Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Loveless Academic Magnet Program RR | Judge: Amelia Ritenour
Advantage
Workers are striking, but employers aren’t listening – they’re just replacing those who speak out.
Bogage et al, 10/31: Bogage, Jacob Business reporter, The Washington Post and Alyssa Fowers Graphics reporter, The Washington Post. “Workplace strikes are surging. Here’s why they won’t stop anytime soon.” The Washington Post, October 31, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/31/faq-striketober/ CH
Factory workers, nurses and school bus drivers are among the tens of thousands of Americans who walked off jobs in October amid a surge of labor activism that economists and labor leaders have dubbed “Striketober.” The strike drives, experts say, stem from the new leverage workers hold in the nation’s tight job market: Having seen the massive profits their companies collected during the coronavirus pandemic, they want their contributions acknowledged in the form of better pay and working conditions. While work stoppages may contribute to near-term inflation and production tie-ups, economists say they could fundamentally change the economic standing of millions of workers. Here’s what you need to know about the tide of recent strikes. WHAT TO KNOW Why are so many workers on strike? Do the strikes have anything to do with the “Great Resignation?” How many workers are on strike? Have the strikes been effective for workers? What do all these strikes mean for my job? What do all these strikes mean for the broader economy? Why are so many workers on strike? There are a number of reasons, but ultimately it comes down to how the pandemic has changed the way people see themselves, their employers and their jobs — especially if going to work heightened their risk of exposure to the deadly virus. So while millions of people quit or switched positions, others have staged walkouts — or at least are threatening to. “People don’t want to go and die at work. I mean, they’re not compensated enough,” said Kim Cordova, president of the 23,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers in Colorado. Strikes or strike authorizations — when a union supports a walkout if negotiations with management break down — typically revolve around compensation. At John Deere, where 10,000 workers at 14 factories walked off the job on Oct. 14, employees want better pay and retirement benefits. The company offered 5 to 6 percent raises in a new collective bargaining agreement, but workers say it’s not enough, given the company’s soaring profits. Kaiser Permanente nurses and health workers in California and Oregon want the health care provider to drop a proposed two-tiered wage and benefits system that would compensate new employees less than existing ones. More than 30,000 workers represented by several unions authorized a strike in an Oct. 11 vote. More than 1,400 Kellogg workers in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Michigan and Tennessee went on strike on Oct. 5, seeking better benefits, vacation time and trying to defeat a two-tier wage system. Several hundred of those employees returned to work on Tuesday after the company threatened to hire a contractor to replace them. Other workers are using strike drives to try to improve workplace culture. A walkout at Chicago tortilla-maker El Milagro was tied to requests for better safeguards against sexual harassment and coronavirus safety protocols. Management responded to the work stoppage by locking workers out of its factories; executives have not responded publicly to employees’ concerns. Workers at a West Virginia producer of industrial pump parts went on strike Oct. 1 seeking better seniority rights. Do the strikes have anything to do with the “Great Resignation?” Return to menu The “Great Resignation” is the term some economists are using to describe how workers are reevaluating their jobs nearly two years into the pandemic. A record 4.3 million people — or nearly 3 percent of the U.S. workforce — quit their jobs in August alone, Labor Department data shows. So many businesses need employees, economists say, that working people have more leverage than they’ve had in many years. Millions of people are venturing into the job market in search of better wages and working conditions. For others, though, it’s provided the impetus to strike — success can mean more pay and benefits without starting over somewhere else. How many workers are on strike? Some 17,400 U.S. workers went on strike in October, according to a Bloomberg Law work stoppage database. Of the 119 union strikes so far this year, 15 are “major” strikes involving 1,000 or more individuals, according to the database. That compares with nine major strikes in 2020, when the pandemic took hold, and 30 in 2019. Data on U.S. work stoppages is not centralized, so it is difficult to draw direct comparisons between years. But it is clear, economists say, that the 2021 strike movement is historic in both its size and the way it spans across industries. In 2019, strikes mainly occurred among public-sector and health care workers, according to Labor Department and Bloomberg Law data. That trend continued in 2020: Aside from a 10,000-person carpenters strike in Massachusetts in April, 34,000 of the 58,000 workers involved in union-involved strikes were by educators or health service workers. This year, manufacturing workers made up 47 percent of those who began strikes, data show, while education and health services represented 36 percent. In January, 1,400 workers walked out at Hunts Point Produce Market in New York seeking better pay. In March, 1,300 workers in five states from Allegheny Technologies struck over wages and health care premiums. Numbers spiked in recent months after strikes at major corporations including Nabisco (1,000 workers struck for 40 days), Frito-Lay (600 workers struck for 19 days), Kellogg (1,000 workers have been on strike since Oct. 5) and John Deere (10,000 workers have been on strike since Oct. 14). Have the strikes been effective for workers? Results are mixed, economists and labor leaders say. Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers won big concessions from their employers, and both groups returned to work in September. Nabisco workers received $5,000 bonuses, annual raises and increased contributions into employees’ 401(k) accounts. Frito-Lay workers stopped their strike after the company agreed to wage increases and a guarantee of at least one day off each week. Hollywood production workers secured concessions from television and film studios after threatening to strike, including mandatory 10-hour break periods between shifts, a 54-hour weekend, 25 percent pay increases for lower-level workers and a $400 million contribution to pension accounts. Those new contracts have galvanized other strike drives across the country, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. Others, though, are still on the picket line — or have returned to work — without winning much from their employers. Coal miners in Alabama have been on strike since April asking for better wages and more vacation time. Their employer, Warrior Met, has continued operations with a nonunionized workforce, and Alabama state police have escorted those workers to the mine through picket lines in recent weeks. Kellogg and John Deere have both run their factories without union members. But 400 Kellogg mechanics broke their strike on Oct. 19 after the company threatened to contract out their work to a third-party vendor. What do all these strikes mean for my job? Short term, the rise in strikes contributes to the existing worker shortage, said Julia Pollak, a labor economist for job site ZipRecruiter. That means there are more job openings and fewer workers to take them, giving all sorts of workers more leverage.
