Bobby. wrote Yesterday at 8:11pm:


No-one is going to whip you if you don't turn up for those two weeks Bobby. Or don't try very hard. If you really don't want to be there, your boss won't want you there either.

Bobby. wrote Today at 1:00pm:


I assume you mean fair. This is more an issue of collusion - the same principle that gets invoked when coles and woolies get accused of colluding on the price of eggs, and fined if found guilty. Companies are meant to compete against each other and try to undercut each other on the price of goods they sell. It's the same with salaries. Companies are supposed to compete against each other in their efforts to get good staff. It is illegal for them to collude to keep salaries low.

Strikes are an exception to this general rule. The general rule would say that employees are not allowed to collude on salary either, which is essentially what a strike is. If the strike is industry wide, then the unions are essentially forcing competing companies to collude on salary in their response to the strike. That is why the whole thing is so heavily regulated, and I support that, for several reasons:

1) Collusion on salaries, as discussed above. This is not a restriction on your right to withdraw your labour, but your right to collude with others in doing so.
2) Raising salaries above what a competitive market would settle on inevitable creates unemployment and denies people the right to work.
3) Union behaviour is generally unethical, particularly for the well known 'militant' unions. They work themselves into such an ideological frenzy on this that they convince themselves that it is OK to commit acts of violence and intimidation against "scabs".
4) The broader impact on the economy is generally negative, through two primary mechanisms - increasing unemployment and increasing costs of goods produced by people on union wages. The waterfront unions are the worst offenders here. They essentially hold the entire economy to ransom by gaining monopoly control over labour at importation bottlenecks, then deliberately reducing productivity so as to push up prices, and they pocket the difference.

It used to be that every trade was 100% unionised. You were only allowed to make beer barrels if you were part of the barrel makers guild. If you weren't, they would break your arms. They restricted productivity to push prices up, making it lucrative for them, but the only way to get in was if your father was in the guild. The entire economy used to run like this - centuries ago of course. Breaking up these guilds contributed significantly to the explosion of western economies.

There is one industry that still does this - medicine. The number of doctors is restricted by restricting the number of medical degrees. The downside is fairly obvious - there is still plenty of work to do, so graduate doctors end up doing 12 hour shifts, falling asleep on the job, killing patients etc. And because most of their jobs are in the public sector, they don't actually get paid a whole lot more for it.