Actually worker conditions had been getting better for a long time. As for the Lily Ledbetter Act, I fear that as usual it will cost businesses and do little for worker bargaining- you can’t legislate ethics, employers have a large number of reasons they could cite as to why a person isn’t being paid as much. Additionally, in my experience HR departments are now, well maybe always, just a lawsuit mitigation group. Businesses still treat employees as they always have they just now have the added expense of running a larger HR department and workers have lost the only group that “might” have been their advocate in employee/employer mediation.
Minimum wage is actually a false price signal. Minimum wage is an arbitrary number. And yes I’ve worked for less.
That’s a big statement. If Rethuglicans were in charge would that scare you? Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Rethuglican- tolerance and all that. Any organization which has a monopoly on force should scare a peaceful, thoughtful person.
Sure. Technology has made it pretty much redundant IMO. More and more money is thrown at public education with little to no improvement. The schools have always been failing in my lifetime.
Actually I’ve been surprise that boingboing is seemingly full of buggywhip makers. The future is unknown but change will always happen. Change can be disruptive and scary but it can also be exciting and beneficial.
Regardless of rates government revenues always hover around 18% of GDP. That’s an old and discredited statement.
i really enjoyed reading this. Sarah Kendzior’s perspective is well thought and concise. i would love more information from… say, the government. http://www.epa.gov/ocr/crslawreg.htm although, the federal and state governments in america seem to suffer from preferential hiring (just like many corporations).
They are. Much like pro-business types say, if you find yourself in a “closed shop”, you can always go be employed elsewhere…
Except, not everyone has the same access to technology. The poor once again, disproportionately do not have access to technologies that could make information more or less free. Nor do they have access to quality public education. So, they are pretty much screwed no matter what. The internet is just no substitute for education.
I fail to see what that has to do with my point, which is that the period of fast economic growth in the private sector was largely underwritten by tax dollars.
There has been a slow erosion of labor laws and enforcment in recent decades, especially since Reagan and deregulation.
No. See Polyani’s The Great Transformation or say James Scott on the Peasant economy. There really are other ways of organizing life other than around market forces.
It seems a waste of time dialoguing with a human algorithm that produces little more than INVISIBLE HAND FREE MARKETS CHANGE CHANGE CHANGE NO PUBLIC EDUCATION BOOTSTRAPS LOG CABIN WORK WORK WORK GUBBMINT IS BAD memestrings.
Actually worker conditions had been getting better for a long time.
Citation needed. Wealth disparity has certainly been increasing. Certain overtly sexist work conditions have improved in certain industries, other areas need help. If companies are paying equivalent salaries to similarly rated people the Lily Ledbetter Act won’t cost them a dime. I’ve worked for less than minimum too, in the hopes it was a good learning/training experience. I learned the boss was a greedy bastard, and that my time would have been better spent elseewhere.
I’ve lived through multiple Republican administrtions, they tend to weaken or repeal, not enforce labor laws. There tendency to encourage bombings and lack of concern regarding pollution is frightening to me as a carbon based life form, have never really been scared by their labor laws. I survived Reagan/Bush/Bush, no Libertarian/Repuiblican is going to lose his Freedomness because of a law protetcting interns.
Citation… I live an a poor urban area. Most of the kids around here have better hardware than I do.
That raising taxes doesn’t raise revenue. Thus the rate had nothing to do with economic growth.
Seems to me that there has been an ever increasing amount of regulation. If fact no one has been able to accurately count the number of federal regulations.
Wealth disparity can be an issue but it’s just a data point. More important is how well the those at the bottom of the wealth measurement do.
[1]: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=511[quote=“snig, post:47, topic:15348”]
If companies are paying equivalent salaries to similarly rated people the Lily Ledbetter Act won’t cost them a dime
[/quote]
I would say that a CV and annual review are not the end all of performance measurements.
Uh, the current administration isn’t republican. Pretty much the same as the last.
So are you saying that these are good ideas?, Because you didn’t actually answer that question, you just asked another question.
The education question you asked who is going to pay for it, The pay question you asked if HE (the person that asked) is going to enforce it.
That’s a pretty sly way of dismissing the argument by providing a fake answer.
The money question is sort of legitimate, but the responsibility for enforcing is clearly facetious, therefore the blame has been shifted, therefore the question has been avoided.
So, Do you think people should get a days pay for a days work?
Isn’t it the responsibility of the person seeking to have a task performed to provide compensation for said task?
