Just that lacking empathy makes it easier to be a Republican. Now a TOTAL lack of empathy? That makes it easy to be Trump.
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I see lawmakers in South Dakota are special sorts of fuck nuggets.
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If they were inconceivable they wouldn’t be pregnant…
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required employers to provide pregnant workers with water, a stool to sit on, and bathroom breaks.
Fucking socialists!
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Thankfully, she’ll have the ACA to fall back on.
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Agreed. Sure you can quit – and be homeless. That is not a choice, that is economic terrorism – so why aren’t these lawmakers getting dragged to The Hague? I do not understand this political misogyny. It’s as if these men never had mothers. I get the motive: drive women out of the workforce and lose any independence they may have, but really, if you are that afraid of women, get help and get over it.
We always had women working in jobs – queens had jobs! And June Cleaver was an actress who was paid to play a housewife…
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Also, this is somewhat beside the point of the article, but if you describe your occupation as a “business owner” you are probably an asshole. My grandfather was a partner in a small CPA office, and my other grandfather owned a culligan soft water dealer. The only people who say “business owner” rather than what they actually do are either more interested in their own power and ego that what they actually do of value, or people who own adult stores and don’t want to deal with the reaction they get in “polite” company. If Rep Steinhauer owns a sex shop, then I apologize. Even Donald Trump describes himself as a “builder” or real estate developer, even if many things with his name on them are just licensed branding.
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That this issue has drawn so many angry comments is not surprising given how the state rep. phrased his opposition to the bill. The issue is rather simple, should the state use the force of law (i.e. the threat of violence) to make business owners change working conditions to accommodate a pregnant worker?
In the absence of a contract between the employer and employee that specifies accommodations for the pregnant worker, the business owner is under no obligation to provide them. That being said, if the business owner values the labor of the pregnant employee highly enough, working conditions will be changed to accommodate the employee, this will be done voluntarily, no force is required. If the employer does not value the employee’s service highly enough to change working conditions for that employee, the employee must make the decision stay or to leave the place of employment based upon the working conditions set by the owner.
Or, stated another way… if being pregnant makes you too expensive to the business owner, then it’s your own darn fault for getting pregnant?
The problem with the “invisible hand of the market” is that it doesn’t care about silly little things like “human rights” or “equality”.
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Does the business owner have rights? Are the rights of the employee somehow greater than those of the business owner, or do they both have the same rights as human beings? Do the rights of the pregnant employee entitle her to job? Is employment a human right?
But an employee is an employee and if there are laws to protect non pregnant workers, then pregnant ones should have the same rights. But there is always some universal obliviousness, where the baseline for anything in society is what works for a young, white, healthy, able, bright, unattached man. That’s the yardstick; so everything – and I mean everything – is built with that idea in mind, so anything else requires extra or adjustments, which makes it seem more costly, inefficient, etc.
Now suppose some society had an idea that the baseline is a middle aged woman with children – everything would dovetail to a woman’s wants and needs; and so, that would be the cheapest to produce – but including other groups would be more expensive. That’s the entire blindness of society – the prototype is always the same and isn’t very flexible. So to save money businesses take shortcuts that cost more, and then they get all grumpy because their thoughts range from A to B.
So lawmakers should know it, and a new generation of industrialists should also stretch their little brains and start from scratch with the zany assumption that a sizeable percentage of the workforce is going to by lugging a pre-developed person in their bodies for nine months and then devise the workplace without the law having to kick their backsides into it. I always said society would be absolute paradise if it thought of more than just (somewhat less than) one half of the population…
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Yes. And those rights end where they infringe on the rights of other people. Really, it’s not all that difficult a concept.
Especially in a situation where you hold power over another person (like, for instance, an employer), you have a responsibility to ensure that their rights are upheld.
Yes, they both have the right to be accommodated at their job for a temporary medical problem not entirely under their control…
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Short answer - Yes.
Longer answer…
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssss.
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You make good points, but the question remains, should the state use the force of law (i.e. violence) achieve what you think is the correct outcome for the pregnant worker.
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Well, that is a good question. We have not really explored the ways of encouraging good corporate behaviour, and if someone had a good system that was an alternative to it, that would be great, and let’s try something new.
But, since we don’t, we need to balance out things. If a workplace can compel pregnant women to have to leave/flee a job if they don’t comply (i.e., economic punishment from a power bigger than an employee), then they have set the terms of engagement; so what you do to others you then must allow others to do to you; so yes, companies are agreeing to economic punishment by a power bigger than they are (as an aside, I don’t think companies have a right to gripe about unions since they have their own unions they call lobby groups, but I digress).
Is it the best system? Probably not, but until we come up with something else, that can do for now.
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