And, this disproportionately affects Black Americans – especially Black women.
Weller 19: Christian E. Weller is a senior fellow at American Progress and a professor of public policy at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His area of expertise includes retirement income security, macroeconomics, money and banking, and international finance. He is also a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute and an institute fellow at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Gerontology Institute. Prior to joining the Center, he was on the research staff at the Economic Policy Institute, where he remains a research associate. “African Americans Face Systematic Obstacles to Getting Good Jobs” December 5, 2019, AA
These differences are not new, and the longest labor market expansion on record has not eliminated them. African Americans have always been more vulnerable in the labor market. They regularly experience higher unemployment rates and work in worse jobs, which feature lower pay and fewer benefits, than whites. Moreover, they tend to work in jobs that are less stable than those held by white workers. For example, African American workers often see their unemployment rates go up sooner than white workers when the economy sours, and their unemployment rates also take longer to decline when the economy improves than is the case for whites—a phenomenon often described as “last hired, first fired.” Moreover, unemployed Black workers look longer to find and secure a new job than do white workers. The labor market experience for African Americans has historically been worse than that for whites, and this continues today. There are several factors that have contributed and continue to contribute to this. These include repeated violent oppression of African Americans such as the riots that destroyed Black business owners’ wealth on the Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, codified segregation, legal racial terrorism during the almost century long period from Reconstruction to the civil rights era, systematic exclusions of African Americans from better-paying jobs, and continued occupational segregation.4 Despite notable improvement, today’s Black workers still have a harder time than whites securing good employment. For Black women, the intersection of race and gender bias has had a combined effect on their labor market experiences, too often devaluing their work and confining their opportunities.
Worst, Black workers are barely represented in decision making roles.
Connley 4/16: Courtney Connley is a careers reporter for CNBC Make It. Prior to joining CNBC, she worked as a freelancer for Cosmopolitan and a freelancer for Black Enterprise magazine, where she eventually worked her way up to careers editor. During this time, she created daily content for Black Enterprise’s website and worked with the research team to create content for annual lists like the Most Powerful Women in Corporate America and the B.E. 100s, which spotlights the nation’s largest Black-owned businesses. “Why Black workers still face a promotion and wage gap that’s costing the economy trillions” April 16, 2021, AA
Today, Black workers are overrepresented in low-wage entry-level jobs and underrepresented in senior leader and executive roles. In the U.S. private sector, Black workers make up 12 of the entry-level workforce and just 7 of the managerial workforce, according to McKinsey and Company. The higher you go, the fewer Black professionals you see. At the senior manager and VP level, Black workers make up just 5 of the workforce, and at the SVP level, just 4. At the very top, only around 1 of Fortune 500 CEO spots are held by Black leaders. If the current trajectory continues, McKinsey and Company estimates that it could take 95 years before Black employees reach parity at all levels in the private sector. “Black workers, on average, are not being hired, promoted or paid according to what would signal their level of productivity based on their experience or their education,” Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy, tells CNBC Make It. And “it absolutely impacts everything. It impacts your family’s economic security.” On average, Black men are paid just $0.71 for every dollar paid to white men, according to EPI. Black women, who face both gender and racial barriers, are paid just $0.63 for every dollar paid to white men. Over the course of a 40-year career, the National Women’s Law Center estimates that Black women stand to lose close to $1 million due to this disparity. These racial gaps in the labor market are linked to several structural inequities, according to McKinsey and Company, including Black workers’ underrepresentation in regions with high job growth opportunities and overrepresentation in industries with low growth and low wages, such as entry-level healthcare jobs, retail and food services. And in the corporate world, Black workers face ongoing challenges like bias and discrimination, a “broken rung from entry-level to manager roles,” lack of support from supervisors and tokenism that continues to hold them back and can even force them out the door.
Solvency
Plan text: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.
Definition of unconditional right to strike:
NLRB 85 National Labor Relations Board; “Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947: Volume 1,” Jan 1985; https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7o1tA__v4xwCandrdid=book-7o1tA__v4xwCandrdot=1
Edited for gendered language
As for the so-called absolute or unconditional right to strike—there are no absolute rights that do not have their corresponding responsibilities. Under our American Anglo-Saxon system, each individual is entitled to the maximum of freedom, provided however (and this provision is of first importance), his their freedom has due regard for the rights and freedoms of others. The very safeguard of our freedoms is the recognition of this fundamental principle. I take issue very definitely with the suggestion that there is an absolute and unconditional right to concerted action (which after all is what the strike is) which endangers the health and welfare of our people in order to attain a selfish end.
Enforcement through IFAs is normal means – that solves credibility concerns and legal loopholes which encourages striking.
