But I do not think the denial of the right to strike obtains this end in any of them; and I do not believe that the same considerations apply to every sort of vital public service.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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It must, I think, make a difference whether the industry is primarily operated for private profit or no; for only in the latter case is its quality as both vital and public fully recognized.
No one, surely, can examine the record of the coal industry either in England or in America and say that the motives which underlie its ownership by private interest are compatible with the view that an uninterrupted service to the…
There are several reasons of primary importance for retaining the right to strike so long as private ownership continues in this sphere.
If, for instance, a steamship company proposes to send out its ship under the conditions in which the Vestris of ill-fated memory sailed in the spring of 1929, I think the crew would be justified in striking in the public interest.
So, also, I should argue that the Seamen’s Union would be justified in striking, to see to it, if it could, that every vessel putting to sea carries with it wireless equipment.
Again, a body of miners might, in my judgment, justifiably strike if they believed that some part of a pit to which they were to be sent was in fact too dangerous for coal to be hewed there without an alteration of the physical conditions…
I should, further, urge that a strike to secure a national agreement for uniform conditions in a particular industry as against a variety of local agreements was a justifiable enterprise if that end could not be attained in any other way.
It is, I suggest, obvious folly to attempt legislation which cannot be enforced at the critical point of urgency.
The business of the state, therefore, is not to prohibit, but to find how best to make the use of the strike the final and not the first instrument in conflict.
It can be done, first, by limiting the profits private ownership can make in any industry of vital importance, either absolutely so that the owners are debenture-holders merely, and not the residuary legatees of any profit made, or…
We respect freedom of association by leaving it at liberty to insist that the proposed solution is unjust, while we protect the public interest in continuity of service by insisting that the right to strike shall not operate until the…
It seems to me quite definitely a denial of liberty for which no justification can be found to say that men shall work on terms they think utterly unjust; and the argument that, if they do not like those terms, they can find other work…
The number of those in any society who have a genuine choice, at any given time, of alternative occupations is notably small.
An electrician cannot suddenly become a barrister, as the latter can suddenly become a journalist; and if it is a matter of hundreds, or even thousands of men, the compulsion upon them to continue in the vocation for which they have been…
The community never gains, in the long run, from work performed by men who labour under a sense of injustice.
We should resent it if a football club passed resolutions upon the foreign policy of a government; and it is in the same way illegitimate for a trade union to deal with matters outside its sphere.
The state, therefore, is entitled to define that sphere and to limit the activities of trade unions to matters that come within it.
They rush to the legislature to compel action every time they discover some exceptional incident of dubious conduct.
No one, I suppose, can seriously doubt that men like Mr Comstock regard themselves as the saviours of society.
They have an unlimited sense of a divinely appointed mission, and the whole of their life is set in its perspective.
I know nothing more incompatible with the climate of mental freedom than the inference of such people.
They lack altogether a respect for the dignity of human personality.
They are utterly unable to see that people who live differently think differently and that in so various a civilization as ours absolute standards in these matters are out of place.
It is difficult to overestimate the price we pay for their successes.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
