Supreme Court rules company can pursue strike damage claim

Supreme Court rules company can pursue strike damage claim(nbcnews.com)

9 points by feelandcoffee 2 years ago | 4 comments

jfengel 2 years ago |

Notwithstanding the harsh rhetoric, Charlotte Garden, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in labor law, said the ruling “isn’t as bad as it could have been” for organized labor because it does not directly threaten the right to strike.

But it does. Strikes are already difficult. Workers need their salaries; that's why they work. Unions usually provide aid, but every dollar out of their coffers reduces their ability to support workers long enough for the strike to mean something.

Companies are more likely to have money. They can afford to spend time pursuing a lawsuit that the union can't afford to defend against.

A lot hinges on how people read "affirmative steps to endanger ... property". The company is claiming that the damage includes work that they couldn't do. The whole point of the strike is to disable the company's ability to work. If that's included, then strikes might as well not exist.

I can't speak to whether the wet concrete thing is reasonable or not. I don't know the situation, or construction. But it sounds as if they're giving companies a tool for breaking strikes, by searching around for anything they can call "damage" and forcing them to spend money defending that suit.

djmips 2 years ago |

I like worker representation but leaving wet concrete in the trucks is a pretty horrible thing to do.

failuser 2 years ago | |

Right, they should have dumped it into the management’s houses.

simfree 2 years ago | |

The corruption amongst the ownership of concrete companies and the city's politicians has been an enduring feature of the local political landscape, not too long ago SDOT would only build roads out of concrete unless there was a very good engineering reason not to.

The impact of the concrete strikes here in Seattle has been awful tho, it caused multiple clients of mine to give up leases due to half complete projects impeding their ability to do business.

Hopefully in the future it won't take repeated protests over 5 years to reach a compromise contract. The concrete industry's management needs to be treated much more severely than what they got away with this past go around.