Neill 12 Emily CM; “The Right to Strike: How the United States Reduces it to the Freedom to Strike and How International Framework Agreements can Redeem it,” 1/1/12; Labor and Employment Law Forum Volume 2 Issue 2 Article 6; https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/andhttpsredir=1andarticle=1047andcontext=lelb
IFAs open the door to collective bargaining by creating a space that alters the traditionally antagonistic employer-employee engagement and is more hospitable to the organizing process.83 MNC commitment to respect the core ILO principles of freedom of association and the rights to organize and collectively bargain through IFAs are instrumental to realizing that purpose.84 1. The Creation and Proliferation of International Framework Agreements An IFA is an agreement negotiated between an MNC and typically85 a global union86 to establish an ongoing relationship between the signatories and ensure adherence to uniform labor standards by the MNC in all countries in which it operates.87 IFAs are the first and only formally-negotiated instruments between unions and corporations at the global level and a significant development in labor relations.88 Since the signing of the first IFA in 1988, they have spread at a steadily increasing rate. 89 Their proliferation since 2000 has been especially dramatic—with the number of IFAs signed in 2003-2006 nearly doubling the number signed in the first fifteen years.90 By 2008, approximately sixty-five agreements had been concluded.91 At the end of 2010, that number had jumped to seventy-six.92 2. Context of Framework Agreements: Corporate Social Responsibility While both corporate codes of conduct and IFAs can be traced to a consumer driven push for corporate social responsibility, a key difference separates the two: credibility. In the late 1980’s, MNCs in the United States began to respond to campaigns by non-governmental organizations accusing MNCs of international human rights abuses by elaborating internal codes of conduct.93 These codes, unilaterally written and implemented, tend to be vague and provide for no enforcement mechanism.94 The voluntary, self-enforcing nature of these commitments has led critics to conclude that they are mere marketing ploys lacking in credibility or having any real social impact.95 IFAs were developed, in part, as an alternative to corporate codes of conduct to raise labor standards.96 Unlike unilateral codes, IFAs are negotiated between the two principal actors—employers and workers—in the employment relationship.97 Involvement of the very party the agreement is meant to protect attaches greater meaning and significance to the instrument.98 The purpose of IFAs is to promote fundamental labor rights by regulating corporate conduct on a global level.99 This brings us to another key distinction between corporate codes of conduct and IFAs: their concrete normative content. 3. Core ILO Principles as the Substantive Content of IFAs Whereas codes tend to be vague in their commitments, MNCs commit themselves to concrete international labor norms through framework agreements. The key areas of IFAs are the acceptance of the four core labor standards, as articulated in the 1998 ILO Declaration.100 The Declaration itself is typically not mentioned, but rather the four rights are referred to in IFAs by their convention numbers.101 Thus, apart from a very few exceptions, IFAs refer explicitly to ILO Conventions 87 and 98 on freedom of association and the right to organize and collective bargaining, respectively.102 As previously discussed, ILO standards are the principal source of international labor norms.103 ILO Conventions 87 and 98 are perhaps the most important of ILO principles since the right to organize and bargain collectively is essential to the defense of working conditions like wages, hours, and health and safety through the collective bargaining process.104 4. Scope of IFAs, MNCs and Supply Chains One of the most important features of IFAs is their goal of addressing behavior not only within the signatory MNC, but along their supply chains as well.105 According to one study, of the IFAs in existence as of 2008, eighty eight percent explicitly indicated that the norms of the agreements applied to their subsidiaries and seventy-three percent contained provisions defining their application to suppliers and subcontractors.106 These provisions contain varying degrees of commitment on behalf of the signatory MNC. Some MNCs agree to place very concrete obligations on supply chain parties, going so far as to detail sanctions to be imposed upon non-compliant suppliers.107 Others contain provisions that are less mandatory, limiting the MNC’s obligation to informing or encouraging its suppliers and subsidiaries to respect the principles of the agreement. For instance, the PSA Peugeot Citroen IFA was amended in 2010, changing its once relatively firm language by which suppliers are “required” to make similar commitments to a much weaker provision in which the MNC agrees to “request” that its suppliers a similar commitment in respect of their own suppliers and sub-contractors.108 III. ANALYSIS The principal weapon workers have to leverage their bargaining power is the strike.109 The permanent strike replacement policy renders strikes this weapon almost meaningless by subjecting workers that employ it to a risk of job loss. This practice deviates from international norms on freedom of association, the right to organize, and bargain collectively, as enunciated in Conventions 87 and 98, and reaffirmed in the ILO 1998 Declaration to the point of rendering the right to strike a mere freedom to strike.110 Fortunately, IFAs have the potential to bring many U.S. operating companies into compliance with international standards on the right to strike, which prohibits the use of permanent replacements. This Section first addresses the effect of the permanent replacement doctrine on the right to strike in the United States. It next argues that as a member of the ILO, the U.S. is obligated to amend this policy to guarantee workers protection in their right to strike. Finally, it argues that even if the U.S. permits permanent strike replacements, certain U.S. companies are bound to IFAs that prohibit them from taking advantage of the policy. A. Interference with the Right to Strike is an Abridgement of ILO Principles Collective bargaining is the mechanism through which workers present their demands to an employer and, through negotiations, determine the working conditions and terms of employment.111 The right to strike arises most often in the context of collective bargaining, though as a weapon of last resort.112 The employment relationship is an economic one—with most workers’ demands encompassing improved pay or other working conditions.113 To bring balance to the employment relationship at the bargaining table, one of the primary weapons available to workers in defending their interests is the threat of withholding labor to inflict costs upon the employer.114 The principle of the strike as a legitimate means of action taken by workers’ organizations is widely recognized in countries throughout the world, almost to the point of universal recognition.115 The ILO Committee on Freedom of Association holds the position that the right to strike is a basic consequence of the right to organize.116 Interference or impairment of the right to strike is inconsistent with Articles 3, 8, and 10 of Convention 87 guaranteeing workers freedom of association and the right to take concerted actions to further their interests. Article 3 recognizes the right of workers’ organizations to organize their activities and to formulate their programs.117 Article 10 states that the term “organization” means any organization for furthering and defending the interests of workers.118 When read together with Article 10, Article 3 protects activities and actions that are designed to further and defend the interests of workers. Recall that strikes are recognized as an essential means through which workers further and defend their interests.119 Article 8 declares that no national law may impair the guarantees of the Convention.120 Because strike action falls under the activities protected by Article 3, which are aimed at furthering and defending workers’ interests, limitations on the right to strike may contravene Conventions 87 and 98.121 This subsection addresses the lawful practice of hiring of permanent replacements for striking workers in the United States as it relates to ILO principles. 