Amazon joins companies arguing US labor board is unconstitutional | Hacker News Reader

Amazon joins companies arguing US labor board is unconstitutional

reuters.com

If I understand it correctly, Amazon's argument here appears to be that the NLRB's statutory authority (i.e., its power to adjudicate labor disputes) is essentially unconstitutional, as it deprives Amazon (and other companies) of the ordinary trial process.

If this interpretation is correct, the consequences are disturbing: a ruling against the NLRB here would imply absolute judicial supremacy, and not a system of checks and balances. In effect, it'd break the US Government's regulatory backbone: any regulatory decision could be challenged not within its statutory limits (or for exceeding its statutory limits), but on the basis of statutory regulation itself being unconstitutional. In effect, it would amount to a government whose regulatory framework is not controlled by the elected branches, but by the sole unelected one.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand the mechanism of “absolute judicial supremacy”.

The judges are checked and balanced by executive appointment, and legislative confirmation. They also can be impeached by the legislature. Same as it ever was: perhaps this is no longer sufficient, but surely it is not new?

The legislature, setting up this agency as a parallel judiciary/executive that both prosecutes cases and judges them, while also insulated from the presidential oversight, is setting up something accountable only to Congress, and unchecked.

The supremacy here which you advocate here semi-explicitly is Congressional supremacy. It could be argued this is better! It is more directly democratic, after all, and it’s probably more like parliamentary systems. But it’s sure not what the US constitution went for in the eighteenth century, nor has anyone amended it since.

I meant in statutory matters. You're right that the judicial branch would still be checked in other matters, e.g. appointment and confirmation.

I don't deny that the judicial branch has the authority to review these semi-judicial schemes designed by the legislative branch. What I find concerning is the broader conclusion: that the legislative branch may effectively have no regulatory power behind its statutory power, and that all regulatory decisions or adjudications would have to flow through a judicial process instead of the competent agency or department.

In effect, this would both gum up the US's regulatory machinery by making legislative acts themselves toothless. That seems pretty bad to me, and not in keeping with the enumerated powers of each branch.

Even the enforcement powers that are not held in the judiciary should be vested and exercised in the executive branch, should they not? Meaning the legislative branch should not have both legislative and enforcement powers.

I think of the FAA, FDA, and the like as being part of the executive branch, not the legislative. Quick Google seems to back that up (and it matches my model of checks and balances from civics.)

You are correct.

The basic breakdown is this:

Lawmaking: Congress

Law Enforcement: The President and all agencies under him

Adjudication and guarantor of due process: Federal Judiciary

Regulations often get confused with law, but they’re not law so much as either 1) guidance as to how that agency interprets the laws that Congress passes within their enforcement domain and will be proceeding with how they enforce it or 2) orders issued by the President or his cabinet as to how an agency lower in the hierarchy is to proceed.

Where the NLRB is being challenged (as had the FTC and SEC has been recently) is that in addition to authorizing the agencies in question, Congress vested them with some limited amount of adjudication powers related to their enforcement domain which have in turn tried to limit access to Article III judicial review by saying you have to go through their internal court processes first before you can get access to the Federal Judiciary to review the case.

If you think that violates separation of powers, Amazon and SpaceX do too. Theoretically handling everything within a single agency might be more efficient, but that’s to the government’s benefit to the detriment of the rights of Amazon and SpaceX to due process and Judicial oversight of the Executive branch.

>adjudication powers related to their enforcement domain which have in turn tried to limit access to Article III judicial review by saying you have to go through their internal court processes first before you can get access to the Federal Judiciary to review the case.

And does any of these companies include an arbitration clause in any of their contracts?

> but that’s to the government’s benefit to the detriment of the rights of Amazon and SpaceX to due process and Judicial oversight of the Executive branch.

Or to their benefit when the regulations affect their competitors, often to the detriment of the rest of us.

Corporations with enough money to buy regulators and legislators probably should not be entitled to any rights. They should only exist and continue to operate at the pleasure of the electorate.

Corporations are a legal proxy for the owners and management; protecting the rights of these people and pooling their resource are essentially a corporation’s raison d’être. They can’t really do that if they don’t receive the same due process protections, and they are under our legal system entitled to those.

I think the issue is that the Supreme Court has established itself as a parallel legislative branch. It can arbitrarily choose to re-examine the constitutionality of an established thing, and it can also reverse its past opinions.

There should be a time limit beyond which the Supreme Court cannot act. If nobody has challenged the constitutionality of something in 10 or 20 years, it should be implicitly constitutional, and no court opinion should be allowed to change that. Similarly, if the Supreme Court has already made a decision, it should not change it unless the relevant laws or the relevant parts of the constitution have changed. The right way of changing the constitutional status of an established practice should be changing the constitution itself.

You may be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism

> Originalism is a method of constitutional and statutory interpretation. Originalists assert that legal text should be interpreted based on the original understanding at the time of adoption. Originalists object to the idea of the significant legal evolution being driven by judges in a common law framework and instead favor modifications of laws through the Legislature or through Constitutional amendment.

> Proponents of originalism argue that originalism was the primary method of legal interpretation in America from the time of its founding until the time of the New Deal, when competing theories of interpretation grew in prominence.

Note that this philosophy -- for better or worse -- runs counter to many modern rulings of courts.

Example of decisions that differed from accepted understanding of the Constitution+Amendments at time of ratification:

* Gideon v Wainwright

* Lemon v Kurtzman

* Roe v Wade

* Obergefell v Hodges

Brown v Board of Education

No, not really.

It was not universally believed that public school segregation was compatible with the 14th Amendment when it was ratified.

Originalists may have something to say about the legal reasoning in the opinion, but Brown's victory itself is not a counterexample.

I've never heard an originalist say anything but that Brown v Board conformed to the original meaning of the 14th amendment.

That's because modern originalists are embarrassed by this, because it starkly reveals how untenable originalism is. But it's a fact. Look up George Wallace some time. Segregation and Jim Crow were the law of the land for 100 years after the 14th amendment was ratified, and many (white) people fought tooth and nail to keep it that way.

