Talk:Violence in industrial disputes

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Contents 1 Deletions 1.1 Loaded Terms 1.2 Unsubstantiated assertions 2 Pax!

[edit] Deletions

Please do not delete long segments of an article, just because you disagree with it:

Be Bold

But please note: be bold in updating pages does not mean that you should make deletions to long articles on complex, controversial subjects with long histories,

I realize that this article does not have a long history, but still: if you think that one version has a POV, apply reasonable edits to correct that, don't delete wholesale factual information that supports an interpretation you don't agree with.

[edit] Loaded Terms

Also, in the guise of "removing POV", you've added a whole lot of POV yourself:

Phrases like

• ... is a pejorative term... (as opposed to "is felt by some to be a pejorative term")
• ... is more of a slogan than a description... (that's an opinion, at best)
• ... used almost exclusively by right-wing (says who?)
• ... Right-wing commentators... (same as above)

are just inflamatory.

[edit] Unsubstantiated assertions

I note that the original article had no statements about frequency of union violence, but the ammended version has such assertions...and they are unsupported:

documented examples of actual violent behavior by trades unionists are rare. Most reported examples turn out on examination to involve sabotage or vandalism rather than violence against persons.

If it's true, back it up with a cite, and/or an external link.

(The above comes from Tjic, we can assume - I've formatted his/her headings to make the dialogue easier to follow)

[edit] Pax!

OK, I cheerfully agree that I did a hatchet job on this one. It was a piece of blatant anti-union propaganda, riddled with tendentious terminology and inexact use of terms. So I turned it round and made it about a wee bit NPOV from the other side, to get the point across. (I did not, however, delete large sections because I disagreed with them - I deleted them because in my view they were propaganda, i.e. non-encyclopedic, or wrongly characterised, e.g. acts of sabotage listed as acts of violence.)

However, having made my point, I've now set about creating an objective and balanced article about this, and I'm assuming from the way you edited my teases that that's what you want to do too. Getting two people of rather different POVs working on something is quite a good way of arriving at an NPOV result, if it can be done in a constructive spirit. So what I have done is the following:

• Renamed the whole thing "violence in industrial disputes", with redirects from "union violence" and "management violence" (the latter still to do - I'll do it in a minute)
• Put in a bit to explain that descriptions of events are likely to be loaded, and tried to keep the term "violent" to a narrow definition.
• Provided a list of well known cases of violence against union activists, of roughly the same length as the list of examples of violence
• Tried to characterise the circumstances under which industrial disputes turn violent (neither management nor labour is routinely violent, so it's of interest to try to see what triggers each of them into violence).
• Cut out a whole lot of stuff you had formatted as "Pro" and "Con" - much of it the two of us trying to trump each other's perceived POV and not really helpful to the reader.

All that's potentially contentious, but I'm happy to discuss (preferably here rather than by a process of competitive reversion) why I think it is the best way forward.

Some formatting principles I followed, which I don't think are contentious but are just aimed to help readability - I'm listing them here in the hope that we can agree to stick to them:

• I've linked to the names of murder victims, but not to other victims nor to alleged perpetrators. That's just based on a hunch that people are most likely to write pages about murderees, and we don't want every word in the article to be a dead link.
• Linked to the names of all unions and firms - there will almost certainly be articles about them in the future even if not now
• Arranged both lists of examples with the most recent first.

I also tidied up format, expanded abbreviations, etc. Please note that although I've lived in the US I am based in the UK so I may have mistaken names of unions etc - if you can check those from better knowledge please do.

Sorry for twisting your tail! Oh - and please sign your comments (~~~~ does it neatly) - thanks. seglea 00:07, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)