1. The Use of Permanent Strike Replacements Reduces the ‘Right’ to Strike to the Unprotected ‘Freedom’ to Strike In refraining from ratifying ILO Conventions 87 and 98, the United States government has insisted that U.S. law sufficiently guarantees workers protections of the principles of freedom of association, the rights to organize, and bargain collectively.122 While Section 13 of the NLRA addresses the right to strike,123 in reality, enforcement of the NLRA falls short of its goals and departs from international norms, which afford the right to strike fundamental status.124 The Mackay doctrine, permitting permanent replacement of strikers renders the right a mere privilege, or freedom, because it removes meaningful protection of the right by stripping employers of a duty to refrain from interference with striking.125 Wesley Hohfeld’s famous account of legal rights provides a useful analytical framework for distinguishing between the colloquial uses of the “rights” and their implications.126 Under this framework, rights are distinguished from what he calls privileges, or freedoms, by the existence or inexistence of a corresponding duty. All rights have a corresponding duty, or a legal obligation to respect the legal interest of the right-holder and refrain from interfering with it.127 In the example of the right to strike, the correlative is the employer’s duty to not interfere with the employees’ right.128 On the other hand, a ‘freedom’ is the liberty to act, but without the imposition of a duty upon others.129 When one has the freedom to act, others simply do not have a right to prevent her from acting.130 In the strike context, if employees enjoy the freedom to strike, an employer does not have the right to stop the employees from striking, but does not have a duty to not interfere with the act of striking.131 In establishing the Mackay permanent strike replacement Doctrine, the Supreme Court reasoned that the ‘right’ to strike does not destroy an employer’s right to protect and continue business by filling the vacancies of the strikers.132 In so holding, the Court actually transformed the ‘right’ to strike it into the ‘freedom’ to strike by removing a corresponding affirmative duty not to interfere with the exercise of the right from the employer.133 The hire of permanent replacements interferes with strike action by inflicting substantial repercussions upon the employees that undertake the action, loss of employment opportunities.134 The Mackay doctrine forces an employee to choose to strike—at the risk of losing the very job that is the object of the gains and benefits sought— rendering the act virtually useless.135 The threat of being permanently replaced has, in fact, discouraged workers from exercising their ‘right’ to strike.136 Application of the Mackay doctrine produces results that are inconsistent with the NLRA’s provisions regarding protected activity, making the diminution of protection for striking employees even more apparent. In recognizing an employer right to hire permanent replacements, the Mackay Court created a loophole for employers who otherwise are prohibited from firing striking employees under the Section 8(a)(3) of the NLRA, which proscribes retaliation against employees that engage in protected union activity.137 While the act of permanently replacing strikers is lawful, firing strikers is unlawful, although both acts produce the same result: loss of a job as a consequence of striking.138 The result renders the NLRA’s protections for striking workers a dead letter. Although employers have a duty to refrain from retaliation against workers engaged in union activity in the form of firing, employers do not have a duty to refrain from reaching the same result through a different tactic—permanent replacement.139 Thus, this removal of a duty to refrain from interference renders the ‘right’ to strike, an unprotected ‘freedom’ to strike that yields to an employer’s corresponding freedom to replace strikers.140 In other words, the Mackay doctrine preserves the NLRA Section 13 reference to strike action as a lawful recourse for workers, but not one afforded the status of a protected right.
Striking is a way of resisting structural domination and worker exploitation.
Gourevitch 16: Gourevitch, Alex. Assistant professor of Political Science, Brown University "Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike", Cambridge University Press, June 13, 2016. MB
We now have a way of explaining the right to strike as something decidedly more modern than just residual protection of some feudal guild privilege. The right to strike springs organically from the fact of structural domination. Striking is a way of resisting that domination at the point in that structure at which workers find themselves—the particular job they are bargaining over. It is not that workers believe they have some special privilege but quite the opposite. It is their lack of privilege, their vulnerability, that generates the claim. Structural domination makes its most immediate appearance in the threat of being exploited by a particular employer, even though the point of structural domination is that workers can be exploited by any potential employer. The sharpest form that the structural domination takes is through the threat of being fired, or of never being hired in the first place. The claim that strikers make to their job is therefore, in the first instance, a dramatization of the fact that their relationship is not voluntary, it is not accidental and contingent. They are always already forced to be in a contractual relationship with some employer or another. The refusal to perform work while retaining the right to the job is a way of bringing to the fore this social and structural element in their condition. It vivifies the real nature of the production relationship that workers find themselves in. Quitting the work but not the job is a way of saying that this society is not and cannot be just a system of voluntary exchanges among independent producers. There is an underlying structure of unequal dependence, maintained through the system of contracts, that even the “most voluntary” arrangements conceal. This is not just a dramaturgical fact about strikes, though the drama has, in many cases, been nearly Greek in its intensity and tragedy. It is a point about power. It would not have the drama if it were not a power play. By demanding the job as a matter of right workers do not just publicize their domination, they attempt to challenge the forcing to which they are subject. Limiting the employer’s ability to make contracts with others, and preventing other workers from taking those jobs, is a way of reversing the power relationship. It is a way of neutralizing the threat of losing the job, which is the most concrete, immediate point of contact with that background structure of domination. If you cannot lose your job, you are less vulnerable, less immediately economically dependent. Of course, this does not do away with the background structure itself, but a particular strike can never do that. Though even here, there are times when a strike, as it becomes a more generalized rejection of structural dom- ination—say in large-scale sympathy strikes or general strikes—can begin to challenge the broad structure of economic control itself.60
Strikes work at making progressive changes – teachers prove.