Even if Brown vs Board were incompatible with originalism (though, again, no actual originalist says that), I don't see how "it starkly reveals how untenable originalism is."

If you want judicial philosophies that produce only moral outcomes, regardless of law, you don't even need laws.

> no actual originalist says that

That's because originalists are hypocrites.

> I don't see how "it starkly reveals how untenable originalism is."

Because if originalists were not hypocrites, if the actually practiced originalism consistently, they would be calling for the repeal of Brown and Loving and advancing a whole host of other radical ideas that no sane person supports, and everyone would see how intellectually and morally bankrupt they are.

> If you want judicial philosophies that produce only moral outcomes, regardless of law, you don't even need laws.

I want a judicial philosophy that is, at a bare minimum, internally consistent. Originalism as it is actually practiced by self-identified originalists doesn't even meet that basic criterion. Originalists are originalists only when it suits their political agenda.

If a system seems inconsistent, it possible you haven't understood the rules.

Loving is a terrible counterexample. Following the 14th Amendment, there were no anti-miscegenation laws (or they lingered dormant). Not to mention the democratic debate in passing the 14th Amendment, had many legal assertions that the amendment would invalidate such laws.

That the 14th Amendment was democratically -- if contentiously -- adopted by the people with the express consequence of ending racial discrimination (education, marriage) is a ridiculously easy case to make.

> it possible you haven't understood the rules

Yes, that's possible. But the (ostensible) rules of originalism are not exactly rocket science.

> Following the 14th Amendment, there were no anti-miscegenation laws (or they lingered dormant).

That statement has the form of "Santa Claus exists (or the sky is blue)." It's technically not false, but it is not a good-faith argument either. There absolutely were anti-miscegenation laws in 1865; such laws date back to 1691. So there is absolutely no possible originalist justification for Loving. When Loving was decided, anti-miscegenation laws had been on the books continuously since long before the United States even declared independence from Britain.

>That the 14th Amendment was democratically -- if contentiously -- adopted by the people with the express consequence of ending racial discrimination (education, marriage) is a ridiculously easy case to make.

None of that is even remotely close to being true. You are either not arguing in goof faith, or you are profoundly ignorant of history. The passage of the 14th Amendment was followed by 100 years of uncontested Jim Crow laws [2]. Even today the Republican party is hard at work finding new and creative ways to disenfranchise minority voters [3-8, and I could have gone on and on and on].

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Un...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

[3] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/09/29/stacking-the-deck-how-t...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/us/politics/trump-republi...

[5] https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659784277/republican-voter-su...

[6] https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/republican-election-tacti...

[7] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-...

[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/vot...

Should its own rulings be as binding? Plessy v. Ferguson was decided in 1896.

Of course. The job of the judiciary branch is to establish what the laws actually mean. If people don't like the decisions, the right process is telling the legislative branch to change the laws.

The actual process is to appoint new SCOTUS judges and they just re-interpret the meaning to your liking. No legislation required.

Works out well for the legislature too. Plenty of topics to campaign on. Plenty of chance to grandstand on social media, in hearings, in the regular media. Get re-elected while solving no problems. "Half" the population will always vote for you because the alternative is socialist/fascist. It's a version of the lazy google engineer [1] that makes less money but has potential for national fame and maybe some insider trading.

If the legislature was getting screwed by this arrangement there would be a lot less deadlock in congress and the power of the judicial branch would be relatively less. And somehow this take is somehow less cynical then yours? What a world we live in.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD2JaAnMMo0

The 5th Circuit court of appeals has already ruled similarly that the SEC's in house courts are unconstitutional, and that Congress can't delegate its legislative/judicial powers to the executive branch in that case under the separation of powers [1], a case that will likely be heard by the SCOTUS. By extension, if that is upheld, the idea is that this same principle could be applied to other executive branch administrative courts like in use at the NLRB.

[1] https://www.winston.com/en/blogs-and-podcasts/government-pro... "Fifth Circuit Holds That SEC’s Use of In-House Courts to Adjudicate Enforcement Actions Is Unconstitutional"

Congress can Overrule the SCOTUS and the Voters can Change Congress and if things get too Conservative Activist in the SCOTUS and the 1%-5% of the wealthy in the US get too much sway then that's only one Depression Away there from moving back the other direction, A La FDR and another New Deal! And just because any Administrative Law Court and agency is set up under the executive branch does not mean that it was not set up by Congress and is not under Congressional Review where the Executive Branch head of any agency gets reviewed by a Congressional Committee on a regular basis. Congress sets up administrative Courts and any Administrative Law Court NLRB/Other Administrative Law Court can have its decisions appealed to a Federal District Court or a DC Circuit panel of Judges and on up to the SCOTUS.

> In effect, it would amount to a government whose regulatory framework is not controlled by the elected branches, but by the sole unelected one.

How is the NRLB "controlled by elected branches" but judicial systems are not? Judges are appointed, not elected - actually, some lower court judges are elected. Same with the NRLB. It's just changing authority from one completely unelected branch of government to another branch that has a mix of elections and appointments.

> actually, some lower court judges are elected

This is going to confuse people.

Not in the Federal government they’re not. All Federal Judges are appointed from the lowest to the highest.

Some States have variations though from fully elected judges to retention elections, effectively turning their judges into politicians too.

The NLRB is an independent agency of the US Government, which means that its power derives from the statutory authority of Congress. That's what makes it controlled by one of the elected branches.

(The argument is not that the NLRB itself is elected, or needs to be. It's whether the judicial branch has the authority to diminish Congress or the Executive's statutory authorities as enumerated under the constitution.)

And judges also enforce the laws passes by Congress (and state and local laws). They're both ultimately enforcing laws passes by Congress.

The tenth amendment constrains congress from regulating outside enumerated powers. Intrastate trade is not an enumerated power. Most applications of the NLRB are tyrannical short-circuits.

First of all, there's no evidence that any of this is intrastate or that Amazon has made a claim on the basis of intrastate trade (this would be a flabbergasting claim for them to make, given that their business is horizontally integrated across 50 states).

