201–210 of 327 posts
I am not sure how they can "interrogate" stuff. Can't they be simply told to go fuck themselves and do not stick their nose where it does not belong?
This seems to be part of a persistent pattern of businesses thinking they are above the law, and when challenged, the filing of endless countersuits and appeals. At some point, the democratic process elected Congress and the laws passed therein, and businesses exist at the pleasure of the people and their elected representatives, not the other way around. A business that doesn’t want to unionise is free to close up s…
>> businesses exist at the pleasure of the people and their elected representatives As one noted politician famously said: "Corporations are people". The issue is that soo much of US jurisprudence has granted corporate entities all the rights of personhood. The only thing they cannot yet do is vote, but that too will come. They are certainly today allowed to vote with their wallets by financially supporting candidate…
An obvious solution would be to revoke limited liability for a corporation, converting it into a general partnership… shareholders could either abandon or sell their shares, and ones who remain would assume both liability and control over the corporation. (Imagine something like this at Boeing.)
Limited liability is a privilege, not a right, bestowed by state governments.
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> I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important. Ok fair enough. In english there is a distinction between just "Union" and "labor union". And under this distinction, a police union would not be a labor union. Language is important. Moving be…
It's because the police are always on the side of capital
The ACLU is currently going through a court case involving the NLRB. The ACLU is fighting with the novel argument that the Biden administration replacement was done unlawfully, therefore every action of the NLRB since then is illegal.
I'm sure a potential future Trump administration will try as hard as possible to destroy labor and the NLRB.
https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-aclu-is-attacking-free-speech
https://prospect.org/podcasts/2024-03-18-aclu-nlrb-lawsuit-l...
https://dailycaller.com/2024/03/12/aclu-worked-undermine-bid...
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I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important. When we say "the police union isn't a labor union", we're people rejecting them from the classification even though they use the word because we don't think they fit in with our values. That's be…
> I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important. Ok fair enough. In english there is a distinction between just "Union" and "labor union". And under this distinction, a police union would not be a labor union. Language is important. Moving be…
It exists fundamentally in order to be able to collectively negotiate around the amount of that value extracted and attempt to retain more for those who create it. That in doing so it also establishes workers' rights, policies around treatment etc is a nice to have.
The police, as an extension of state power much like the army, are generally understood to be broadly on the "side" of capital (in capitalist states). They are not value-creating, and their "unions" have nothing to negotiate for a share of. This is why you'll more often see them represented as "associations" or "federations", much like civil service, nursing or fire service staff bodies. Their goal is simply to argue for better terms and conditions for their members.
Does the distinction practically matter? In many cases, no. When the interests of capital or the state are at stake, yes: police officers will break up labor union strikes, even when those officers are members of a federation. They are fundamentally not part of the same movement.
I wonder why US companies keep pulling stunts like this despite the data showing little negative impact of unionization to overall productivity nor company survival. It looks to be a purely dogmatic ego trip where somehow blind loyalty is demanded even when it's not actually necessary.
Nobody wants to admit it, but businesses are deeply ideological. Not in the typical sense, but they have lots of strongly held irrational beliefs that are contradictory. They are not rational actors.
A well-managed business tries to focus on profitability as opposed to, say, picking up horseback riding as a hobby. But the way profits are pursued is absolutely irrational and chaotic. Does anyone believe otherwise?
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White and Asian students, if stratified separately, rank in the top 10 academically world wide. Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are. Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assign…
Why do black and hispanic students score worse?
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Where did those unions get so much money from?
Dues, I imagine. If you don't strike very often, the war chest keeps filling... That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
But this union stuff pisses me off to no end. Apple has high margins and is generally ahead of competitors in things like sustainability and supplier responsibility (yes yes not perfect, I just said ahead).
It would be 100% in line with the company’s ethos to embrace unions. Not necessarily to encourage, but certainly to treat them as an important part of the economy and a good check/balance to ensure the benefits of customer loyalty and high margins are shared with those who make it happen.
Just like renewables or supply chain audits, this wouldn’t have huge impacts on profits but it would make the world better. Serious misstep by Apple that pisses me off.
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The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given. You do not contradict anything I have written nor provide any examples of how unions might be a positive for employers... Again, if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself (For inst…
> if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself I don't think this argument in particular stands well against reality. The market is generally driven by players with concentrated power and it's very likely the interests of those players will align creating an even more one sided power imbalance. People's preferences are low entropy. Things that are in the inte…
I think it does. I mentioned the salaries and perks offered by tech companies. I could also mention Henry Ford.
If something benefits the company then they will do it, and if it works it will naturally spread.
> Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention
I didn't write "in the interest of individuals", I wrote benefitting both sides, which means, crucially, also benefitting the company. But again, in many cases happier employees simply do not provide a net benefit to the company.
Back to the point: The claim that unions benefit both sides is naive and a fairy tale. Obviously unions do not benefit companies hence why they are opposing them as much as they are legally able to.