Freedom in One Lesson

43.

There Is No Moral Right to Strike

Leonard Read’s The Coming Aristocracy (Read 1969a) includes an article with a title that makes a particularly bold statement about strikes: “There Is No Moral Right to Strike.” Because, in our time of rising labor unrest, discussions about strikes seldom take a moral approach, his argument is worth serious consideration.

Rarely challenged is the right to strike. While nearly everyone in the population, including the strikers themselves, will acknowledge the inconvenience and dangers of strikes, few will question the right-to-strike concept. . . . The present laws of the United States recognize the right to strike; it is legal to strike. However, as in the case of many other legal actions, it is impossible to find moral sanction for strikes in any creditable ethical or moral code.

That conclusion is dramatically at odds with, for example, prominent trade unionist Mick Lynch’s assertion that “the right to strike is a fundamental human right” (quoted in Huskisson 2023). As if to respond to that claim, Read turns to what he sees as the major source of confusion behind it: the difference between the right to quit, singly or as a group, and the right to strike, which goes further.

“This is not to question the moral right of a worker to quit a job or the right of any number of workers to quit in unison. Quitting is not striking, unless force or the threat of force is used to keep others from filling the jobs vacated.

The essence of the strike, then, is the resort to coercion to force unwilling exchange or to inhibit willing exchange. No person, nor any combination of persons, has a moral right to force themselves—at their price—on any employer, or to forcibly preclude his hiring others.

Read, for whom the distinction between willing and unwilling exchange is a major theme, recognizes that the right to quit, singly or as a group, involves no coercion of others and violates no one else’s right to offer labor or goods in willing exchanges. Strikes, however, rely on coercion, allowing strikers to violate the rights of others.

Reference need not be confined to moral and ethical codes to support the conclusion that there is no moral right to strike. Nearly anyone’s sense of justice will render the same verdict if an employer-employee relationship, devoid of emotional background, be examined.

Read turns to an illustrative example to make his point.

An individual with an ailment employs a physician to heal him. The physician has a job on agreeable terms. Our sense of justice suggests that either the patient or the physician is morally warranted in quitting this employer-employee relationship at will, provided that there be no violation of contract. Now, assume that the physician (the employee) goes on strike. His ultimatum: “You pay me twice the fee I am now getting or I quit! Moreover, I shall use force to prevent any other physician from attending to your ailment. Meet my demands or do without medical care from now on.”

Who will claim that the physician is within his moral rights when taking an action such as this?

Read then generalizes the moral conclusion of his example and contrasts it with the common “right to strike” view.

To say that one believes in the right to strike is comparable to saying that one endorses monopoly power to exclude business competitors; it is saying, in effect, that government-like control is preferable to voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers, each of whom is free to accept or reject the other’s best offer. In other words, to sanction a right to strike is to declare that might makes right—which is to reject the only foundation upon which civilization can stand.

To further develop his argument, Read turns to a property-rights approach, reflecting the view in economics that different property rights provide different incentives, which produce different outcomes. He emphasizes that a job is the result of a willing exchange between parties, not something a worker can “own” without a contractual agreement or the continued willingness of the employer. But a right to strike asserts an ongoing ownership of one’s current job even without the employer’s agreement, which entails a right to deny all others the right to compete for that job.

Lying deep at the root of the strike is the persistent notion that an employee has a right to continue an engagement once he has begun it, as if the engagement were his own piece of property. The notion is readily exposed as false. . . . A job is but an exchange affair, having existence only during the life of the exchange. It ceases to exist the moment either party quits or the contract ends. The right to a job that has been quit is no more valid than the right to a job that has never been held.

Read concludes that “the censure” of the adverse consequences for individual rights and social cooperation that arise from strikes “should be directed at the false idea that there is a moral right to strike.”

His argument here strongly aligns with that of one of his libertarian forebears, English philosopher Auberon Herbert, expressed in his 1891 essay “The True Line of Deliverance.” Like Read, Herbert believes that government should only be empowered to use defensive force against the aggressive use of force by others so that “the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them” (Herbert 1897).

It is the interest of all . . . to make the free-trade footing universal for all. I do not mean that A and B should accept work on any terms other than those that they themselves approve, but that they should throw no dam round their labor by preventing C from . . . accepting terms which they decline. That is the true labor principle, universal individual choice. . . .

The labour of the country never can obtain for itself, except at the expense of other labor, more than the free and open market will yield. . . . Extracting more . . . is very near to dishonesty, since he is forcing this higher price at the expense of others.

. . . Leave every man free to settle his own price of labor. . . . In the case of a serious disagreement between an employer and his men, the union would remove all such men as wished to leave. . . . But there would be no effort to prevent the employer from obtaining new hands. . . . There would be no strike, no picketing, no coercion of other men, no stigmatizing another fellow workman . . . because he was ready to take a lower wage. All this would be left perfectly free for each man to do according to what was right in his own judgment. If the employer had behaved badly, the true penalty would fall upon him; those who wished to leave his service would do so. . . . That would be the true penalty and the true remedy. Further than that in labor disputes has no man a right to go. He can throw up his own work, but he has no right to prevent others accepting that work. (Herbert 1891)

Leonard Read and Auberon Herbert before him stand apart from the crowd in that both approach the right to strike from a moral perspective. They share a common answer to the animating question, “Do you believe in force and authority, or do you believe in liberty?” They come to similar conclusions, and, in fact, Read could easily have written the following quote from a lecture Herbert published in 1908 about the use of coercion and the violation of the rights of others that follow from the right to strike. “Force rests on no moral foundations” (Herbert 1908).