veiled4allah: labor unions in Bahrain

Al-Munaqabah said:

Total comments: 996

Subject: Re: labor unions in Bahrain

I'm very interested in this question as well My search turned up mostly general materials such as The Quran and Worker Justice (from the National Interfaith Committee on Worker Justice, a pro-labor interfaith organization). Basically, the idea presented here is that Islam sets out certain rules that employers must follow in regard to how they treat their workers, wages and so forth. If an employer is being unjust, the workers should join together cooperatively to struggle for justice, since Islam approves of people working together to help each other. The labor union's slogan "An injury to one is an injury to all" is very similar in spirit to hadiths that say that when any part of the umma is injured, all Muslims feel the pain. This suggests that labor unions are an acceptable but not religiously mandated means for workers to seek justice. They could use other means as well if those were effective.

The only search result that I found that discusses the question specifically is from Hizb at-Tahrir, that group that thinks that the only lawful system for Muslims to live under is a universal caliphate. They claim that collective bargaining is an innovation in Islam but then go on to innovate their own system instead so they seem to be motivated more by a desire to reject every aspect of Western society because it's Western than by any other principle. They also ignore the basic rule of Islamic jurisprudence that all things are lawful unless proven to be unlawful. Those who argue that collective bargaining is forbidden in Islam have to bring a proof-text specifically forbidding it; those who argue that collective bargaining is lawful do not need to bring any proof-text making it lawful, this is the presumptive state. The only way that it could be an innovation would be if someone claimed that collective bargaining is religiously mandated in Islam, which it obviously isn't. But then, the whole ideology of Hizb at-Tahrir is incorrect, in my opinion.

It would be useful if scholars who are expert in the Islamic law of contracts could set out guidelines in terms of what provisions are and aren't Islamically acceptable in a collective bargaining agreement.