dagblog - Comments for "Biden speaking on the right to unionize"

NYT host: Rubio's support for

artappraiser — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 21:10:57 +0000

In reply to Biden speaking on the right to unionize

NYT host: Rubio's support for Amazon union part of 'culture war' against tech giant

@ TheHill.com, March 24

Jane Coaston, host of The New York Time podcast “The Argument,” said Wednesday that Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) recent support of efforts by Amazon workers to unionize says less about his actual support for their demands, and more about him engaging in a “culture war” with the tech giant.

During an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Coaston responded to Rubio’s USA Today op-ed published earlier this month in which he accused Amazon of pushing back against “working-class values,” crushing small businesses, banning conservative books and bowing to “China’s censorship demands.”

Coaston noted that Rubio, along with other conservatives, have historically opposed the influence of labor unions.

“This is not about support for unions,” the podcast host explained. “This is about the fact that the companies that Republicans and conservatives had long felt were their biggest beneficiaries… that they don’t feel they have the same quid pro quo with them, they don’t feel as if they have the same relationship they used to have with Apple or Amazon or big companies at large.”

“I think this represents an effort at hostage-taking,” Coaston continued. “Let’s say Amazon were a very conservative-leaning company, there’s no way Marco Rubio is saying this, there’s no way this op-ed happens.”

Coaston argued that Rubio’s pushback against Amazon can more accurately be described as “a culture war issue that happens to involve unions.”

Watch part of Coaston’s interview above

This is my favorite kind of coverage at The Hill, where they persue one of their primary missions as a publication, to keep congressional workers apprised of WASSUP WITH THAT? type topics.

the reality is unionizing is

artappraiser — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 21:26:32 +0000

In reply to Biden speaking on the right to unionize

the reality is unionizing is not going to work long term against entities like Amazon for physical labor:

I’m afraid this will be all Amazon shipping centers within 10 years.

I’m worried about a lot of blue collar workers. This is just the beginning.

We need UBI soon. @AndrewYang https://t.co/IADliPlo3j
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 16, 2021

right away, tho, I see a future growth job: robot maintenance and repair

I’ve seen a bunch of viral

artappraiser — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 05:30:22 +0000

In reply to Biden speaking on the right to unionize

I’ve seen a bunch of viral tweets about boycotting Amazon in solidarity with the warehouse workers in Alabama. To be clear, the union involved in the election @RWDSU has NOT called for a boycott and has nothing to do with this, a spokesperson confirms.
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) March 7, 2021

Boycotts are serious business. They are carefully deliberated within unions. Less so on Twitter!
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) March 7, 2021

The pro-union Amazon workers are not trying to inflict economic pain on their employer. They’re trying to win a union election. Big difference. An outside boycott could muddy the messaging and open up a bunch of unknowns. If I were part of the union effort I wouldn’t like this.
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) March 7, 2021

So much of employer messaging on unions boils down to ‘the union is going to hurt our business.’ If I’m a worker on the fence about this vote and I think the union is already stirring up a boycott, then that’s not great for the union. This is all about 6,000 workers in Alabama.
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) March 7, 2021

If you want to curb corporate power, fine, have that battle

If you think a boycott in solidarity with the union will help the union drive, you're wrong

Amazon will use it to tell its workers that the union & its allies want to hurt Amazon & that will cost many of you your jobs
— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) March 7, 2021

Now go back to topic.

artappraiser — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 03:15:30 +0000

In reply to Peracles moved my Prof.

Now go back to topic.

Things like minimum wage laws, earned income credit, even child labor laws, those things are government interfering with a free market economy, laying down some rules and/or incentives for certain kinds of behavior. To someone like Reagan,government wage control and unions of employees paid for by the public are socialist evils, BUT unions of private employees are not!

Collective bargaining between workers and private employers is: FREE FAIR MARKET negotiations. Textbook free market definition as to property: price at which the property would change hands between a willing buyer and a willing seller, neither being under any compulsion to buy or to sell and both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts. Apply it to buying or selling labor.

In actuality, and I would not be surprised if the Professor wrote on this somewhere: one of the ways unionism can go out of control in the wrong direction is fascistic when they get too much power, not socialistic; they can manipulate governments and elections with their power. So treating Biden's instinct here as some sort of lefty proposal just strikes me as bassackwards. Strong unions here would be a free market alternative to more government regulation.

Peracles moved my Prof.

artappraiser — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 02:40:28 +0000

In reply to Biden speaking on the right to unionize

Peracles moved my Prof. Milanovic blog to this thread I really intended to be about understanding immigrant voters and other minority voters who prefer the Republican party ideas to the Democrats way of doing things (and the woke view of the world that they tend to associate with liberal Democrats.)

And actually I think it fits better here. The professor is an economist who studies growing economic inequality worldwide and why it is happening. These questions he is thinking about, these are the type of questions that people like Joe Biden and Liz Warren think about too. So I am copying it here and deleting it there

--------

PROF. MILANOVIC ON WHAT NEEDS TO BE STUDIED ON INEQUALITY & POPULISM, AND INEQUALITY & DISCRIMINATION.

By artappraiser on Sat, 02/27/2021 - 8:50pm |

Professor Branko Milanovic who self-describes this way on his Twitter account 1) Income inequality; 2) Politics; 3) History; 4) Soccer. Author of "Global inequality" and "Capitalism, Alone" (2019). Grad Center CUNY, LSE, Stone Center has some great thought-provoking questions!