Second: the relevant decision here is NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin, which puts it succinctly[1]:

> Although activities may be intrastate in character when separately considered, if they have such a close and substantial relation to interstate commerce that their control is essential or appropriate to protect that commerce from burdens and obstructions, Congress cannot be denied the power to exercise that control.

I'm not aware of a more recent ruling that changes that doctrine.

The clear solution should this stand is to include a Terms of Incorporation when a business is created stipulating that they waive their right to a trial and that any labor disputes will be settled by independent arbitration.

The courts have routinely said you can't sign your rights away. This has gotten muddy with arbitration clauses being sometimes upheld, but for example, you can't sign a contract to entry into slavery for example.

I don't know what courts and what cases you're talking about, but SCOTUS has repeatedly held that binding arbitration agreements override almost all rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc... (binding arbitration overrides state law)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/business/supreme-court-up... (binding arbitration overrides labor protection)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/supreme-court-backs-... (binding arbitration overrides consumer protections even in cases of fraudulent deceptive advertising)

Courts have also routinely said that you CAN sign away your rights, i.e., waive them; courts enforce waivers every single day.

The law distinguishes between alienable and unalienable rights. The right to a trial is by common law an unalienable one.

That’s incorrect: Jury-trial waivers are routinely enforced. (California and Georgia won’t enforce advance jury waivers in state courts, as a matter of state law, not federal-constitutional law.) And there's also a thing called a "confession of judgment," which in effect is a waiver of any trial.

What I said is not in fact incorrect, you are confusing waiving a right with alienating it, here's an essay[0] which can sort you out on the distinction.

> Alienating a right is different from exercising it or waiving it in a particular case. A police officer comes to my door and asks to look around my apartment; if I give my permission, I have waived my right. But the next time he comes, he must ask again, and if he is refused he cannot rely on my previous permission.

[0]: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/jeremy-waldron-i...

Waivers aren't necessarily one-time in nature; they can be ongoing.

Example: Many, many contracts explicitly say that any waiver of a contract right is only one-time, so as to rule out an argument by an opposing party that the waiver was continuing.

Example: If you enlist in the military, you waive — on an ongoing basis — your Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury, because the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribes who can sit as a member of a court-martial [plural: courts-martial].

So in the context we're discussing, calling rights "inalienable" or "unalienable" is not a helpful concept.

There's an enormous difference between waiving rights for a specific (alleged) infraction and carte blanche signing away your rights for anything that might ever happen in the future.

The courts view arbitration as a _forum_ change. The idea is that you're waiving some procedural rights while retaining all substantive rights. This is independent of a jury waiver (although arbitration necessarily requires a jury waiver).

There are some severe problems both in theory and in practice, but that's the rough justification.

At the risk of spamming (I think I've pasted this link several times recently) I've been compiling as much information as possible here. https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/

A corporation has no right of protection from slavery.

And just imagine if you said it was protected from slavery ... would that mean all corporations are suddenly free of the dictates of their executives, their boards, their shareholders.

Exactly what would this emancipated entity be?

Then what is an NDA if not a contract to waiving rights to speech?

An NDA is a contract, not a law passed by Congress. First five words of the 1st Amendment:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If you break it, it's a breach of contract, not a criminal act and you didn't break any laws.

I was responding to a comment about courts saying you can't waive rights away in contracts. I posed the NDA as a counter-example.

Yes, but your example doesn’t work here. The bedrock of what we call our free speech rights is more of a prohibition on Congress from passing laws that impede that. Signing such a contract doesn’t contradict the First Amendment.

It does though because its a contract. There are states which enforces, in their contracts, various anti-boycott measures regarding Israel. These are effectively anti-free-speech clauses and they are imposed by the government. But, are allowed because they are agreed to in the terms of the contract.

Aren't corporations incorporated on the state level? Unless I am missing something at least one state would not include this in their terms and companies would flock to that state if they wanted trials.

If they strike down "Chevron", which they might just do this year, that will be what you're referring to.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-likely-to-d...

Amazon's argument can be basically anything that will give the Supreme Court an excuse to accept it...

SCOTUS has to be checked somehow. Make no mistake about it, this is another power grab. This SCOTUS is snatching up Executive and Congressional powers day after day and assigning them unto itself. Do Conservatives really want to live in a world where courts and often ultimately SCOTUS are deciding labor matters, which drugs are safe & efficacious, whether or not it's safe for PFAS to be in your drinking water? Because this, Chevron, and other cases being heard and under review are on the path to do just that.

The fault here is thinking that Republicans operate in good faith or consistently. They don't. They just want to be able to persecute people, and maybe get richer along the way.

No, but it's perfectly fine for lawmakers to make laws setting these standards (ideally with the input of experts). That's how we get local building codes.

The ultimate power to make policy choices should be made by lawmakers who can be voted out. Bureaucrats are too insulated. An individual bureaucrat can't feasibly be fired by either a President or the Congress.

How are bureaucrats insulated, exactly? Congress can change laws whenever they want. Read your history ... when congress first provided the federal government the ability to collect tariffs, they didn't include in the constitution instructions for how the US Coast Guard would work. Hamilton did that, providing regulation for exactly what kind of boats, equipment, employees, and many other details. It would have been unthinkable by the founders that the Supreme Court would be able to vote to disallow the use of a certain kind of boat, or the policing of a specific waterway. These corporations are attempting to get the US Supreme Court to re-litigate the entire 250 years of settled law and regulation. There are no words.

Neither can a Supreme Court judge...

No one is more insulated than SCOTUS, period, end of story. Your point is moot.

> Do Conservatives really want to live in a world where [...]

Yes that is literally what conservatives have always stood for since we developed the term "conservative" to stand for that kind of political stance. Back then it was to preserve the power of the French aristocracy over the rising calls for democracy. Today it's to preserve the power of the wealthy and over that of everyone that has to actually work for a living.

