It is shockingly easy to convince workers that rights are bad for them. The same thing happens at many blue collar jobs.
> Plenty of drivers said they understood Uber’s and Lyft’s political messaging. And some drivers who spoke to Recode made an articulate case for why they want to remain independent contractors. (A poll of 1,200 drivers by independent blog The Rideshare Guy last year showed that about 76 percent of respondents wanted to remain independent contractors rather than become employees.)
That isn't to say that there isn't an issue with deceiving workers: Uber and Lyft hardly have a reputation for ethical business practices, and I wouldn't be surprised if their messaging was intentionally unclear here. On top of that, it's possible that restrictions on labor can be positive and I'm not ruling out any degree of labor paternalism as valuable to society.
But your reductionist framing of blue-collar workers as simpletons who couldn't possibly disagree with you about _the way their own lives and employment should work_ is despicable. And frankly, the doublespeak involved in labeling restrictions on labor relationships as rights (and thus obviously and unambiguously positive) says much more about your ignorance than theirs.
Well, ok.
And then there’s a suggestion that people talking about labourers are looking down their noses at labourers. Well, that is a thing. As is people looking down at “Apple fanboys,” or looking down at “People who buy whatever marketing tells them to buy,” or “People believing whatever Fox tells them to believe.”
That is absolutely a thing, and it goes across almost all discussions about almost all topics. You can’t bring up interviewing without a bunch of people confidently stating that everyone else is doing it wrong and stupidly cargo-culting.
But I don’t see the OP talking about the way that disinformation and political dark patterns as framing labourers as simpletons.
If you want reductionism, when it comes to humans persuading other humans to do things, we are all simpletons. We all have what amount to zero-day vulnerabilities. We all can be stunningly brilliant in one area of our lives, but thicker than a block of wood in another.
I don’t think there's anything condescending or paternalistic about saying this.
E.g., I know plenty of white-collar workers in my country who believe they're being robbed by their country because their employers have to also pay for their socialized health insurance, naively assuming that if that was not the case, they could actually pocket that money.
Now don't get me wrong: I'm not some extremist hyper-individualist believer in Homo Economicus, and I think there's plenty of scope for paternalism in policy. I think that it's entirely possible to talk to a specific person about their policy beliefs and come away with the view that they don't understand what's going on and are voting against their own interests. I just think that a little humility is in order when making assumptions about other people's lives and struggles a d choices, and applying this approach en masse with blanket statements like the GP comment (and your own, to a lesser degree) is a lot more likely to be ignorant of the realities of the variety and complexity of these people's lives.
It is. It doesn't mean the justification is always wrong, much like Stalin believing 2+2=4 doesn't disprove arithmetic. I agree with the call to humility and I generally not tell individuals I know better than them how they should live their lives, but my comment is a) on the systemic level, and b) based on direct and indirect experience.
For instance, some of the evidence backing my belief is the experience of people close to me who went through periods of abusive employments, and whose stories I got to hear throughout it. For instance, one of those people was stuck under a verbally and mentally abusive boss who exploited the perception of local employment conditions to keep people underpaid and overworked. The irony is, the abused employees were also critical to that man's financial success, and they could've easily fixed the situation for themselves, if they got together. Unfortunately, they (including my close acquaintance) were all scared shitless and couldn't coordinate - everyone was essentially worried no one else would step up, and the lone person would lose the job.
Having seen or heard of cases like this, and also having read here many stories that essentially boil down to "short-term rewards prevent people from taking actions beneficial to their career longer-term" (carrots work better in our industry, for now), I came to the conclusion that it's ridiculously easy to exploit workers. Now, since the context of this discussion is Uber, a notoriously morally bankrupt company, I don't think myself or the OP are too paternalistic with this sentiment. It's not intended as a criticism of workers (myself I'm not immune to this kind of pressure either), but exploitative employers.
Anyway, thanks again!
[1] eg Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignoramus
For example, in the Rideshare Guy survey, there's a pretty even distribution across the buckets of "How much of your total monthly income comes from driving?" About 24% responded "very little", while 19% responded "all or almost all", with the rest somewhere in between.
The ones who responded "very little" are likely using Uber/Lyft in their spare time to supplement income from another job and might be better off as independent contractors. Those who rely on driving for "all or almost all" of their income are driving as their primary occupation, and might be better off as employees. I'd imagine that what's good for the first group on this issue might be bad for the second group and vice versa.
