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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.

https://mises.org/wire/there-no-moral-right-strike

Gary Galles

Americans are in a time of rising labor unrest and activism, including multiple unionization campaigns, regulatory and legal changes to make it easier for unionization efforts to succeed, the “Fight for $15” minimum wage agitation, and the Hollywood writer’s strike. However, such discussions and campaigns seldom approach the issues involved from a moral perspective, beyond the implicit presumption that trying to force others to give you a raise must be moral.

That is why it is worth reconsidering Leonard Read’s bold argument that “There Is No Moral Right to Strike” in his The Coming Aristocracy (1969): “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.”

A quick Google search of “union strike” or “right to strike” quotes quickly verifies Read’s premise that the right to strike is broadly accepted. However, most discussions of strikes focus on their legality, rather than their morality. Read states that “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 one particular quote I came across in the search mentioned above that asserted that “The right to strike is a fundamental human right.”

Almost as if he was responding directly to that claim, Leonard Read focused on what he saw 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 much 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. 

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