Beckett 18: Ben Beckett is an American writer in Vienna. “Public Sector Workers Should Have the Right to Strike” 08.13.2018 AA
Politicians have plenty to fear from striking public workers. The public sector remains a comparative bastion of union strength, with unions representing about 38 percent of public sector workers nationwide, compared to about 7 percent of workers in the private sector. In New York state, about 72 percent of public sector workers are in unions, versus 15 percent in the private sector. This year alone, in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, striking teachers won major concessions from hostile, right-wing state governments. Reactionary politicians and capitalists from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to the forces behind the Janus case understand the potential power of public unions to advance progressive causes — that is precisely why they have attacked them so viciously. Public sector workers occupy a strategic place in the labor market because so many of their jobs are critical to society’s functioning. That means the potential power of withdrawing their labor is magnified beyond their immediate job site. The recent teachers’ strikes were so effective because school closures forced thousands of parents to significantly alter their routines. The New York City transit strike of 2005 lasted only three days, but because it made transportation across the city extremely difficult, it was estimated to cost the city and businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost fares and revenue. And while conditions vary, public sector strikes generally have a lot of public support. One reason for that is from nurses to teachers to welfare workers, better conditions for the people they serve are often among public workers’ core demands. Even when strikes are not linked directly to social demands, a majority of Americans do not support weakening public sector unions. However, for unions, a comparison between the West Virginia teachers’ strike and the New York City transit strike is instructive. West Virginia teachers organized parents and community members for months ahead of the strike. They tied their working conditions to children’s learning conditions, making clear how their demands would benefit virtually everyone. Transit workers did not make such arguments, and support for their strike was nowhere near as high as that of the teachers. Public sector unions have to make clear that when they walk off the job, they are striking to benefit the people they serve as much as themselves. When schools are closed, when buses don’t run, when trash goes uncollected and mail undelivered, it affects not just the employer, but nearly everyone. The pressure on government bosses to settle is therefore extremely high. And when public sector workers strike, they have the power to win transformative victories. From both elected officials’ and union heads’ reaction to Nixon’s right-to-strike proposal, we can see that neither side wants to face this prospect. We should make them.
The plan spills over to challenge other facets of racism
Jones 20: Charisse Jones covers retail and workplace issues. “'Whatever it takes': Thousands of workers could join Strike for Black Lives, walking off jobs Monday to protest racial inequality” July 20, 2020 AA
Workers protested across the USA on Monday, going on strike, walking off the job and marching on city hall to demand an end to systemic racism in the workplace and their communities. The Strike for Black Lives, organized by a coalition of unions, social justice and civil rights groups, was set to take place in an 160 cities, including New York, San Francisco and St. Louis, linking the fight against police brutality to a broader call for racial equity. Planned actions ranged from daylong strikes by fast-food workers to nursing home aides, custodians and others walking off the job at midday for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the length of time a white Minneapolis police officer pinned down George Floyd, whose death led to a nationwide movement to protest police killings of African American men and women. It was not immediately clear how many people participated Monday, but organizers said they expected thousands of workers, from Uber drivers to farmworkers, to take part. The Strike for Black Lives calls on companies to increase pay, offer benefits such as paid sick leave and allow workers to unionize as part of a broader effort to root out bias that hinders the ability of Black people to achieve economic and social equity. In New York City, Sen. Chuck Schumer addressed more than 150 protesters gathered in front of Trump International Hotel demanding better protections and benefits for essential workers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. “Today, we’re here to demand from those in power, including the man whose name adorns the building, that it’s time to dismantle white supremacy and combat police brutality,” said Kyle Bragg, president of 32BJ, a union representing more than 170,000 office janitors, security workers and doormen on the East Coast, according to The Associated Press. “Until we have racial justice, we cannot have economic, climate or immigrant justice,” Bragg said. Organizers said 1,500 janitors in San Francisco went on strike early Monday and will rally with other workers around City Hall. In Chicago, fast-food workers planned to call for better pay and benefits by marching and riding through the city in a car caravan. "With the Strike for Black Lives, we are uniting the interconnected fights for racial and economic justice,” Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement. “Workers from across the country are coming together because we can no longer ignore the deadly impacts of structural racism in America’s economy, especially in the middle of a pandemic that is devastating communities of color.” Federal unemployment benefit going away:Some homeowners expect struggle to pay mortgage Saving for retirement or a house? These are the top 10 long-term investing tips beginners need to know The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and numerous other African Americans, along with the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black and Hispanic communities, spurred an intense national conversation about the presence and impact of systemic racism. A wide range of organizations and unions support the effort, including the SEIU, United Farm workers, the Fight for $15, MoveOn and the American Federation of Teachers. Some organizers called out Walmart and McDonald's, which they said express support for Black lives while exploiting African American workers by paying low wages and offering few workplace protections or benefits. Black employees at a corporate-owned McDonald's in Lakeland, Florida, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Friday, saying they were subjected to a racist and toxic work environment, then retaliation, such as reduced hours and grueling tasks, when they complained. "We want to build a country where Black lives matter in every aspect of our society, including our workplaces," Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a representative of the Movement for Black Lives, said during a media call. "These same companies whose profits are made from the exploitation of Black workers have not changed their policies." In an emailed statement, McDonald's USA said, “We stand with Black communities across the globe in our commitment to address unacceptable racial injustices and are disappointed that these allegations do not reflect the high standards we hold ourselves accountable to every day across all areas of our business. We take these claims seriously and will review the complaint once it has been filed and take actions accordingly.”