They use different tactics, deflections, and posturing to justify their positions, and are willing to give different kinds of concessions in order to achieve those goals today, but it's been essentially the same overarching theme for a couple hundred years. A well-functioning democracy (in this case, one where employees can organize to negotiate the terms of their employment) is an obstacle to them that they want to clear.

A rather partisan definition. Modern conservatives, like Burke, have made the observation that change is frequently for the worse, and fast change promotes chaos and suffering, such as during the Reign of Terror.

I think the Conservatives primarily want power redistributed to whoever's on their side in any given decade. The particular mechanisms and bureaucracies don't really matter, and it's fine if democratic pillars are destroyed in the process as long as "their guys" ultimately get what they want. The liberals seem more willing to play by the rules and not leave a bunch of collateral damage along the way, which is why they keep losing... every small by-the-book gain is overturned and overpowered tenfold with the next Conservative administration.

FWIW I think there's a difference here between the big-C Conservative politicians and judges who are hopelessly corrupt, vs the run-of-the-mill small-c conservative voters who keep voting for them because of virtue signals (guns, abortion, defense, anti-wokism, whatever). The corruption isn't really a high concern to them, either a positive or negative, as long as they get their values enshrined into political power.

It's not really SCOTUS vs the Executive, it's whatever pathway to power they have available at any given juncture in history. They're very good at pivoting and projecting! Not to say it's admirable, but it's undoubtedly very effective, having captured almost the entirety of the US power structure over the last decade while also striving to make sure their liberal opponents cannot easily reverse those gains. Having so thoroughly captured SCOTUS that they can rewrite/reinterpret the Constitution at will is just the latest move in a long series of such maneuvers over the past decades, skillfully executed.

Should be sent to the states where they belong. Congress and Exec just love creating unelected offices that perpetuate the regimes power without any democratic check. Just expand and consume more and more.

Local is best. Send this kind of thing back to states where it belongs.

It's not judicial supremacy other than the constitutional authority of the courts to interpret the law. Congress still passes the law - if they want it to be interpreted differently, they can just be more specific. In this case especially, it improves checks and balances - judges will check the executives, instead of executive-appointed quasi-judges with obvious incentive issues.

Frankly while I don't think the "originalist" interpretation here is correct, clearly early congresses delegated broad and vague authority to executive in various matters, I actually think it's one of the weaknesses of the original intent of the founders. I assume, given that the early American elite was a relatively small group of people with a lot in common, they didn't foresee the need to micromanage each other in such matters.

Now that executive employs millions of people, I think it's necessary. Like, when CDC can suspend probably the most common private contract in the country (rent) under the delegated authority to fight diseases, this is a step too far for me; and even if you don't think so, what would you think of China-style extreme lockdowns? There needs to be a way to draw the line over vague delegation of power. If IMPROVES checks and balances - judicial can check the executive. Congress can still explicitly give executive the authority it needs and override the judges.

Same for NLRB - pass labor law as the normal laws that the normal judges can interpret.

Next stop, make Commerce Clause unimportant again ;)

Slowly but surely people are starting the realize that the vast majority of the federal government’s regulatory machinery is illegal/unconstitutional.

The ATF is one of the worst examples, but the NLRB here is also wrong.

I understand this will come with a reflexive downvote from many who don’t like the outcome, but this has been warned about for decades: Administrative law isn’t. The executive has no right to act as the police, legislative, and judiciary at the same time.

This is true even if it gives you the outcomes you personally want.

> I understand this will come with a reflexive downvote from many who don’t like the outcome

Are you sure they're not from people who think this sort of preemptive griping looks like a manipulation attempt.

I don't agree or disagree with the parent comment, but what do you mean by manipulation here?

1) post unpopular (sincere) opinion: get downvoted/flagged

2) post unpopular (sincere) opinion, with a disclaimer that you expect to get downvoted: Get accused of being manipulative

3) wrap said unpopular opinion in flowery emotional language “I’m not an X by any means, but I think Y” still get downvoted and flagged

4) pretend/lie: post what the hive mind wants and get upvotes

The system encourages you to lie, in fact it rewards you for betraying your convictions and just posting what you think others want to hear. Your post is accusing me (subtly) of posting in bad faith, when in fact bad faith posting is what would make my karma go up.

Yeah that's why the Trump court loves it. It's the federalist society long game.

Bust up federal regulatory authority -> force states into a regulatory race-to-the-bottom to attract business -> profit.

Someone once described Social Security as an anti-guillotine fund, and I think the basic premise applies here, as well.

If we had a strong executive branch right now, we’d have already threatened to launch an FTC inquiry to break up Amazon and or nationalize SpaceX in response, merited or not.

The pure shock of the prospect of breaking them up would spook investors, tank their stock, put both CEOs on the defensive, and force them back in line, and everything would get resolved nicely with a face to face meeting and a handshake.

Whether it’s merited or not is not the point. Purely from a governance standpoint, as a citizen I hate to see corporate interests trying and succeeding to usurp government and societal norms.

Sometimes examples need to be made so others know not to make the same mistake.

I think there's plenty of merit when a massive, multi-trillion dollar corporation (which already has a long history of exploiting workers, exploiting laws, and buying favorable laws) tries to exploit its workers even more.

I'm all for allowing corporations to have goals that aren't 100% in line with the country's best interests, but those goals do NOT and shall not ever take legal standing over the country's interests. We need to have serious repercussions for when corporations try to usurp government in a race-to-the-bottom attempt to further weaken labor laws or measures designed to protect common citizenry.

Fining the board and C-Suite executives collectively a sum of 5x the company's market cap should be a start.

The Democrats are too aligned with corporate interests to really cater to the desires of the popular left (or really the popular anything). Amazon bribes Democrats a lot more than Republicans: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/recipients?id=D0.... Especially look at their 2020 totals: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/amazon-com/totals?id=D00002...

No way a corporate Dem is going to break them up.

"Whether it's merited or not" you want the might of the federal government to "threaten" businesses, acting within the law, that have interests you don't agree with?

It’s called politicking. It happens between any group of people of any size greater than 1: what priorities to focus on, what to apply extra scrutiny to, what to leave alone for another day, etc.

