Is it immoral to cross a picket line?

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I’m a union member for my part-time job. I feel like I get a lot of benefits for the dues I pay. I wish I had one in my full-time job.
 
FiveLinden said:
Um, the union represents you and your family, and the other workers and heir families.
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Is the union going to pay your bills and feed you while you’re out of work? Few do.
They also don’t care much about educating their people about finances. My brother-in-law was a lifetime union guy. When he retired they offered him an annuity or lump sum pension payout with no additional information. He took half his pension in a lump sum with no guidance on how to roll it over to an IRA. So it went into a taxable account giving him a huge tax bill that year. If we had known we would have stopped him, but he just did it thinking the union would take cate of him.
My father-in-law is also retired union and living with us because he can’t afford to live on his own with his wife in a nursing home on Medicaid. He has good health care, but can’t live on his pension and social security.
We tabulated once what the union took out of his pay, if it had been invested in an index mutual fund, he would be better off.
 
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Unions that support political candidates I don’t support, don’t represent me in that regard.

Unions that protect lazy employees, also don’t represent my views in that regard as well.

While in some instances a union might represent me, that certainly is not the case always. Back to the OP, more info would be needed to determine the morality of crossing a picket line.
 
Going on strike is doing nothing less. And you can believe strikebreaking immoral (just as I believe it morally essential), but that won’t make it so.
 
You do realize the Church has said over and over again that unions are important and striking is a right, right?
 
Depends. If you think that the workers have a just grievance maybe it is. However, just my opinion, its kinda jacked up that after just receiving a wage increase for the work they are doing during the Coronavirus outbreak, that labor chose that time to strike for, wait for it, increased wages.
 
Strike in the offing? So, it has not happened?
Unions were badly needed 100 years ago, when human corporations had more captive worker audiences - laborers who could not travel or seek other employment.

Still, all humans, corporate or not are corrupt. Depending, unions may still be needed in some cases, but the tactics of some are far worse than the evils they intended to correct. I wanted to work for a major company, but they told me I had to join the union first. OK. Went to the union office and mentioned that I wanted to join the union before going to work.

The man angrily shouted at me “You don’t go to work unless we send you to work!”

That sound fair?

Union power and greed is not the solution to corporate power and greed. There has to be a balance, as both corporate exec and union rep are still paid while the workers freeze on the picket line.
 
Union member here.

It’s not immoral. It’s a prudential judgement.
 
po18guy said:
The man angrily shouted at me “You don’t go to work unless we send you to work!”

That sound fair?
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No, it doesn’t. However, that was not my experience at all with joining a union. Only time we head from the union guy during a initial hiring was a nice talk about discrimination and how to spot it, and him pounding it into our heads that we are not union and he can’t protect us.

Once some of us were hired he gave another talk explaining we were all fully union and he could protect us. One thing he kept repeating:

Just do an honest days work and go home.
 
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do_justly_love_mercy said:
Surely strikebreaking undermines the union’s bargaining power. If the National Union of Widget Makers is on strike demanding $15 per hour and a 7-hour working day, and I take a job at the widget factory on $10 per hour, working a 12-hour shift, doesn’t that undermine the demands of the existing workers?
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Sure it does. But now you have to argue why undermining their bargaining power is immoral. Any time I compete in a marketplace where I’m better situated to do a task, I undermine someone else’s bargaining power.
 
Of course. Doesn’t mean that the rest of society has an obligation to subsidize their strikes.
 
No, it is not immoral. In addition, workers are in the right sometimes, but in the wrong other times. And, it’s a prudential judgement, anyway.
 
Still a prudential judgement how it should be applied. Maybe the union members should show some solidarity to my desire to work outside their union.
 
Nope. They get it, along with spa days and more perks than you can imagine. It’s a nurses’ union.
 
Some of this talk is reminding me of the old canard about welfare recipients driving BMWs.
 
Le_Cracquere said:
Going on strike is doing nothing less. And you can believe strikebreaking immoral (just as I believe it morally essential), but that won’t make it so.
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Socrates92 said:
But now you have to argue why undermining their bargaining power is immoral.
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I guess it all comes down to your view of the right of workers to form a union for the purpose of collective bargaining and whether you wish to express your solidarity with their cause. I think I would only wish to undermine strike action if I felt that the union’s cause was clearly unjust. However, I am not surprised to find that people on this site are hostile toward unions. The World News forum consists mostly of links to Breitbart articles.
 
StudentMI said:
You do realize the Church has said over and over again that unions are important and striking is a right, right?
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Has the Church claimed that defending oneself against a strike isn’t a right?
 
Defending oneself against a strike is a multifaceted phenomenon. The Church has condemned violence on both sides.
 
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