The right to strike ensures a process of collective bargaining – without it, it would force workers to work against their will.
Croucher 11 Croucher, Richard, Mark Kely, and Lilian Miles. "A Rawlsian basis for core labor rights." Comp. Lab. L. and Pol'y J. 33 (2011): 297. Yoaks
There is another right for us to address here under the first principle. Even the right to bargain collectively as asserted by the ILO is, taken in isolation, a hollow right. It is necessary to have the possibility of recourse to industrial action in some form to back one’s bargaining position in order for a right to bargain to be substantive. If it is illegal for workers to take any action opposing an employer’s interests, then the right to bargain is meaningless, since the employer is free to ignore workers’ attempts to negotiate. We therefore must consider not only the rights to organise and bargain collectively, but also the right of labour to act collectively. The paradigmatic form of such a right of labour, the one most often discussed, is the right to strike, though other forms of industrial action exist. A right to strike is often mooted and has been seriously considered by the ILO for adoption as a declared right, though the ILO has not heretofore put it forward as a core right in the way it has other rights. That the ILO should be relatively conservative in asserting the rights of labour is unsurprising, given its tripartite structure and diplomatic position. However, the ILO has in various places outside of its most fundamental documents acknowledged that the right to bargain collectively implies a right to strike.39 The right to strike appears as a special and controversial case, then, but we argue that from a rights perspective it is a simple, fundamental freedom. The right to conduct industrial action is in effect that to withdraw their labour in some way (quitting, striking, going slow) unless collective demands are met. As individuals, every worker, if they are not a slave (and slavery is explicitly not permitted under Rawls’s first principle) has a right to withdraw their own labour, and might of course threaten this in individual negotiations with their employer. Effectively, what occurs in industrial action is a pooling of individual rights into collective rights, via the individual freedom to associate with our peers, and in this respect we may still discuss these collective rights qua individual rights under Rawls’s first principle of justice. That is, individuals may be said to have an individual right to join in collective industrial action to improve their conditions. Of course, it will be argued that there is no right to strike if it involves a breach of contract. However, no contract can literally force labour – if it did that, it would breach the right to freedom from slavery. Rather, it can only schedule penalties, typically financial, where labour is not performed. In effect, as long as the freedom to contract is limited by the right to freedom from slavery, there is an implied freedom to strike. Thus, it is because of the very lack of complete freedom to make contracts that prevents us having a primary right to bargain that we do have a primary freedom to strike. We cannot, according to Rawls, sign away our basic freedom to refuse to do any particular job.40 Of course, a complete ban on bargaining would make striking pointless. We can say we have a fundamental right to strike, but that we won’t want to exercise it unless we also have a right to bargain. And we will now argue that there a substantive right to bargain collectively is assured under the second principle of justice.
Framing
The standard is decreasing structural inequalities.
Focus on material impacts - the desire to ignore the real-life consequences of their advocacy is the worst form of antiblackness
Christopher A. Bracey 6, Associate Professor of Law, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, September, Southern California Law Review, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231, p. 1318
Second, reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to elide inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy are desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle. Thus, the "principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to outcomes. Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal but can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of oppression. Critics may point out that colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in framing the debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious issue of outcomes and make viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially progressive measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by ideological exchange , which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment.
Next, the oppressed need to carve out rights within the law for themselves – a combination of strategies is key.