In our government, that’s a big part of what the president’s role is. “Bully pulpit” and all that. Presidents do it every day, for smaller and higher profile cases.

At that level, it’s all negotiation. If they didn’t want (or feared the) scrutiny, corporate interests wouldn’t have started the negotiation in the first place. They know it looks bad if Biden doesn’t respond, and that he must in some way. They’re just betting that he won’t start with such a strong gambit, because corporations are no longer afraid of our government, and haven’t been for decades.

That's what they did in Russia when some company founders dared go against the govt or own/fund anti-government media. They did call being against arbitrary, excessive and illegal governance something like "trying to usurp the government", but at least they were not quite as extreme and didn't say quite parts like "Whether it’s merited or not is not the point", out loud. And corporations supposedly threatening some "societal norms" by suing the government is not even Putin-level, it's straight out of 1930ies Europe.

If this kind of authoritarian stuff is what motivates people in NLRB and similar agencies, I'd say abolish them altogether. I'd rather be ruled by cyberpunk dictator Bezos than people with such opinions/approaches

You are absolutely right. The only reason we have the few labor protections we do in this country is because people were driven so hard that they fought to the death to secure them.

Once all the peaceful means of addressing labor disputes become illegal, what will be left to people aside from violence?

In the US, violent protests == arrests == free prison labor. There's really no downside for these companies if they eschew all morals.

The only way out of this is through non-violent unity and solidarity, which is conveniently at an all time low.

> The only way out of this is through non-violent unity and solidarity, which is conveniently at an all time low.

The reason non-violent methods work is because they are implying that if you don't pay attention to the non-violent methods, the only recourse left is violence. Because realistically, if your non-violent methods are easily enough ignored, they'll be ignored.

And historically, violence has been an excellent tool for change. Not always for the better, that's for sure, but to deny that mass violence, especially targeted at those deemed to be in power, doesn't change things is ignoring basically all of human history.

Speak softly, but carry a big stick.

Prisons are already facing staffing shortages nationwide. Not really a viable solution.

Or you can just pass laws, as what Congress was intended for.

Well they have no intention of doing that now.

> Amazon in a filing made with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday said it plans to argue that the agency's unique structure violates the company's right to a jury trial.

I wonder if the founders intended that the bill of rights be extended to legal entities?

The founders certainly intended that constitutional rights would apply to people’s business activities (e.g. the contract clause). So the real question is whether the founders intended that business owners would be deprived of those rights merely because of the legal structure of their business.

> So the real question is whether the founders intended that business owners would be deprived of those rights merely because of the legal structure of their business.

No, the real question is whether the framers intended to prohibit people from implicitly trading away certain individual rights in exchange for limiting what would otherwise be their unlimited personal liability.

They made their positions clear with the 3/5ths rule

I'm not sure what that has to do with personal liability.

Did the founders envision limited liability and the public stock corporation?

Business activity was vastly different at the founding

> Did the founders envision limited liability and the public stock corporation?

They were aware of corporations as a business structure. English public stock corporations had played a major role in the founding of the colonies of Virginia (Virginia Company of London and Virginia Company of Plymouth) and Massachusetts (Massachusetts Bay Company), and also in the history of Canada (Hudson's Bay Company). They were certainly aware of these concepts. Corporations are older than the United States is.

That said, it was a much rarer business structure, only used for very large firms, because incorporating a company required a special act of Parliament – a power inherited by the colonial (and thereafter state) legislatures. It was not until the 19th century that it became the norm to for companies to be incorporated under a general incorporation statute, as opposed to a separate incorporation statute being passed to incorporate each individual company.

Did they envision labor unions with mandatory and exclusive bargaining rights? I'm not sure what the point of going down that rabbithole would be in this case.

At what point should we stop considering the unstated or not explicitly codified thoughts of the writers of the Constitution?

I swore an oath to defend that cloth multiple times and at this point it’s not clear that it holds up to 21st century scrutiny for being the kind of governing document we would create, should we have an opportunity to do so.

It's a magical religion used to rationalize whatever position a speaker wants to push. Appeal to dead revered authority's supposed intent fallacy. Instead, we should be honest, wise, cautious, aware of history, and principled about the needs and concerns now and for the future that diverged significantly due to differences in technology and geopolitics while human nature hasn't changed all that much. American politics are definitely more corrupt, less educated, less principled, and more divided than any point apart from the 1840's.

The writers of the Constitution and the people who democratically ratified their product.

The Constitution is absolutely open to change via democratic means, but in absence of that, it is the democratic product of the people.

Tell me again who could vote for this document?

Entities have rights because they are comprised of citizens.

We don't get to label a group of citizens and then get to violate their rights because we labeled them.

> We don't get to label a group of citizens and then get to violate their rights because we labeled them.

"We" aren't labeling the citizens, they're doing so themselves. The default mode is that people are subject to unlimited personal liability for the harms they do to others. Society has chosen to make available a privilege of doing business in a limited-liability form (corporations, LLCs, LPs), but that privilege has strings attached. Don't like the strings? Then simply do business individually or as general partners — and accept the risk of unlimited personal liability.

(Also, the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial applies to suits at common law; NLRB cases arise by statute, not common law, although SCOTUS has extended the jury right to so-called equivalents of common-law cases, which seems suspect.)

Careful with that line of thinking. If the justification of getting more resources to consume is violence, then unarmed, poor and concentrated urban populations are going to be the victims, not the perpetrators.

The workers of the world may think the chains were made to bind them, but in truth the chains bind the military and security apparatus.

And this has happened before. The Roman emperor Caracalla once described his policy on taxes and welfare thus - "None should have money but I, so I can bestow it to soldiers."

> The workers of the world may think the chains were made to bind them, but in truth the chains bind the military and security apparatus.

The last quarter millenia of history stands in contradiction to this. The country with the most extensive security apparatus in 1916 was Russia, and that did not help the czar and his family in the end.

