The fact that companies can overtly introduce laws for their own benefit and directly advertise to voters is both disgusting and an improvement on the federal system of lobbying and campaign finance.
> California cities and counties won’t be allowed to tax soda for the next 12 years after Gov. Jerry Brown signed fast-moving legislation Thursday.
> It comes after a deal was struck between legislators and business and labor interests who agreed to remove an initiative from the Nov. 6 statewide ballot that would have restricted cities and counties from raising any taxes without a supermajority vote of local citizens.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-soda-tax-ban-2018...
This has happened a few times. Organizations will get a measure on the ballot that threatens some other group (usually with political power), and then use it as leverage to extract concessions before withdrawing it.
Your assertion goes against one century of verified practice in the field of advertisement. Several 10-second ads are exactly what can suggest people and change their minds about a particular topic.
It's truly a mystery then why Uber and Lyft spent $200M on advertising. What a colossal waste of money.
Charitably, Uber and Lyft were raising awareness of what was going on so that people would have a chance to do something about it.
More over, a legislator has way more influence over a public agency than a board member does over a company.
Why exactly is it OK for unions to do the same, then?
Because I'm sure the answer will involve downvotes, I'll make it clear from the outset that I'm honestly asking in good faith, and not attempting to use leading questions to push any particular agenda.
Unions destroyed the golden geese of American industry, and have since moved into the public sector, where they are bankrupting state governments while massively degrading accountability for public sector workers.
New York alone has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector workers making over $100,000 a year. They are huge pushers of left-wing political ideology, because they are being enriched by it.
100 000$ in New York is not at all unreasonable for many public sector workers - senior administrators, senior teachers, higher education teachers, technicians, sysadmins, programmers, lawyers, engineers, etc...
Public sector workers, especially highly educated ones, in general always lean left-wing. I'll leave it to you to figure out why someone that leans left may find it morally good to work in the public function and why highly educated people are more left wing than the average.
Unions would provide no benefit to their members if they negotiated collectively for the national workforce. It's the zero-sum rent-seeking that they engage in that benefits their members, when they force an employer to negotiate with the subset of the workforce that they represent, to the exclusion of all other workers.
>>100 000$ in New York is not at all unreasonable for many public sector workers
$100,000 a year puts you almost in the top 10% of income earners. When you add monetary value of the intangible benefit of being almost impossible to fire, I think we can reasonably class all ~300,000 as being in the top 10% of income earners.
>>Public sector workers, especially highly educated ones, in general always lean left-wing.
It's in their financial interest, as left-wing political ideology encourages more spending on social programs, which unions convert to compensation for public sector workers. Unionized public sector workers are the dominant political faction in advanced economies, and are responsible for, and benefit from, this trend:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
New York itself has ~700 000 workers, so 300k making 30k more than the median knowing they are all more educated than the average is perfectly normal.
Unions provide an advantage even when everyone is in an union. Again, see the multiple countries that have almost full unionization. There is such a thing as the wage share, and there are many other advantages of being able to have a democratic input on your workplace.
Which is significant, given New York has 300,000 public sector workers. The median would be much lower if you excluded them when calculating the median income. They're the dominant political faction, voting in governments that give them more tax dollars.
>>Unions provide an advantage even when everyone is in an union. Again, see the multiple countries that have almost full unionization.
What advantage are you talking about? Anemic wage growth? Public sector pensions that threaten to bankrupt the state? Industrial sectors that are steadily being eclipsed by East Asian economies?
That's absurd, the only way this was true was if the amount of money that companies could spend on labor was completely fixed, and the only way to get a larger wage would be for somebody else to get a smaller wage.
Artificially higher wages at the expense of lower profit margins means lower volumes of investment, which reduces long-term productivity/wage growth. I recommend you read this 1957 book, Why Wages Rise:
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...
Second, the primary cause of the slowdown in wage growth in the US is a slowdown in productivity growth:
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...
> Why exactly is it OK for unions to do the same, then?
Egalitarianism. Equating corporate businesses with worker unions is a false equivalence, since ownership and wealth can be concentrated, but labor cannot. Gains made by unions on behalf of workers can be spread more broadly through the population, while gains made by corporations are typically concentrated among an elite (and become more and more concentrated with increasing status).
Now, someone will probably retort with something about prices, but there's a limit to how much a worker can benefit from lower prices when they come from pressure on labor. There's also a limit to how much a worker can benefit from penny-ante shareholding.
History proves that to be a false assumption. Unions are a corporition like any other. They are driven by the need to increase their own power and profit. They do that by increasing the nber of workers that are required by law to pay them dues even if the worker does not want or support the unions political goals
See the teachers union as a prime example
[0]A system where neither can collectively lobby might be best, but alas...
Just as a thought experiment, let's say labor could be concentrated like wealth. If it could be, how would we measure it? Wouldn't the units simply be those of productivity? More work getting done -- or more precisely, more value being created -- with fewer workers?
It seems intuitively true that this is a desirable goal for society to strive for, not a problematic condition to be remedied. Unionization tries to guarantee a steady position for every worker, but if it does so equitably, the effect will be to dilute the labor pool rather than concentrating it. Is this really a progressive value?
More concretely, it can be surmised that every time unions attempt to organize labor in Amazon warehouses, the company responds by increasing the funding for robotics R&D. Is this seen as a good thing or a bad thing in labor circles? Obviously it's seen as a bad thing... but the assumption that this view is somehow morally and socially correct doesn't get challenged anywhere near often enough.
There are important exceptions, see "tyranny of the majority."
Laws are not last in, first out; previous laws need to be taken into context when new laws are created, no matter how they are created. The fact that this law was created by popular vote has no bearing on its validity or standing in court.
If the constitution says don't do something, and people vote for legislation to do it, then the constitution has to be the controlling document or else it doesn't mean anything.
Also in CA judges are elected by the people.
Uber and Lyft were threatening to simply shut down if this proposition lost. A LOT of people at the time only had Uber/Lyft as their income. That was going to be catastrophic.
Trump was still President so people had little prospect of unemployment benefits. We had no vaccines and no known timeline. Lockdowns were still in effect at various levels of strength.
If you had this vote again, now, I'm not sure it would pass.
(I could also go into how Uber and Lyft were spamming the hell out of my email and phone. That should have gotten a whopping fine from the FEC.)
The rule that allows judges to determine if a measure presented to the people met the rules for such votes, and the rule for the votes that judges apply, were, themselves, adopted by a democratic vote of the people.