Abstract
Workers who go on strike are sometimes accused of holding their employer “to ransom”, the implication being that strike action is a kind of extortion. The paper provides an analytical reconstruction of this objection, before presenting and interrogating different strategies for countering it. The first says that work-stoppages can only be extortionate if they infringe an employer’s rightful claim to productive labour, but that no employer has any such claim under capitalism. The second says that work-stoppages cannot be extortionate because, by themselves, they cannot put an employer under duress. The third and most promising strategy says that an employer’s claim to the productive labour of workers is conditional upon his/her not exploiting them. This approach does not produce a blanket exoneration; it tells us that the aptness of describing a strike as extortionate depends on a prior appraisal of the conditions that the strikers work under, and the fairness with which they are treated.
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Notes
Wallace et. al. (1999) suggest that the relationship is more complex; that trends in strike activity impact labour’s share under some circumstances but not others.
For discussion see Richardson (1996).
Simons is not talking only of unions, but of all economic monopolies. Trade unions, however, are characterised as the worst offenders of all in this connection.
This suggests that extortion is a moralised concept, since whether or not it is present cannot be determined without first making an assessment as to whether there are violations or threatened violations of moral rights.
It shares the salient features of what Thornton Robison (1983) has called an “extorted contract modification”.
In the same way that describing a strike as “coercive” does not necessarily mean that it is unethical. See Gourevitch (2018).
For a discussion of this point see Elegido (2009: 33–4).
Or take a more mundane example: If I do not eat, I will starve. I therefore have no reasonable choice but to agree to give some seller or other my money in exchange for food. But this does not make it permissible to “dine and dash”. I cannot eat my meal and then say that I have no obligation to pay for it, on the grounds that I was compelled by circumstances to agree to some such transaction.
I borrow this example from Valdman (2009): 3.
For a fuller discussion of the “marks of obligation” see Owens (2016).
Keith Hyams (2011) makes a similar point, calling it the “no-gain principle”: consent’s capacity to legitimize is limited by the condition that the perpetrators of wrongdoing (or threatened wrongdoing) should not benefit from it.
One might suggest there is an inconsistency in my argument. I have said that Jill does not wrong Jack when she deprives him of the $1000 promised, but she does wrong him if she fails to transfer even $10, since he has a rightful claim to this much. At the same time, I have said that if a worker is being exploited then she is not liable to the charge of extortion even if she withdraws her labor entirely. But wouldn’t this be like Jill refusing to transfer even the $10? It seems the analogy should only support the weaker conclusion that a worker may withhold that portion of her labour time that is not being compensated fairly. So, if she is being paid two-thirds of what justice demands, then she may withhold one-third of her labor power. Anything more and she is denying her employer something he has a rightful claim to. Three points in response. First, strikes often do take the form of this partial withdrawal—the half-day strike, for instance. Second, in cases where workers do walk off the job entirely and refuse to return until their demands are met, they may have grounds to insist that the employer has already received his due, such that their refusal to provide further inputs is no different from Jill refusing to transfer additional dollars after she has transferred the first 10. Finally, workers are not normally paid for the time they spend in industrial action, so even if they are no longer giving anything, they are no longer taking anything, either.
Since these contractors would give priority to maximising the welfare of the worst off, Kates contends that they would require employers to pay workers their “reservation price”; the maximum that the employer would be willing to pay for the services in question, in the sense that he/she would prefer no transaction at all over a transaction at a higher price. For a more detailed discussion of exploitation see Dobos (2019).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on an earlier draft I thank members of the International Ethics Research Group - Toni Erskine, Peter Balint, Anthony Burke, Deane-Peter Baker, Umut Ozguc, Sheena Smith, Simon Cotton, John Dryzek, Jonathan Pickering, Ana Tanasoca, Luke Glanville, Cian O’Driscoll, and Claire Benn - as well as particpants at the 4th Australiasian Political Theory and Political Philosophy Conference, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, 2020.
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Dobos, N. Are strikes extortionate?. Philos Stud 179, 245–264 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01658-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01658-5