The major exercise of power in a strike is to withhold labor. Allowing employers a freer hand in hiring replacement workers makes a strike little more than a collective quit on the part of striking workers.

While it varies by industry and business, employers rarely experience so much heartburn over replacing their workers especially if the effort extends managerial control over work even if their is a momentary increase in costs or loss of productivity.

IMO, if the gulf between union demands and the market clearing labor rate and standards is so wide that hiring permanent replacement for all union workers is actually profitable for a company, then the union is almost certainly being unreasonable. Such a law would allow the unions to hold the property of companies hostage at whim. Without a vast history of almost exclusively rational and beneficent unions, or a vast history of almost exclusively evil and fraudulent corporate masters, I can’t imagine how this could be considered a reasonable power to grant to unions.

Do most of the people who support this standard really think that hiring is like flipping a switch? Bosses just say ‘fire them all!” and magically productive workers appear on the floor over the next few weeks without a massive and incredibly expensive recruitment, screening and training effort that probably ends up with a signficantly less productive workforce for a year or more?

Many people, probably including the authors, are in fact, strongly opposed to that plank of the ILO on principle, and I agree with them. Whether it’s worth sinking trade deals over, I’m not totally clear on, but it’s absolutely clear to me that adopting that standard is a negative, and a pretty significant one.

The problem in many countries (and not really in the US, except in places like Saipan) is the way corporations are let free to or even abetted in wholesale intimidation of workers that violates legimate free-association and bargaining rights. Those rights ought to be enforced by the government. But the idea that right to strike implies a right to hold the plant hostage to any demand is the kind of marxist nonsense we ought to be beyond at this point, no?

If you’re going to restrict the hiring of permanent replacements in response to a strike, then at a minimum, there would need to be some kind of arbitration board or court of appeal in cases where the union is completely unreasonable.

No, in the US they don’t think you should buy a port facility or a utility company. If you’re a furriner.

In the US, they don’t think anyone should buy a television, an automobile (no such thing as a purely US-produced car) or a children’s toy? If such a group exists, they have certainly been well hidden. There are certainly groups that are against further liberalizing trade rules and even for tightening some. There are generally pretty wrong-headed, but none are trying to close the borders, which is what “against trade” would mean.

Actually, there are enormous, well-funded bodies which are implacably opposed to trade. Those groups probably need to be slotted somewhere into any “it’s all about the workers vs the elites” style analysis. The ability of those groups to push their agenda while having people forget their very existence is probably another useful element in modeling internal debates on trade.

But including core ILO labor standards in any future US trade agreements would seem to have nil effect on WTO talks or FTAs. The WTO pledged in 1996 to act consistent with the ILO core standards; the issue is what the mechanism for addressing violations of the core should be.

It seems that M&H are playing right into fair-trade advocates hands by getting GOP ‘conservatives’ to reject fast-track with ILO on specious sovereignty grounds.