[For those who need confirmation, he is described similarly on Wikipedia: a Serbian-American economist. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality. Since January 2014, he is a visiting presidential professor....]

Yesterday he tweeted a stream describing what mysteries really needed to be studied by real scholars in his field. The tweets were so interesting that someone called for them to be "unrolled" on a single page. That full text is posted ~~after the jump.~~ below in a quote

If I had my own way, I would never pay much attention (today) to people who would tell me they want to study inequality & populism, and inequality & discrimination. These are popular topics, everybody is now ready to study them & I would take it as a sign of lack of originality.

But, leaving aside global inequality and links between factoral and personal inequality, which are indeed my favorite topics, I would love on see studies on (here are some examples):

Why the end of apartheid did not bring income inequality down (but increased it) in South Africa?

Will climate change (under current projections) increase inter-country inequality or not?

Did introduction of cotton gin & incentive for enslavement increase inequality in the US? And does it carry any implications for the role of robotics?

Did fascist regimes increase wages more than profits?

Is corruption always inequality-increasing?

Were socialist regimes class-based?

Can you have a class-based inequality when assets cannot be transmitted across generations?

Why Africa had high inequality even when the main factor of production (land) was in common ownership?

Why do autocrats need (or do not need) wealth?

Why don't rich countries that lose money through tax evasion crack down on tax havens?

Do federal regimes reduce inequality between states?

Is high cost of education a way for the rich to maintain monopoly of education in favor of their offspring?

Are campaign donations, in a *democracy* getting even more concentrated than wealth?

Did inequality in France increase before the Revolution, or it went down?

Was gender inequality substantially reduced in socialism with positive long-term effects on growth?

Does commodification reduce gender inequality?

Are politicians getting richer *after* they leave office?

Was financial capitalism historically associated with high inequality?

And I don't understand what

artappraiser — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 02:23:56 +0000

In reply to Collective bargaining is the

And I don't understand what benefit you guys see in arguing about it theoretically like this.

To me it's like this: like it or not, here's what it looks like Biden is trying to do here: raising minimum wage is just like a bandaid anyhow when the second biggest employer in the country is becoming more of a monopoly middle man everyday based on competing to get ever lower prices to consumers partly by not paying decent wages. If things keep going like that, with fewer and fewer unions to balance things, could end up a disaster with a lot more consumers not being able to buy anything, no matter how cheap. It's the robber baron syndrome of the turn of the 19th-20th century.

AND YES, there is a big difference between public workers unions and these kind and rightly so. The public taxes pay for what those unions want and get.

This, on the other hand, is one FREE MARKET solution to more ballooning profits to billionaires (and capital investors/gamblers) while workers income stagnates or grows lower for years. No government involved. Willing buyer, willing seller of labor. Lessee what happens, whether the playing field levels some or not.

I don't get what arguing about it does, either you like the idea as a policy fix for an economy growing in imbalance every day or you don't. If a person doesn't , might be helpful if the person brought up examples of how unionization hurt the economy. Others could bring up the good old days what society was like when people worked with no unionization at all...

P.S. those who don't like the

artappraiser — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 02:23:16 +0000

In reply to And I don't understand what

P.S. those who don't like the idea have to admit that if workers income continues to fall, taxes on the wealthy have to go up to pay for public services, can't get blood from a stone. Actually we haven't gotten blood from a stone for quite some time now, lotsa people on both sides of the aisle think Earned Income Credit is a great idea, best thing since sliced bread, that if you are willing to work not only do you not pay any income taxes at all but you often get a refund of the FICA tax money you paid in for your retirement accounts, while you keep 100% of the credit for paying it in. So earned Income Credit basically becomes a government subsidy to companies like Walmart and Amazon so they can pay lower wages.

Also . . .

The_Old_Duck — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 01:12:16 +0000

In reply to Timothy Noah @ The New

Also . . .

In the nine states responding about SNAP food stamps, Walmart employed about 14,500 workers receiving the benefit, the Sanders team said, per The Washington Post. ... In Georgia, around 2.1% of all NDNE adult Medicaid enrollees worked at Walmart, the GAO reported, with around 3,959 staff claiming the healthcare benefit. Nov 19, 2020

https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-walmart-mcdonalds-food-st...

Now... checkout the https://livingwage.mit.edu/ calulator...

Here's the New York link: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/36061

~TOD~

Timothy Noah @ The New

artappraiser — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 01:00:47 +0000

In reply to Biden speaking on the right to unionize

Timothy Noah @ The New Republic on Biden on topic:

Amazon is the second-biggest employer in America, after Walmart, and, like Walmart, it maintains no union shops on U.S. soil. https://t.co/wjWrt5D6dD newrepublic
— Dr. Joseph Frusci (@JFrusci) March 7, 2021

Collective bargaining is the

moat — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 23:59:44 +0000

In reply to Collective bargaining hadn't

Collective bargaining is the singular act of forming a union. I am not sure what it means to say it has not been brought up.

The conditions for hiring and firing are always critical conditions in such contracts. I don't understand how your reference to "a clear misuse and misreading of the Interstate Commerce Clause" relates to the simpler confines of contract law.

Please elucidate.