this regard, the increase in SO2 concentrations ranges between 0.36 and 0.38 points; an average increase of about 13 and 14. These results confirm that the availability of public transportation in the city creates a positive effect in terms of reducing pollution, mainly due to a supposed reduction in the use of private cars. In this regard, our main recommendation to policy makers around the world should be to promote the use of public transportation in cities as a method to reduce pollution. Specifically, in the case of Barcelona, due to congestion1718 on some modes of transport, an increase in supply should increase the number of users, and reduce pollution due to a reduction in private car use. Although we don't have data about traffic and public travel passengers for the period analyzed, our results are similar to Tsapakis, et al. (2012), Anderson (2014) and Bauernschuster, et al. (2017). These authors found that the increase in pollution levels during a public transport strike was associated with the rise in traffic of private vehicles. As people in general have to go to work during public strikes and each household has, at least, one private vehicle we assume that, as our results are in line with previous studies, there should be a relationship between a public strike and an increase in the use of private cars for, at least, the strikes where pollution increased. Note that the use of temporal variables captures the usual effect of traffic and pollutants emissions during periods with no strikes, so increases in pollution during strike hours should be attributed to a specific change that is common during these strikes, and, as previous authors have shown, the most likely reason should be an increase in traffic. The opposite occurs with the ozone level because it generates a negative effect during the metro and RENFE strikes. The concentration of O3 decreases during these strikes due to chemical reactions transforming emissions of NO and NO2 in the atmosphere to lower levels of O3 (Eckhardt, et al., 2013). In general, we show that transport strikes generate an increase in the levels of pollution in Barcelona in the case of the metro and RENFE. In this regard, metro strikes increase pollution for all pollutants analyzed, and RENFE strikes increase pollution for all pollutants analyzed, except SO2. Taking into account traffic air quality stations, pollution in these areas increases when metro, RENFE, or buses are on strike for all pollutants analyzed.
These strikes harm society, leading to excess deaths and overall decrease in standard of life for citizens
Bauernschuster, Stefan; Hener, Timo; and Rainer, Helmut. "When Labor Disputes Bring Cities to a Standstill: The Impact of Public Transit Strikes on Traffic, Accidents, Air Pollution, and Health†" American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2017, 9(1): 1–37 https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20150414 Pp 32-33
Our most interesting and novel finding is that strikes in public transportation not only cause congestion costs, but also pose a non-negligible threat for public safety and public health. We have shown that public transit strikes cause daily pollution shocks accompanied by an increase in pollution-related health problems. For children under five years of age, hospital admissions for respiratory diseases and abnormalities of breathing increase by 11 and 34 percent, respectively. With 71 transit strikes in our sample, 68 more young children had to be admitted to hospitals than would have been if there had been no strikes. Moreover, our estimates suggest that transit strikes increase the risk of being injured in a motor vehicle crash by 20 percent. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), governments can ban strikes in "essential services," defined as a service whose stoppage poses a clear and imminent threat to the life, personal safety, or health of the whole or part of the population. Public transportation does not fall under the ILO's definition of an essential service. Taken at face value, our results seem to provide evidence in support of the opposite position: that mass transit—just as the police or firefighters—is critical to public safety and health on a day-to-day basis. That said, it is also important to point out that the economic costs associated with the strike-induced increases in accidents, accident-related injuries, and hospitalizations are small, coming to less than 0.5 percent of the above calculated congestion costs.37 Some strikes in our sample only span a few hours, while others last all day. We are therefore able to examine whether longer strikes are more disruptive than shorter strikes. In unreported regressions, we have replaced our binary strike indicator with a continuous variable capturing the duration of strikes in hours. Using a simple linear specification, we find that a reduction by one hour in strike duration reduces the negative effects of an average strike during the am peak period by
7.6 percent for freeway traffic, (ii) 7.8 percent for travel times, (iii) 16 percent for vehicle crashes, (iv) 13 percent for accident injuries, (v) 9.8 percent for particle pollution, and (vi) 7.3 percent for respiratory-related hospitalizations among young children. From a policy perspective, this suggests that restrictions on strike duration might undo some of the negative effects unearthed in this study