Crenshaw: Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams. Acting Professor of Law, UCLA “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 101, May 1988. BE
Rights have been important. They may have legitimated racial inequality, but they have also been the means by which oppressed groups have secured both entry as formal equals into the dominant order and the survival of their movement in the face of private and state repression. The dual role of legal change creates a dilemma for Black reformers. As long as race consciousness thrives, Blacks will often have to rely on rights rhetoric when it is necessary to protect Black interests. The very reforms brought about by appeals to legal ideology, however, seem to undermine the ability to move forward toward a broader vision of racial equality. In the quest for racial justice, winning and losing have been part of the same experience. The Critics are correct in observing that engaging in rights dis- course has helped to deradicalize and co-opt the challenge. Yet they fail to acknowledge the limited range of options presented to Blacks in a context where they were deemed "other," and the unlikelihood that specific demands for inclusion and equality would be heard if articulated in other terms. This abbreviated list of options is itself contingent upon the ideological power of white race consciousness and the continuing role of Black Americans as "other." Future efforts to address racial domination, as well as class hierarchy, must consider the continuing ideology of white race consciousness by uncovering the oppositional dynamic and by chipping away at its premises. Central to this task is revealing the contingency of race and exploring the connection between white race consciousness and the other myths that legitimate both class and race hierarchies. Critics and others whose agendas include challenging hierarchy and legitimation must not over- look the importance of revealing the contingency of race. Optimally, the deconstruction of white race consciousness might lead to a liberated future for both Blacks and whites. Yet, until whites recognize the hegemonic function of racism, and turn their efforts toward neutralizing it, African-American people must develop pragmatic political strategies - self-conscious ideological struggle - to minimize the costs of liberal reform while maximizing its utility. A primary step in engaging in self-conscious ideological struggle must be to transcend the oppositional dynamic in which Blacks are cast simply and solely as whites' subordinate "other."200 The dual role that rights have played makes strategizing a difficult task. Black people can afford neither to resign themselves to, nor to attack frontally, the legitimacy and incoherence of the dominant ide- ology. The subordinate position of Blacks in this society makes it unlikely that African-Americans will realize gains through the kind of direct challenge to the legitimacy of American liberal ideology that is now being waged by Critical scholars. On the other hand, delegitimating race consciousness would be directly relevant to Black needs, and this strategy will sometimes require the pragmatic use of liberal ideology. This vision is consistent with the views forwarded by theoreticians such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Antonio Gramsci, and Roberto Unger. Piven and Cloward observe that oppressed peo- ple sometimes advance by creating ideological and political crisis, but that the form of the crisis-producing challenge must reflect the insti- tutional logic of the system.201 The use of rights rhetoric during the civil rights movement created such a crisis by presenting and manipulate the dominant ideology in a new and transformative way. Challenges and demands made from outside the institutional logic would have accomplished little because Blacks, as the subordinate "other," were already perceived as being outside the mainstream. The struggle of Blacks, like that of all subordinated groups, is a struggle for inclusion, an attempt to manipulate elements of the dominant ideology to transform the experience of domination. It is a struggle to create a new status quo through the ideological and political tools that are available. Gramsci called this struggle a "War of Position" and he regarded it as the most appropriate strategy for change in Western societies. According to Gramsci, direct challenges to the dominant class accom- plish little if ideology plays such a central role in establishing authority that the legitimacy of the dominant regime is not challenged. Joseph Femia, interpreting Gramsci, states that "the dominant ideology in modern capitalist societies is highly institutionalized and widely inter- nalized. It follows that a concentration on frontal attack, on direct assault against the bourgeois state ('war of movement' or 'war of manoeuvre') can result only in disappointment and defeat. "202 Con- sequently, the challenge in such societies is to create a counter-hege- monv by maneuvering within and expanding the dominant ideology to embrace the potential for change. Gramsci's vision of ideological struggle is echoed in part by Rob- erto Unger in his vision of deviationist doctrine. Unger, who repre- sents another strand of the Critical approach, argues that, rather than discarding liberal legal ideology, we should focus and develop its visionary undercurrents: the struggle over the form of social life, through deviationist doc- trine, creates opportunities for experimental revisions of social life in the direction of the ideals we defend. An implication of our ideas is that the elements of a formative institutional or imaginative structure may be replaced piecemeal rather than only all at once. 203 Liberal ideology embraces communal and liberating visions along with the legitimating hegemonic visions. Unger, like Gramsci and Piven and Cloward, seems to suggest that the strategy toward meaningful change depends on skillful use of the liberating potential of dominant ideology.
Prioritize structural impacts – worst-case scenario predictions are based on threat exaggeration – distorts rational decision-making and justify preemptive warfare
Mueller and Stewart ’11 John, Woody Hayes National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science @ Ohio State University, Mark, Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at the University of Newcastle in Australia, “Terror, Security, and Money”, page numbers below
Focusing on Worst-Case Scenarios Cass Sunstein, who seems to have invented the phrase "probability neglect," assesses the version of the phenomenon that comes into being when "emotions are intensely engaged." Under that circumstance, he argues, "people’s attention is focused on the bad outcome itself and they are inattentive to the fact that it is unlikely to occur." Moreover, they are inclined to "demand a substantial governmental response-even if the magnitude of the risk does not warrant the response." It may be this phenomenon that Treverton experienced. Playing to this demand, government officials are inclined to focus on worst-case scenarios, presumably in the knowledge, following Sunstein's insight, that this can emotionally justify just about any expenditure, no matter how unlikely the prospect the dire event will actually take place. Accordingly; there is a preoccupation with "low probability/ high consequence" events, such as the detonation of a sizable nuclear device in midtown Manhattan. The process could be seen in action in an article published in 2008 by Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Michael Chertoff. He felt called upon to respond to the observation that the number of people who die each year from international terrorism, while tragic, is actually exceedingly small. "This fails to consider," he pointed out, "the much greater loss of life that Weapons of mass destruction could wreak on the American people." That is, he was justifying his entire budget-only a limited portion of which is concerned with Weapons of mass destruction by the WMD threat, even while avoiding assessing its likelihood. It is sometimes argued that conventional risk analysis breaks down under extreme conditions because the risk is now a very large number (losses) multiplied by a very small number (attack probability). But it is not the risk analysis methodology that is at fault here, but our ability to use the information obtained from the analysis for decision making. A "high consequence" event has been defined to be a "disaster" or "catastrophe" resulting in "great human costs in