To be appalled that the Bbc are debating the right to strike

[Letshaveablackcelebration22]

The bbc are currently debating, on one of their sickly Sunday morning shows if people have the right to strike.

Anyone in a decent society has the right to withdraw their Labour - might be good to take a look at the countries that don’t have the right to strike. It’s a sign of a democratic society that you can withdraw your labour.

Aibu to think that there shouldn’t even be a debate about the ‘right’ to strike. Of course I would expect nothing less from the fascists in waiting that are the current Tory party though.

Slightly off-topic but are there any groups you would restrict the right to strike for? Military in wartime? Military in peacetime? The PM and cabinet? Safety technicians for nuclear plants/Porton Down?

If not, what arrangements do we need to make to avoid catastrophes that could ensue?

In my view the above is a legitimate (vital) area of debate, and by extension the whole broader subject must be too.

YABVU. Of course there should be a debate on whether it’s acceptable to strike or not.

Because it isn’t. If you don’t like your working conditions/pay, quit and find another job that better suits your needs. Don’t make others suffer.

I guess it depends what you view as an “essential service” - surely the whole Covid thing taught us that almost every job is “essential” - refuse collection, transport, healthcare, food supply, education, etc.

Strikes only work because they cause disruption. To demand a “minimum level of service” makes the whole strike farcical. The full point (of a pay related strike) is so that the government/employer realise the worth of the employee.

An alternative to striking is a work to rule, which generally takes far longer to achieve its goals, and I can guarantee more people would suffer if a long-term work to rule was implemented than scattered strike days. In my line of work anyway (I’m a teacher)

There is already a minimal level of service (life and limb preservation) for the health services. Nurses have gone way beyond this minimum and agreed to derogate things such as outpatient chemo (definitely NOT life and limb treatment and could safely be delayed a couple of days). The government as usual get away with gaslighting and we have a lazy unchallenging media made up of nice looking but intellectually lacking ‘presenters’ rather than journalists.

Of course there should be debate in a democratic society, I don’t think you fully understand what democracy means.

If you want to live in a country which quashes debate then you can take up residence in Afghanistan or North Korea to name but a few.

Do you not think that people are suffering precisely because people with poor working conditions and pay are quitting to find another job?

Have you seen the numbers of vacancies in the public sector?

How would you address that?

The problem is, people ARE quitting. Look at retention figures for jobs like nursing and teaching. Now surely those are jobs that you want the “best” candidates in place for? Unfortunately, staffing levels are low, increasing workload. At the same time, they are being paid less in real terms than they were 10 years ago. They can receive better pay and conditions in a supermarket, so they quit. Which makes the workload issues for their colleagues worse.

Pay them well, attract the best candidates for the job.

I see your point OP. I've long given up on getting annoyed. The BBC does this a lot of the time. Giving equal weight to so called 'both sides' arguments. Doing this is actually quite an insidious way of making the unthinkable quite palatable. I say this from the perspective of every 'debate' on race being 'Does racism exist in the UK'. i.e. before you even get to the structural issues, you're left even questioning if it actually even exists. This will become more common place for all manner of things.

'Have Human Rights gone too far?'
'Should women be allowed to seek abortions?'
'Does anyone really have a right to privacy?'

And so forth and so forth...

The government want to limit the choice to take strike action even further, for certain jobs. Valid to debate this, because it should be challenged.

I agree with @Letshaveablackcelebration22 about the BBC Sunday morning shows being sickly. If they really challenged this government though, you know the licence fee would be reduced or non-payment decriminalised.

Laura Kuennsberg never challenged even retrospectively the fact that Boris Johnson stared at her chest when being interviewed.

Agree, It’s authoritarian to stamp on debate.

there should be no debate in a democratic society

I think this is really what young people think now - hence all the people who get ‘cancelled’ for expressing an opinion which doesn’t parrot the current group-think.