Among the young in the US, socialism is now as popular as capitalism ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capita... ). As Marx predicted, short sighted big business functionaries yet press ahead with removing the few scraps they toss from the table in response. It is not the working people who have to fear, but the aristocracy. Besides, the enlisted soldiers abandoning the front and marching back to St. Petersburg and Moscow is what really ignited the revolution.

I have my doubts that the socialism that is popular with genz/millenials has much to do with the actual economic system. The same poll showed free enterprise still wildly popular with the same group after all.

Rather I think it more likely that the concerted effort to brand welfare and regulated capitalism as socialism for decades has finally succeeded.

I mean, that's a weird example to pick. Tzarist Russia is the second best police state in 20th century Russia. That doesn't make it very notable, except by the standards of pre-WWI Europe. And the fact that soldiers abandoned the tzar only serves to demonstrate he didn't use this lever of power. If the tzar had plundered the workers and peasants to pay his soldiers, he would have undoubtedly survived.

When Ukrainian pleasants were starving in 1932, did it cause any sort of disturbance? No. Why? Because the soft and pathetic Okhrana was replaced by the effective and ruthless Checka.

The young are simply told that socialism is the cure for their problems, when it isn't. In fact our problems with "capitalism" are general problems with corruption and competition with other countries. Not capitalism in and of itself.

Prosperity requires hard work, and capitalism encourages that push for excellence more than socialism ever could. Socialism tends to degrade into communism and authoritarianism, with lots of corruption, because the notion of giving away everything to the state goes against human nature.

What even is socialism and capitalism except overloaded labels to throw around? Show me policies! :-)

Bruh, it's not the place for a dissertation. But it suffices to say that capitalism in this context is a tendency toward free market, and socialism is a tendency for the government to provide everything (after taking it from workers and businesses, of course). I think we need a little of both but putting the government in charge of anything warrants a thorough examination of any viable alternatives.

Have you read Burnham's The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World?

I often wonder if what we have today is really capitalism or rather it is something much worse.

We have Oligarchy marching around in capitalist skin suits.

> If the justification of getting more resources to consume is violence, (...)

You picked a very peculiar weasel word to refer to being fairly compensated by the value you create. As if workers who scramble to make ends meet while working for the wealthiest organizations ever devised by man were actually wasting resources that can only possibly be used wisely by billionaires.

And by the way, I recommend you check out the french revolution, and what the urban plebes did to their old masters.

Didn't you read the post I'm replying to? It's referring to a guillotine. A method of public executions. Unless you believe executions to be a non-violent affair?

As to the French revolution, who ended up being the master of the French plebes at the end? Could it be a certain military officer named Napoleon and his marshalls?

As opposed to the violence done to them by the wealthy? In comparison it was quite surgical. That Napoleon managed to run off with it is an error but that wasn't the only possible outcome and even today France has some of the strongest social fabrics that traces its threads straight back to those guillotine ropes.

> Didn't you read the post I'm replying to. It's referring to a guillotine. A method of public executions. Unless you believe executions to be a non-violent affair?

I'm not sure if you are being disingenuous, but you should pay attention to what I said and understand that my comment was on your adoption and use of the weasel word "justification of getting more resources to consume".

As if actually paying workers a living wage is somehow destroying resources.

Either the company's profits go for the billionaire's pockets, or it is transfered to the worker's salary as part of the fair compensation for making everything happen. It's curious how you only see "destruction of resources" when profits don't line up a billionaire's pockets.

Do you understand what I said?

Old people aren't usually starting revolutions.

If you paid young people to go on vacations in Thailand - that'd be a an anti-guillotine fund.

> Old people aren't usually starting revolutions.

Social security covers way more stuff than pention plans, at least in civilized countries. It covers stuff like unemployment benefits, medical leaves, parental leaves, etc.

I think that in some countries it also covers some healthcare.

The US is civilized (I assume you meant to imply it isn't) and our welfare programs are not all under one umbrella is not like that. The actual naming of the programs is irrelevant. I do wish that we had a bit more benefits, but we don't even collect enough taxes to fund the benefits we already have. The US simply wouldn't be competitive in the global economy if it did offer all the benefits many European countries do. Neither Europe nor the US are really competitive with poorer countries in the world, especially because of high expenses like health care.

I wonder why healthcare is so expensive in the US...

Everything in the US is much more expensive than in most places in the world. We have the dominant global reserve currency and also minimum standards of living that are much more expensive than elsewhere. Additionally, the supply of doctors is limited by a professional body, and there's a government-mandated insurance racket that is basically on the hook to cover a lot of stuff. So the doctors charge the market rate for their services, knowing they will probably get paid all or none. If you took out the guaranteed payors, prices would naturally go down because nobody could pay.

We could try to fix prices like the socialist countries do. But this does not lead to good outcomes in any conceivable way. Price fixing creates scarcity. I think we already try to increase supply of healthcare workers by importing them. But I don't know enough about it to know if a meaningful number of them are imported.

If a young person asks me for career advice, I'm saying that they should try for medicine. Not everyone can handle it I'm sure, but demographic projections suggest it has a positive outlook.

> Everything in the US is much more expensive than in most places in the world.

Except for gas.

They yearn for socialism and this is how they express it.

> They yearn for socialism and this is how they express it.

Socialism is not the bogeyman you think it is. Some of us who were fortunate enough to benefit from living in countries in western Europe can tell you that basic rights such as 10 weeks of paid parental leave including for the father is a very nice thing to have.

Paid parental leave? Western Europe?

Who knew the socialist revolution would be won not through class struggles ultimately culminating in a violent popular uprising by the proletariat, but rather by redefining "socialism" to mean welfare capitalism?

Paid leave has nothing to do with "workers owning the means of production."

My employees get a ton of paid leave because I respect them, not because our business is socialist.

You are choosing that, and that is admirable. But in a democratic-socialist country (pick pretty much and country in Europe with the possible exception of Switzerland), that is not an employer being nice, but is the law so it is not up to the employer to decide if their employees get that or not.

I'm sure it is very nice to have extra vacation. That might be why European salaries are lower than US salaries, and their tax rates are higher still.