The NAP is literally impossible to not break over even the most trivial of things and if you seriously believe in it or similar you're far more ignorant than the person you accuse.
Miranda rights are positive rights (you have the right to). Much of the Constitutional rights are negative (shall not infringe on...)
For instance, most of organized labor may understand that "Right To Work" legislation is Luntzian doublespeak, because their orgs have policy people to unravel the lies.
But it's effective against non-union labor, editorial boards, and low-information voters. Providing much needed cover for corporate shilling legislators.
"And frankly, the doublespeak involved in labeling restrictions on labor relationships as rights (and thus obviously and unambiguously positive) says much more about your ignorance than theirs."
I don't think he said that.
The only solution to this is better education that teaches critical thinking rather than mechanical parroting-exams based system that is widespread today in majority of the world.
The underlying assumption here is that everybody is capable of anything if only they were given the right 'education'.
That is, I believe with better education we can have a substantially larger number of people who are capable of critical thinking and can navigate through trickery and misinformation at a basic level.
This is an unsolved problem, and a really important one in the modern cognitive economy, which is why theories about inherent cognitive capability have gained so much purchase recently. For my part, I think these theories are plausible, but also think that their implications are significant enough that I don't want to be too hasty and buy into them until I've been convinced that we've exhausted the possibility that thinking can be taught.
The people I’ve met who are least capable of critical thinking seem to have accepted some form of universal or protouniversal truth, usually an ideology that sort of explains all things away they don’t want to think about. Religion, strong societal rules and position, and lack of unwanted interference in your life can do that.
Some degree of oppression doesn’t seem to harm either as it seems to me it forces people to confront the fundamental sense of fairness they might want to believe in has no grounds in society. So it’s a mix of things.
Learning Socratic dialogue seems useful though.
Probably the least critical thought-inclined people I’ve met are students of economics who take the theories at face value though. Interestingly they are very often quite sheltered and privileged people, which goes into my point about oppression.
In fact I’d like to add that I said above - probably the best education for critical thinking I can imagine is teaching people about cognitive biases and heuristics.
Could you make a cup of tea if you didn't know? Probably, but you'd ruin a lot of tea bags...
Is probably more accurate. You can bring a horse to water but you can't make them drink. It's impossible to know but it may be that those who are willing to be educated already have been and those who are left are willfully ignorant or have low enough intelligence that education isn't possible.
As society becomes more complex, greater and greater numbers of people will be unable to successfully interact with it. What we do with them is a unsolved problem.
As long as...
a) The politicians find it easier to manipulate dumb voters and realize that voters with good critical thinking skills are more capable of calling out their BS.
and
b) The bureaucrats deciding what gets taught in public school are ultimately accountable to people appointed by and accountable to politicians
and
c) Most of the voting public gets a public school education.
...we will never have a general public with good critical thinking skills.
Now, before anyone puts words in my mouth, no there isn't some grand conspiracy to keep the proles stupid, it just so happens that there's a disincentive to making them smart and making them smart takes resources so obviously there's no will to get it done.
You'd be surprised how much good stuff the government doesn't do is attributable to this incentive structure.
Unions provide checks and balances against that type of abuse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
In the programming world, how many people are convinced that white-collar desk labor is qualitatively different from assembly line work, such that unions apply to factories but would never apply to a bunch of coders in an office building?
I grew up hearing that programmers are professionals and individuals and we can all negotiate for maximal pay, and of course that's poppycock. The vast, vast majority of programmers would be well-served with a guild or union at their workplace, because most are simple laborers trading their time for dollars; exactly the same boat as people building cars or wiring buildings.
Everyone cites the rock star making bank -- you are probably not it, and even if you're on the upper tier, a union could get you a larger slice of that company pie, and could get you more of a say in how the workplace is run (no more crunch time? more schedule flexibility? more time off? more opportunities for mentoring or being mentored? pick how you want your workplace improved...).
The thing is, technical workers were headed down the path of considering themselves labor until IBM brought in union-busters that crafted this propaganda of "the nature of the work means we're more like engineers or doctors or lawyers and THEY'RE not unionized" (ignoring that they're all members of professional guilds).
So, thank IBM that we're only now, decades later, starting to see labor organizing in tech fields, and here, only in the most abusive of fields (video game development); thank IBM and our desire to see ourselves as somehow above the guys who built the buildings we're in.
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/why-95-perce...