life, property environmental damage, and future economic activity" However, depending on how one weighs the words in that definition, there may have been only one terrorist event in all of history that qualifies for inclusion. Moreover, the vast bulk of homeland security expenditures is not focused on events that fit a definition like that, but rather on comparatively low-consequence ones, like explosions set off by individual amateur jihadists. Analyst Bruce Schneier has written penetratingly of worst-case thinking. He points out that it , involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social immobilization paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism. It leads to bad decision making because it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes. It also assumes "that a proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible," and it "can be used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we don't build it, We will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy" And worst, it "validates ignorance" because, "instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don't know-and what we can imagine." In the process, "risk assessment is devalued" and "probabilistic thinking is repudiated in favor of possibilistic thinking." As Schneier also notes, worst-case thinking is the driving force behind the precautionary principle, a decent working definition of which is "action should be taken to correct a problem as soon as there is evidence that harm may occur, not after the harm has already occurred." It could be seen in action less than a week after 9/11, when President George W Bush outlined his new national security strategy: "We cannot let our enemies strike first . . . but must take anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States, will, if necessary act preemptively _ . . America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed." The 2003 invasion of Iraq, then, was justified by invoking the precautionary principle based on the worst-case scenario in which Saddam Hussein might strike. If, on the other hand, any worst-case thinking focused on the potential for the destabilizing effects a war would have on Iraq and the region, the precautionary principle would guide one to be very cautious about embarking on war. As Sunstein notes, the precautionary principle "offers no guidance-not that it is wrong, but that it forbids all courses of action, including regulation." Thus, "taken seriously it is paralyzing, banning the very steps that it simultaneously requires."9 It can be invoked in equal measure to act or not to act. There are considerable dangers in applying the precautionary principle to terrorism: on the one hand, any action taken to reduce a presumed risk always poses the introduction of countervailing risks, while on the other, larger, expensive counterterrorism efforts will come accompanied by high opportunity costs." Moreover "For public officials no less than the rest of us, the probability of harm matters a great deal, and it is foolish to attend exclusively to the worst case scenario." A more rational approach to worst-case thinking is to establish the likelihood of gains and losses from various courses of action, including staying the current course." This, of course, is the essence of risk assessment. What is necessary is due consideration to the spectrum of threats, not simply the worst one imaginable, in order to properly understand, and coherently deal with, the risks to people, institutions, and the economy The relevant decision makers are professionals, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that they should do so seriously. Notwithstanding political pressures (to be discussed more in chapter 9), the fact that the public has difficulties with probabilities when emotions are involved does not relieve those in charge of the requirement, even the duty to make decisions about the expenditures of vast quantities of public monies in a responsible manner. page 14-17
Root cause explanations of international politics don’t exist – methodological pluralism is necessary to reclaim IR as emancipatory praxis and avoid endless political violence.
Bleiker 14, Roland. "International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique." (2014): 325-327. (Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland)Elmer
This book is part of an increasing trend of scholarly works that have embraced poststructural critique but want to ground it in more positive political foundations, while retaining a reluctance to return to the positivist tendencies that implicitly underpin much of constructivist research. The path that Daniel Levine has carved out is innovative, sophisticated, and convincing. A superb scholarly achievement. For Levine, the key challenge in international relations (IR) scholarship is what he calls “unchecked reification”: the widespread and dangerous process of forgetting “the distinction between theoretical concepts and the real-world things they mean to describe or to which they refer” (p. 15). The dangers are real, Levine stresses, because IR deals with some of the most difficult issues, from genocides to war. Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny can thus have far-reaching consequences. Following Theodor Adorno—who is the key theoretical influence on this book—Levine takes a post-positive position and assumes that the world cannot be known outside of our human perceptions and the values that are inevitably intertwined with them. His ultimate goal is to overcome reification, or, to be more precise, to recognize it as an inevitable aspect of thought so that its dangerous consequences can be mitigated. Levine proceeds in three stages: First he reviews several decades of IR theories to resurrect critical moments when scholars displayed an acute awareness of the dangers of reification. He refreshingly breaks down distinctions between conventional and progressive scholarship, for he detects self-reflective and critical moments in scholars that are usually associated with straightforward positivist positions (such as E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, or Graham Allison). But Levine also shows how these moments of self-reflexivity never lasted long and were driven out by the compulsion to offer systematic and scientific knowledge. The second stage of Levine's inquiry outlines why IR scholars regularly closed down critique. Here, he points to a range of factors and phenomena, from peer review processes to the speed at which academics are meant to publish. And here too, he eschews conventional wisdom, showing that work conducted in the wake of the third debate, while explicitly post-positivist and critiquing the reifying tendencies of existing IR scholarship, often lacked critical self-awareness. As a result, Levine believes that many of the respective authors failed to appreciate sufficiently that “reification is a consequence of all thinking—including itself” (p. 68). The third objective of Levine's book is also the most interesting one. Here, he outlines the path toward what he calls “sustainable critique”: a form of self-reflection that can counter the dangers of reification. Critique, for him, is not just something that is directed outwards, against particular theories or theorists. It is also inward-oriented, ongoing, and sensitive to the “limitations of thought itself” (p. 12). The challenges that such a sustainable critique faces are formidable. Two stand out: First, if the natural tendency to forget the origins and values of our concepts are as strong as Levine and other Adorno-inspired theorists believe they are, then how can we actually recognize our own reifying tendencies? Are we not all inevitably and subconsciously caught in a web of meanings from which we cannot escape? Second, if one constantly questions one's own perspective, does one not fall into a relativism that loses the ability to establish the kind of stable foundations that are necessary for political action? Adorno has, of course, been critiqued as relentlessly negative, even by his second-generation Frankfurt School successors (from Jürgen Habermas to his IR interpreters, such as Andrew Linklater and Ken Booth). The response that Levine has to these two sets of legitimate criticisms are, in my view, both convincing and useful at a practical level. He starts off with depicting reification not as a flaw that is meant to be expunged, but as an a priori condition for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked. Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.