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Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

So? I have a hard time understanding why a multinational company needs to participate so deeply in the politics and labor strikes of a single city.

New York is big, but I'd imagine the CEO had a focus that included LA, Chicago, London, etc. and that would take away from coordinating with any taxi-strikers in NYC.

Addendum: Did the taxi union contact Uber before the strike to coordinate this action?

I mean it's a 1 hour strike. Is there any real meaning to this? The trains have stopped working for far longer than that.

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Worth noting that 3 collective entities "broke" the strike.

1) Uber drivers by responding to pickups.

2) Uber customers by requesting those pickups.

3) Uber the company by facilitating those pickups.

I am not sure we can claim high moral ground and label (3) immoral while staying oblivious to (1) and (2).

Failing to boycott is not the same thing as breaking a strike. If this whole incident has revealed one thing, it's the extent to which the labor movement has lost cultural and moral mindshare. Forty years ago, everyone knew what scabbing was, what it wasn't, and had social/political/moral ideas about it.

Now that the labor occupies a much less central place in our society, these common norms and knowledge have been lost. I happen to be appalled by this because of my own political views, but good or bad it's certainly a sign of the times.

But the people claiming Uber was stabbing don't even understand it. Scabbing is something done by individuals, in this case the Uber drivers.

>these common norms

Common to union supporters.

Also, abusing a unions' power to make a political statement rather than fight for the workers' rights is only weakening the union further. It's now less of a self defense mechanism and more of a mafia-esque bullying mechanism.

Don't you have to agree to a strike (or agree to be part of an organization that strikes) to be considered to be "breaking the strike"? Wasn't it taxi unions or collectives that decided to strike? Aren't Uber drivers (and Uber the corporation) not beholden in any way to the organizations which chose to strike? When the writer's guild decided to strike in 2007, that only applied to members of the WGA, not everyone who happened to do any work in that industry or a similar industry. Were bus drivers "breaking the strike"? How about pilots? Train engineers? Surely the fact that taxi organizations decided to strike doesn't mean that anyone involved in human transportation at the time was "breaking the strike."

Well, six entities: the three you mention plus each one with s/Uber/Lyft/, since Lyft was also picking up people from the airport during that time.

Your point still stands, of course. (Though I choose to avoid taking the moral high ground not by condemning all of those entities, but by refusing to condemn any of them, since I don't see any fault here.)

They don't have to but their customers are similarly free to opt to not use Uber and, even, to call for other customers to do the same.

Because we all live in one society?

Clearly we don't, at least for values of society that include this strike?

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