Just because not paying an initern is status quo, is it right? How about best?
Are you just trolling then?
I’m just cribbing from the Howard Roark Social Engineering Quarterly, which is generally a privately circulated work–one theory holds that the journal is beamed straight from Ayn Rand’s mouldering corpus straight into the brains of her disciples and acolytes, and then from their brains to their mouths and from thence to the ears of the credulous, the gullible, and the otherwise wholly unlovable and forlorn, a most interesting manner of communication, if true. I hacked the paywall and like to look at the articles every now and again, their editorial staff is really something, such fire! (Translation, I see a lot of this crap online and I enjoy teasing its various avatars and trufans. You are the newsletter.)
Each their own generally, unless it breaks my leg or picks my pocket, or breaks the pocket of someone else while picking their leg, which I seem to recall a Famous American Person saying and which is part of the Freedumb Speech often left out by anti-gubbmint folks. You are not free to operate a sweatshop. You are not free to privately own a nuclear weapon. You are not free to own people. Etc. Walk the argument back from these obvious things that you aren’t “free” to do, and try to arrive at something that both feels comfortable and doesn’t get you laffed at so much.
It’s not a question of how important London is per se, it’s the point that the door is only open to those people who can afford to front £2-3K worth of living and travel expenses to get their foot in the door.
Whether you like it or not, all regulations and laws help determine the winners and losers. So long as any laws exist, the government is picking winners and losers. The only thing that changes with new laws is that some of the winners may become losers and vice-versa. Yes, this represents a change in the status quo, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that laws don’t determine who the current winners are.
Here are three quick, easy, and non-controversial examples:
Copyright laws have changed dramatically over the course of US history. If we still had pre-1909 copyright laws on the books, the winners and losers in a lot of business sectors would look very different.
Tax law currently allows deductions for home-mortgage interest, doesn’t treat employee benefits as taxable income. Changing these tax rules would have a direct impact on the housing market and the health-care industry, as well as eliminate the subsidy that other taxpayers are providing to those who have mortgages or have employer-provided health plans. You don’t want others to be able to force you to pay for public education? I don’t want to be forced to subsidize your mortgage. Don’t even get me started on capital-gains rates, or the lack of substantial inheritance taxes.
More generally, businesses rely on government social programs to pay workers less than a living wage, with the expectation that they can rely on the government to step in and keep their workers alive. This keeps wages down in an artificial way.
More broadly, the existence of any property laws at all, and the vigorous state protection of property, sets up winners and losers. You want to complain that “economies (and markets) are too complex to manage in any real sense”? Then why do allow governments to manage and regulate who owns what? Why not allow self-help redistribution of property (i.e., what current property regimes regard as theft)? Why does the government need to step in and protect, under the threat of coercion and violence, those who have a lot of property from those of have none?
What do you think had caused them to get better? Surely not a change in laws.
Do you think that businesses want to hire employees that cannot read or perform basic math? Do you think they want to internalize the costs of educating their workforce (a cost current borne largely by the government). Why is the government picking winners by performing the training necessary to perform even the most basic of jobs? Why are they manipulating the market in this way?
You mean that increases in working conditions also took place against the backdrop of ever-increasing regulations. I see.
Interesting. You ask for a citation, then provide your purely anecdotal, subjective impression of how poor kids live. Well done.
Cells phones are not a portal to education… neither are ipads or other doo-dads. This is the same specious argument people make about nikes… Unless you’ve gone up to every single person who has some of that “hardware”, you can’t make assumptions about how that person came to have that. Bottom line is that even having access to the net is not a guarantor of an education.
Again, you missed my point – the government was subsidizing the good economic times of the 50s and 60s.
Government agencies doesn’t = effective regulation necessarily. Many of the regulatory bodies charged with environmental, consumer, and labor protection have been essentially defanged by stripping out the financial resources to do so–we don’t have the money, they say, yet we can still give oil companies and corporate farmers billions of rebates. Many agencies, depending on the president, are staffed with industry friendly people–the energy commission being headed by oil men, the Fed Reserve or SEC being chaired by Goldman Sachs alum, the FDA being headed by big Pharma folks, etc.
Yet, you’re perfectly content to have an enforced market system? Cause that’s what has happened over the past century and a half. We’ve been stripped of other options altogether. Many Communist countries are being forced into the market system.
The problem with libertarianism (imo) is that it wants to free people from the shackles of gov’t restriction while at the same time appointing the market judge, jury and executioner
