PrepTest 150, Section 3, Question 13
Hendry: Most employee strikes should be legally permitted.(54 more words not shown)
On the basis of their(10 more words not shown)
- Aa university's students(7 more words not shown)
- Bmost employee strikes(5 more words not shown)
- Cstrikes by university(5 more words not shown)
- Dmost employee strikes(4 more words not shown)
- Efaculty strikes harm(3 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Wouldn't that rule also block a lot of other strikes?
I can see the concern about students. Imagine paying tuition and losing classes because the faculty strike. But customers of other employers can also lose a service when employees stop working. If harming customers makes a strike impermissible, why should university strikes be an unusual exception to a generally permissive rule?
Hendry nevertheless combines two positions: most strikes should be permitted, and any strike harming customers should be prohibited. To hold both, Hendry needs most strikes not to fall into that prohibited group.
Menkin presses exactly that problem. If we apply Hendry's principle, Menkin says, almost no strikes will be permitted. Menkin therefore sees customer harm as widespread enough to make the rule far more restrictive than Hendry admits.
What we’re looking for
For their disagreement, I'd look for how common that customer harm is.
Working the answers
- A
Hendry treats students as the university's customers. Menkin doesn't object to that classification; the reply concerns how broadly Hendry's principle would restrict strikes. We don't have Menkin taking the opposite position about whether students count as customers.
- BCorrect
Hendry says most strikes should be allowed while accepting a rule that forbids strikes that harm customers. That commits Hendry to rejecting the claim that most strikes harm customers; otherwise, the rule would forbid the very majority Hendry wants to permit.
Menkin's response goes the other way: applying the harm rule would make strikes almost never permissible. That treats harm to customers as common across strikes, rather than an exceptional feature of university strikes. B captures this disagreement about the reach of the rule.
- C
Hendry opposes legally permitting faculty strikes. Menkin doesn't tell us what legal policy to adopt for those strikes. Menkin could favor permitting them and reject the harm rule, or accept the rule and favor a broad ban. The conditional reply alone doesn't settle that policy position.
- D
This is tempting because Menkin says strikes should 'almost never' be permitted. But those words are inside a condition: if your principle is correct, this is the result. That isn't the same as saying the result is the policy Menkin personally supports.
Menkin could agree with Hendry that most strikes should be legal and use the restrictive consequence as a reason to reject Hendry's principle. Or Menkin could accept the consequence. The disagreement we can establish concerns how many strikes the principle would prohibit, not their final preferred legal policy.
- E
Hendry explicitly says faculty strikes harm students. Menkin doesn't deny it. Challenging how Hendry applies the rule to strikes generally doesn't commit Menkin to rejecting this particular claim about student harm.
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