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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

It’s a strike. How could the workers be prohibited from deciding whether to strike?

By living and working in the U.S.. Most commenters here are wrongly assuming workers in Sweden have as little rights as they do, and probably just as exploited as well.

Well, you are the one wrongly assuming. I am from Slovakia, and we have strong labour laws and strikes all the time.

The thing is that government services must be provided to everyone or (if enough people are on strike) not at all.

I'm not sure when Slovakia entered the chat, but I was responding to the parent's question of how could the workers (in Sweden) be prohibited from deciding whether to strike, and was trying to make a point that US commenters go by US laws which do not apply here.

You were replying to a user who asked me a question and you were explaining my views to them…

The Swedish model makes it so that we rarely have large strikes, despite having strong unions, as typically companies work together with the unions rather than against the unions.

In a way the Swedish model has found an equilibrium between company powers and workers right that has been very productive.

Until an ignorant American enters the market and think he knows better than everyone else

Prohibited is easy. Just pass a law making it illegal for workers in that agency to strike, or to advocate, promote, discuss, etc., potential strikes (that may conflict with existing law, be politically difficult, etc., but the mechanism is clear.)

Prevented, though, is harder. Prohibitions aren't always effective prevention.

There are no agency workers who are participating in any strikes? Unlike the US we have a privatized postal service and the old postal service is now merged with the danish postal service and co-owned between the Swedish and Danish states and competing on an open market with other postal services.

Not everyone has state postal services like in the US

Are they on strike? I thought they were just refusing to provide services to single customer.

That would be a sympathy strike.

A strike is between a company and its workers, or maybe an industry and its workers. Postal employees, the fire department, transit employees, they don't work for Tesla.

_Sympathy strikes_ only make sense when directed towards the target of the original strike.

If all sympathy strikes were to be total walkouts then it would result in a general strike and that doesn’t target any specific party and thus doesn’t put pressure on them

I would expect them to stop working at all instead of de facto stealing parcels belonging to a single customer.

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