You are contradicting yourself

a liberal society requires freedom of speech and a right to debate.

you ARE opening up debate on the right to strike because of your assertion that there should be no debate on the point….

for what it’s worth I agree with you that there should be a right to strike but I think there should be a right to debate it

The armed forces and intelligence services are not currently allowed to strike. Because that would leave the country vulnerable to attack.

What is being discussed is not whether or not everyone has the right to strike - already thousands of government employees do not have that ‘right’.

What is being discussed is whether the category of government employees who aren’t allowed to strike should be extended to cover eg medical staff and other essential services, because of the extra deaths caused when they strike.

I don’t see a problem with the BBC debating this.

What the strikes are really about is the gap between private sector pay and public sector pay, in the contrxt of rising cost of living. Nurses can’t afford to buy food and heat their homes, let alone buy a home. Meanwhile a Christmas bonus can be £200,000 in one private job I know. There did not used to be that kind of gap between public and private sector pay.
Public sector needs a massive pay rise and also fewer employees and the government needs to address the crisis it caused that began with Tory ‘austerity’ and it then made worse with Cameron’s moronic insistence on a Brexit referendum and Johnson’s self-serving ‘hard’ Brexit (which is why your fruit and veg has got so expensive) and why there are so few nurses now.

Surely it.s being debated because this Government is looking to bring in laws that will curtail this right in some circumsatnces The new laws I would find offensive -the debate on them healthy

Are you in the police or the prison service?

In your opinion.

All debates are worth having. How on Earth do you form your views and challenge what you think, if you don’t understand how others, with different opinions, reach theirs? How can you know you are right in your own mind if you haven’t explored all the alternatives?

I think that there is an argument often made by people, including the OP judging by their post, that the right to strike/withdraw labour, is a basic, universal human right.

So if there are exemptions for the groups that you have mentioned, then effectively they become a sub-human group. Which I strongly disagree with. But, because of the nature of their jobs, I don’t think they should have the right to strike either.

The term human rights is funny, because it doesn’t actually physically exist. It’s not like oxygen, or gravity. It’s just a concept that we have enacted ourselves. And doesn’t apply around a lot of the world (ask Ukraine at the moment). The main groups who allow us to have this illusion of human rights, including any right to strike, are the police and the armed forces, without which they wouldn’t exist for long in this country.

My point being, almost anybody in the UK has the right to withdraw labour by the expedient of quitting their job, subject to any notice period. The right to strike, however, should be more nuanced. And people who can strike should be a little more grateful and understanding for those that can’t.

No (lawyer so don’t feel too sorry for me 😉)

Yes, obviously in my opinion. Do you want me to put that at the end of every post. 😬

Didn't barristers just go on strike?

Of course you should be able to discuss (almost) anything, but your democracy is weak if there is genuine debate about whether democracy itself is a good idea. The right to strike is a feature of a democratic society - there is no reason not to discuss the topic but it really is a concern if anything more than about a quarter of the population are seriously considering curtailing it. In most democracies you still have about 25% who are pretty keen on extreme policies e.g. death penalty, banning strikes, corporal punishment.

The UK is becoming more authoritarian, the current government is keen to remove our rights wherever possible.

One of the issues we do have with the BBC is they present mainstream positions against quite fringe positions as if they are equal - we see that with climate change all the time.

Really what we should be discussing, IMO, is are the government's proposed changes compatible with modern democratic practices? The right to strike is a given in a democracy, and whether we want to remain a democracy is hopefully no a debate we need to have.

No, sorry, I really do not need to consider the views of racists when deciding that being non-racist is better. I do not have to debate endlessly with people who hold opinions I believe to be wrong.

I have my ethics and my principles and whilst I do review in the light of new information, I don't have to endlessly go back over whether I think it is right to twat someone in the face. I don't care how someone else reaches the opinion that they think it is OK to punch people, I am not wasting my life debating it and trying to understand them.

I think you’re right, but I’m not that type of lawyer (think more private practice solicitor).

The people who love to 'debate' these things are interestingly never the ones whose lives are at stake. The reason why these debates are so popular is because they are in large part a fantastic distraction from actually doing any meaningful structural change.