Behold, a socialist "utopia" where people line up 3 days to see a "free" dentist: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/people-line-outside-dentist-third-... This is probably a little worse than average but I have heard many times that socialist countries with free healthcare will let you die before seeing you, because they simply don't have resources to live up to the promise. In that case you'd be lucky to have cash to get out and see a doctor in another country.

> I'm sure it is very nice to have extra vacation.

Parental leave is not vacation.

At the and of the day, life expectancy is lower in US than in western Europe.

I always wonder if this is still true for 90th or 95th percentile income in each region

Behold a capitalist "utopia" where maybe if you are lucky your community might throw you a scrap of healthcare once a year https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/economy_and_business/...

They were lining up because their local area had had a significant shortage of dentists, not because of some socialist death panel agenda.

Behold, a capitalist "utopia" where your medical bills being paid can depend on how many people you can share your GoFundMe with, or where you divorce your lifelong spouse while on hospice care so as to not saddle them with debts arising from your end of life care.

Imagine finding internet humor in an online forum! Fetch the fainting couch!

More seriously, while almost nobody is calling for actual guillotines there is a huge problem looming: income inequality started getting worse 40 years ago and that trend is only going to get worse as automation becomes more capable. Pair that with the demographic trends (fewer workers supporting more retired people) and climate change, and this century is shaping up to be quite volatile compared to most people’s lived experience. History has taught us that one of the greatest sparks for conflict is lack of hope; a slight increase in the taxes rich people pay will reduce that risk and it’s hardly a communist uprising to go back to the rates which balanced the budget two decades ago.

This is one of the many reasons that I’m traveling the world to look for a new home. I love my city and surrounding metro. I wrote an angry diatribe when an asshole politician criticized it. A friend suggested submitting it to a local paper and it got published there. I wanted to live here for the rest of my life.

America is too hostile towards regular people. Its values don’t match mine. I’ll sadly accept a lot of things in my life changing in ways I regret to separate from it.

>America is too hostile towards regular people.

So many family members constantly remind me that "your brain is capable enough to escape most of America's problems, just earn more money..."

And I keep having to remind them that I don't want to out-compete against others, just so I can have basic healthcare (not attached to employment). Universal healthcare would "lift all the boats," and not just the yacht-owners'.

>This is one of the many reasons that I’m traveling the world to look for a new home.

I just applied for my passport, and am looking forward to worldly exploration.

> I just applied for my passport, and am looking forward to worldly exploration.

Congrats! Travel is super important to gain perspective - culturally, politically, and socially.

As an added bonus, having a passport makes ID verification much less of a pain in the ass (typically you just need a passport rather than a state ID + other documents).

Without the board, employees would not be allowed to exercise their right to negotiate together without actually losing their job, which I'd say is fairly unconstitutional.

America already feels like a corporation not a country to a large part of the working class. Further undermining the safeguards for labor will have a huge impact on the labor movement. The pendulum will swing mighty hard the other direction in response. This is a dumb move by corporate America.

You're absolutely right.

And yet some people are still surprised by the political climate in America that is being created as a result. I keep saying that someone (I don't care who) needs to do something about housing, healthcare, and wages before there's even bigger trouble.

Dumb move by Amazon. First time after hearing criticism of them for over 20 years that I actually felt like I was wrong about them.

Amazon has been on the late stage capitalism warpath for awhile now.

They even have internal reports that they are going to exhaust the labor pool due to their hiring and firing practices at warehouses within a few years.

The latest news from the Amazon delivery side? They are looking to reduce the minimum hiring age from 21 to 18. That just screams trying to scrape the barrel of the nearly exhausted labor pool and they don't give a single fuck why they are in the predictament they are facing.

Will cause reasonable people do unreasonable things. Sometimes I wonder how lacking the aggregate critical thinking is of the folks at these orgs having these back room conversations, or that they’ve never opened a history textbook. I suppose the result of their positions, disconnection from median reality, and perception of risk.

"I put a dog in a corner, why did it viciously attack me!?"

It's very hard because I don't see how we would ever actually trigger any sort of revolution anymore.

I personally live way too comfortably to justify to myself the possibility of being arrested, hurt or even killed for anything I believe in. I hate myself for that, but the logical part of my brain simply won't let me do it. Even when I was making much less, I still had this same mentality.

For better or worse, the line that must be crossed for millions to actually get together and do something about it is much, much lower in this day and age.

If there's one thing that is clear to me, is that when many of the rights we have today, that were fought and conquered with blood, people had much worse conditions of living. People were already in terrible situations, so taking personal risk in order to fight for something better was not so far fetched.

Another aspect is that we now live much more individualized lives. We no longer have the communities we had before, nor the similar shared communities. Only individuals that actively seek like-minded people and causes to fight for, end up together. The vast majority lives in their own bubble.

P.S: dang, if you read this, can you tell me if I can even comment on anything with any "ideological" overlap anymore. I don't wanna break any site rules but it's really hard for me to know where you draw the line for this stuff. I just enjoy discussing these matters and I'm not trying to create flame wars or anything like that.

> America already feels like a corporation not a country

There is a concerning percentage of US citizens that actively wants this.

"He will run America like one of his business"

The problem with the idea that 'the pendulum will eventually swing back' is that it isn't true. History's graveyard has way more countries in it than are currently in existence. Every one of those dead countries/societies saw the pendulum 'swing back' every time except the last one.

They're feeling the squeeze for sure, Millennials don't feel invested in the market (because we have no investments due to multiple fleecings across the last 15 years), and Gen Z is radicalized beyond belief against capitalism.

The mood is that Boomers are only going to be "in charge" for so long, and when that tape runs out, things stop being so predictable. I bet they'll ratchet up as much of these alienating policies as possible just to ensure the overton window buffers out progressive action before they don't have the means to anymore.

A cheap but effective tactic for them to take.

The future sure does look more and more radical, going to be interesting to see what flavor wins out (reds or browns).

> Gen Z is radicalized beyond belief against capitalism.

This is a strangely heated way of describing it.

