Wildcat strikes spread to power stations across Britain today with more than 2,000 workers at 17 different sites walking out in protest against the use of foreign contractors.Around 700 staff walked out of the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland and 400 more staged an unofficial strike at a refinery in Teesside as workers lent their support to a three-day strike at Total's Lindsey oil refinery near Grimsby.
The wave of renegade strikes has also hit power stations including Longannet in Scotland, where 500 mechanical contractors have downed tools. At least 17 sites have seen strike action thus far and talks about further walkouts are ongoing at other installations, including the Sellafield nuclear plant.
Nationalist wildcat strikes in Britain
Friday January 30, 2009
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Rich, Daniel won't even accept arguments that meet his "criteria" for discussion. He doesn't care. He's a true believer in the Progressive Path to Utopia.
John M., I agree with most of what you say except for patent law. The intent of patent law is to allow the person/company that develop a new idea to have exclusive use of it for a certain length of time for the purposes of profiting from their investment. When you can't profit from your idea, you either don't invest in it or you spend a lot of time hiding how your idea works (i.e. attempting to limit knowledge). Patent laws, in the long run, increase general knowledge because the inventor has less to fear in losing his knowledge capital.
Jon, I agree with all this, but I am not sure of what your point is. Knowledge, like every other human value, is the product human labor. I have to labor to learn. Further, labor always involves knowledge. So how this modifies the LTV is not clear to me. If you wish, you can say, "All human values are the product of knowing labor and the gifts of nature," that's fine with me, but I think it is a distinction without a difference, because the definition of human labor already includes human knowledge.
Rod, your spellchecker has done something really, really weird to the word "Racist" at the start of you headline.
John Medaille, I'm not sure that's exactly "what patent laws say." I think a good patent law system acknowledges that the restriction of knowledge does constitute a cost to overall productivity, but considers a certain limited cost in that department to be outweighed by the gains from an artificially inflated incentive for innovation.
Two things:
1. It's certainly possible to get that balance wrong, and to end up paying too much in decreased productivity for too little in increased innovation.
2. It's also conceivable that it might *never* be a worthwhile trade to make, in which case patent laws would indeed make no sense.
But either way, that's a bit different from assuming that patent laws can only be justified by completely ignoring the costs to productivity.
Ethan, I would argue that there are absolutely NO social benefits from patents; they actually decrease knowledge, create monopolies, and thereby misdirect incentives while raising costs. R&D can be more efficiently funded in a variety of ways, such as licenses or awards.
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