The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Strikebreaker

in capitalist countries, an individual used by employers to disrupt strikes and to weaken workers’ unions. Strikebreakers are recruited from déclassé elements and from people without class consciousness, as well as from unemployed people who are pressed by need. Unemployment is the economic foundation of strikebreaking. In many capitalist countries, especially the USA, there are legal organizations that supply strike breakers to firms whose employees are involved in job actions. Bourgeois propaganda uses any means to hide the profound amorality of strikebreaking by evoking the right to work that labor allegedly enjoys under capitalism. Bourgeois labor law actively encourages strikebreaking.

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References in periodicals archive

ARU strike leaders, including Debs, served three to six months in jail, and injunctions, backed by the Supreme Court, became a key tool for state and federal strikebreaking.

"The fibre of which presidents ought to be made": union busting from Rutherford Hayes to Scott Walker

Quicksands of Economic Insecurity: African Americans, Strikebreaking,

The lost origins of American fair employment law: regulatory choice and the making of modern civil rights, 1943-1972

(34) One woman was convicted in court for denigrating strikebreaking women as "dirty scabs" and "rats," while another female worker was fined fifteen dollars for disorderliness.

Accommodating resistance: unionization, gender, and ethnicity in Winnipeg's garment industry, 1929-1945

At the Carnegie Steel (Homestead) lockout in 1892, entrenched workers fired on Pinkerton detectives hired to protect strikebreaking replacements, attempted to sink the barges they arrived on with cannon fire, and poured oil into the fiver and set it on fire before the Pinkertons surrendered.

Unions, the rule of law, and political rent seeking

investigated the use of private police in strikebreaking, but he found it difficult to distinguish between the functions of private police agencies and suppliers of public police.

Constitutional limits on private policing and the state's allocation of force

Moreover, "[f]ormal private police forces, like the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police and the strikebreaking Pinkerton Detective Agency, founded in 1852 by Allan Pinkerton, served industrialists' interests in labor disputes." Id.; see also EDWARD L.

Annoyancetech vigilante torts and policy

Hired guns working for strikebreaking firms under contract with school districts.

Walking the line: fear and loathing in the Ohio Valley: two locals faced a strike and the professional bullies brought in to break them

Shaw, who appears to lean toward the open-the-border side, contends that Chavez didn't mind illegal immigration per se, merely illegal immigration when it took the form of strikebreaking. But the distinction is strained.

Yes he did: what Barack Obama learned from Cesar Chavez

military bases in our country, the militarization of the countryside, rampant corruption, strikebreaking, even the aesthetics of the traditional beauty pageant.

Memoirs of a street marcher

The Taft-Hartley Act allows the executive branch of the federal government to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike "imperiled the national health or safety," a test that has been interpreted broadly by the courts (Abraham 1996).

Are you prepared for a devastating port strike in 2008?

There may however also be an Employment Court hearing regarding allegations from the union that the airline, which is an Air New Zealand subsidiary, implemented illegal measures for strikebreaking.

Air Nelson reaches agreement with union after six weeks of industrial action