Exactly. I’m going to go blind if I keep rolling my eyes as hard as I do whenever I hear the term “right-to-work”. It’s about as accurate as the “Restoring Internet Freedom” anti-net neutrality crap.
I have a pile of pithy riffs to make on this, but let’s be serious for a minute:
This is where I think your first principles and mine are in conflict. Not because I think unions are great by their very nature, but because as others have said, we have a ton of data that outcomes for workers are significantly better in industries and regions with strong unions - which includes things like compulsory dues and union-only shops and everything else the capitalist class has spent the last forever banning.
I’m not a hundred percent technocrat in my politics – I do have some moral principles that I believe are worth accepting a ‘worse’ aggregate outcome for, like if we had data that slave economies performed better overall than abolitionist economies the moral price of slavery would be too high – but I strongly lean that way.
Unions and labor rights and restrictions on capital have proven over and over again to lead to better outcomes for society. We should do more of that, not less. Are there abuses of power in unions, corrupt leadership within unions, and instances in which strong unions have led to worse outcomes? Absolutely. But we should work toward fixing or mitigating those problems, not throw up our hands and repeal the ACA without any plan to replace it.
I know folks who have been screwed over by unions, specifically UPS drivers screwed by the Teamsters.
Likewise, on the other side, I know workers at non-union shops like Honda, who are treated better than their Union based counterparts in the automotive industry. Or Toyota plants in places like Kentucky, where their workers are paid better than UAW members.
Unions can have benefits. But at some point the Union just becomes another giant corporation that has no real ties to the employees they are supposedly protecting. They’re just as corrupt and driven by self interest as the corporate CEO’s they are supposedly fighting.
Unions should have to earn support from employees.
Unionizing was worth a good bit of money for me- and that’s with an incompetent union. Some of it is going into the lobbying to keep our job though.
So, if the sexes and races don’t differ at all, and if psychological interchangeability is true, then there’s no practical business case for diversity.
On the other hand, if demographic diversity gives a company any competitive advantages, it must be because there are important sex differences and race differences in how human minds work and interact.
Which is why i said
The convulsive and sensitive issue of accepting the differences between men and women without doing so directly or with any sort of theory
This is where things get into the weeds and into the knives.
The progressive view is essentially that gender differences are due to socialization, which means in essence this position is undisprovable. If there are no differences, than treating people different is discrimination. If there are differences, those differences are due to differential socializing discrimination, and therefore need to be overcome with affirmative action, and therefore treating people different is discrimination.
And this is where the author of the linked article does not seem to understand the potential objections progressive people will raise. He says, essentially, that there is no such thing as socialization imprinting gender roles. If women act differently it’s due to biology, if women don’t act differently, it’s also due to biology. So there’s are fundamental assumptions about the nature of things he and his potential critics simply won’t see eye-to-eye on.
Objection! Arguing by anecdata. Totally fair to question my own assertion about unions/labor rights leading to better aggregate outcomes, but frankly I’m posting during a lecture that I’m staying ahead of minute to minute so I’m not going to go digging for sources. I think the general trend of the American economy leading up to the 1930s and 2010s is pretty darn good supporting evidence, though.
Absolutely. But a good union system has a vote to organize in the first place, and then regular elections to ensure that the leadership is doing what the membership wants them to do. If that accountability loop breaks down, then that’s a problem to be debugged and not a signal that we need to destroy unions.
Unless any leadership/governance structure that gets abused or corrupted should be torn down, in which case let’s all just head to Anarchy Camp.
It’s more that whatever the ultimate source of gender differences, they are statistical measurements of averages across the population, and so don’t justify treating individuals differently.
If you want to hire people with a particular trait, you should do your best to measure that trait in the candidates directly, not start from the assumption that you want someone of whatever gender is more associated with that trait.
To be clear, I don’t want to destroy unions. I just want unions to be accountable, and in the cases of some of the biggest unions like UAW, they kind of aren’t.
Saying that you are obligated to pay money to an organization who doesn’t represent your best interests is just a tax on you. It’s extortion. Unions should be able to convince those employees that supporting the Union benefits them, and if they can’t make that case, then they don’t deserve those dues… which is why I’m really not in favor of forcing people to pay those dues.
The evidence says pretty clearly that these two positions are incompatible without some other way to solve the free rider problem, which by all means, I’d be more than happy to hear about.
A recent Economist contained an interesting statistic about Kansas under Sam Brownback: “most Kansans think their own taxes went up after the state cut income tax.”
This might surprise you, since Governor Brownback is famous in reality-based circles for cutting taxes so much that it crippled his state. But it didn’t surprise me at all, because I also remember how many Americans were convinced that their taxes went up when President Obama lowered their tax bill.
I also remember a long conversation with a coworker who was complaining about how the boss had totally screwed them by giving them a raise that put them in a higher tax bracket. Marginal tax rates don’t work like this, but they just knew they were getting screwed, and had invented false memories of their pay stubs to support their false belief.
The problem with your anecdotes isn’t that the rest of us can’t verify them. The problem is that people love to complain and love to make stuff up. Combining those two factors we end up with union employees constantly kvetching about how little their union does for them while the aggregate data constantly shows that unionized employees are better off than non-unionized employees.
It’s also probably worth noting that the vast majority of Americans would quickly opt-out of paying any taxes because “the Government hasn’t done enough from me to earn those tax dollars!”
When I was in AmeriCorps, which includes an Education Trust, this came up. I tried to explain to that group how marginal taxes work and why most people don’t get a rate of say 25% it’s something like 24.7, for example. They still didn’t understand these were, primarily, college grads. This is simply not really taught outside of econ, finance and business and we really on people being interested enough to find out I guess. That’s not working. They honestly believe getting a raise screws them… Reality is, in some instances you might, might disqualify for a specific deduction at some point, like the student loan interest has an income cap, but most of these individuals weren’t even close to that.
The other factor being missed is that we as a society want to emphasize that any person can do any job and excel if they work hard enough and put their mind to it. Given the history with these same screeds used to perpetuate false racial stereotypes in the past. …
Even if there are biological hurdles to overcome (which I don’t for a second buy), it does more harm to perpetuate them, and is contrary to our belief system that all people are created
equal.
Put another way, if you want the best coders, you want an environment which enables people to be the best coders they can be. This mindset does the exact opposite.
Well sure, but there is actually a ton of data about stuff like Japanese car manufacturers in the US being resistant to unions. Unions just haven’t been able to make inroads there, largely because they treat their employees well. That stuff goes beyond anecdotal evidence.
Japan has a very large temporary and part-time workforce that can’t even get housing. They also have a suicide problem, as in working class people throwing themselves in front of trains, at least one a day. You have to dig deeper when you say stuff like they treat their employees well so that’s why Union’s don’t make inroads.There are other factors involved.
I understand the ACLU has to protect the worst speech… and I will hold that against them.
So… maybe you don’t understand that point at all.
Well… it’s Brianna Wu. So yeah.
To clarify, I was talking about Japanese manufacturers’ plants in the US, not in Japan.
Oh sorry. I misunderstood.
As for Unions in general, my personal experience with one was not great, grocers or something like that, but my overall opinion remains mixed.
Interesting. Everyone here and at google should read this.