General Assembly Resolution #43 “WA Labor Relations Act” (Category: Civil Rights; Strength: Significant) shall be struck out and rendered null and void.
The General Assembly finds as follows:
- Since the passing of the target resolution (GA 43), this body has implemented more extensive protections for the ability of labor to organize through the triangulation of these resolutions:
- GA 543 "Protecting the Rights of Labour Unions" protects, as the name suggests, the ability of labor unions to operate. It balances that with reasonable restrictions to keep unions operating in good faith.
- GA 537 "Right to Assemble" provides strong protections for the ability of people to assemble and associate "for the purpose of articulating or advocating any belief or ambition," which naturally applies to organized labor. This resolution includes protections against retaliation and balances its strong protections with reasonable exceptions to protect the common good.
- GA 436 "Protecting Free Expression" sought "to strike a reasonable balance between protecting the right of free expression and permitting member nations to enact rational and well-meaning restrictions thereon" and does so by banning "member states from hindering the right of individuals to free expression, excepting the restrictions established in" that resolution or other WA legislation. Free expression is defined "as the ability to outwardly demonstrate, articulate, or otherwise express a political, cultural, social, moral, religious, ideological or other belief without fear of state punishment or reprisal."
- Even without being unnecessary due to the above resolutions, the target actively hurts organized labor to a bizarre degree:
- Clause 2.a. says that "[e]mployers are not required to pay wages of workers while they are on strike." This impedes the ability of governments to pass stronger laws on the subject should they want. Clause 9 is similarly problematic due to impeding efforts to promote union membership.
- Clause 3.b. allows national governments to exempt "strikes or other industrial actions which significantly endanger the health or welfare of the public, such as, but not limited to strikes by medical and police personnel." Clause 4 "[reserves] to the respective member nations the right to determine the extent to which the provisions of this resolution shall apply to members of the armed forces, law enforcement personnel, providers of emergency services, and government employees providing essential public services." These clauses have the dual effect of both significantly weakening the target's already unneeded protections and compromising the ability of future resolutions to provide these groups with stronger protections. This is because rather than excluding these groups from a definition (and leaving the door open to a future resolution on the topic), the resolution actively empowers members to make exceptions themselves.
- Clause 5 "[mandates] that labor disputes involving workers lacking the right to strike under articles 3.b. and 4 of this resolution be settled through binding arbitration administered by an independent and unbiased third party." Thanks to the target allowing members to make sweeping exceptions, this shoehorns potentially vast groups of workers into having their labor disputes resolved by binding arbitration even if a class-action suit would have better precedential value, draw valuable public attention to the plight of those workers, or merely have value in allowing numerous workers to band together to fight for their rights. There's no good reason to tie binding arbitration to the lack of the ability to strike.
Believing that the aforementioned more recent resolutions render the target unnecessary and the stated issues it prudent to repeal, and
Feeling that a labor resolution ought to have the effect of helping workers more than it harms them,
The General Assembly repeals GA 43 "WA Labor Relations Act."