It's a strangely heated topic for them, far more than the previous two generations. I'm generalizing of course, this is just based on my own personal experiences with Gen Z, there's a lot of variability within any generation. That said, the identified causes of suffering have shifted inexorably.

I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other about the labor board, but presumably that can’t be the justification for why we need a labor board. Most things that are criminally or civilly punishable don’t have specific government entity that enforces them.

There’s no free speech board.

It was a compromise to help move away from the old way of dealing with labor disputes, which involved murders on both sides. The local cops were almost always in the pockets of the wealthy (which has of course changed in the intervening century of course) so congress helped set an independent federal agency to regulate disputes. Go read about the events surrounding the Wagner act’s passage, it should help you pick a side.

>which I'd say is fairly unconstitutional.

Genuinely curious, what part of the Constitution protects their right to negotiate?

The NLRA was passed in 1935 which is the law that have the following:

> Section 7: Employees have the right to self-organize, form, join, or assist labor unions, bargain collectively with employers through representatives of their own choosing, and engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining.

> Section 8(a)(1): Employers cannot interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their rights under Section 7.

Shortly after that, it was challenged [1]. In short, The Supreme Court upheld the act in a 5-4 decision, acknowledging Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, even indirectly through labor regulations. This was not the only case. The supreme court weighted on many aspects of the act [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLRB_v._Jones_%26_Laughlin_Ste...

[2] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/unions-have...

Thank you.

The first link did not work. I think the correct one is:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLRB_v._Jones_%26_Laughlin_Ste....

Thanks, fixed.

The National Labor Relations Act creates a right to collective bargaining for private sector employees. It's not a fundamental constitutional right, but it is a right.

I've seen arguments about it being impossible for the state to restrict union activities under the 1st amendment because of freedom of association, and trying to shoehorn it into the 14th under a due process theory (can't deprive liberty without process). These are both restrictions on state activity, i.e. saying that the state can't outlaw unions, rather than saying that a private sector company couldn't just immediately fire anyone who joins a union.

I think you mean "private sector" instead of "public sector" unless you are using a non-standard definition of what public means. In this context public vs private is in relation to the state (government) not the stocks and shareholders.

Oops, you're right, I'll edit that.

The 13th

I don't think that would work. The thirteenth is the amendment which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, both of which would only apply if a company was forcibly stopping you from leaving a job.

The right to assembly is a restriction on the government, not private enterprise.

The Supreme Court has already upheld that the right for employees to organize is a fundamental one and that Congress can enforce it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLRB_v._Jones_%26_Laughlin_Ste....

> ...the statute goes no further than to safeguard the right of employees to self-organization and to select representatives of their own choosing for collective bargaining or other mutual protection without restraint or coercion by their employer.

> That is a fundamental right. Employees have as clear a right to organize and select their representatives for lawful purposes as the respondent has to organize its business and select its own officers and agents. Discrimination and coercion to prevent the free exercise of the right of employees to self-organization and representation is a proper subject for condemnation by competent legislative authority.

It's the mechanism of enforcement that seems to be in question here, but IANAL.

I don't see anything in the constitution about that.

If nothing else, the NLRB forces people who otherwise like their job to join a union they may not like, which seems equally unconstitutional.

The point of a union is that if you don't like it you can advocate to it for changes with less of a power imbalance than if it was the company that you didn't like. The union can't fire you like the company can.

To paraphrase a common argument about why we don't need unions, if you don't like the union, why not just find another job?

> I don't see anything in the constitution about that.

> The point of a union is…

Those comments are unrelated. You can like an idea but that doesn’t mean it’s constitutional, which is why amendments exist. Conversely, you can very much dislike an idea that may be in the Constitution.

“Good idea” and “legal” are distinct categories.

Rightness and legality are intertwined in a world where laws are slower than public opinion and people can voluntarily choose to do more than only what the law allows for.

But a more direct criticism of the legal aspect would be: getting a job is voluntary from a legal perspective, how does that make joining the associated union a compelled action? The union is part of the job.

Besides, union security agreements already _are_ heavily regulated in the US.

> less of a power imbalance than if it was the company that you didn't like.

Not really. Sure you in theory vote for union leaders, but in practice it ends up being just as bad as any other politics and so you don't really have any more ability to change things.

> The union can't fire you like the company can.

What is the difference between being fired and being told we don't have any work for you? Labors often do lose their job - they may still be in the union and thus early in line if there is another job, but they don't have control of when jobs come up.

> Sure you in theory vote for union leaders, but in practice it ends up being just as bad as any other politics

This is not at all universally true? A union can be dysfunctional just like any other collaboration between people—that's hardly a reason to not even try.

Specifically, I joined the Glitch union along with my coworkers in 2020, and we were pretty united on what we wanted to negotiate for. The union more than paid for the effort we put in to forming it and our dues when it won severance and health coverage for those hit by layoffs later.

> What is the difference between being fired and being told we don't have any work for you? Labors often do lose their job - they may still be in the union and thus early in line if there is another job, but they don't have control of when jobs come up.

What does this have to do with a union improving the power balance in negotiations between employees and a company? If you're suggesting that even with a union companies can find ways to get rid of you, well, that's one of the very things unions can fight against with the help of the labor board being threatened in the article above.

You are saying that people are entitled to block others from taking a job they wont do?

"rights" are purely metaphysical super natural constructs they're only enforced via might.

Enjoy your corporate overlord fiefdoms

Funny how few people understand that “rights” are not fundamental. What good is a “right” that nobody observes you actually have?

Rights are granted by the legal observation of said right. If your right boils down to words without observability, it’s not a right.

They’re a convenient term for “freedom we care about a lot”. They’re good as a propaganda (neutral sense) tool.

Folks getting hung up on “well that’s a right and this other thing can’t be because technically…” are definitely missing the last 200ish years of thought in that area, though. As are the ones who think rights are actually better-protected than other freedoms (aside from the PR boost of the name! And maybe “popular” rights are better-enshrined in law, but that’s not inherent in their being a right—we could so-protect anything)

There’s no set list that’s definitely correct and they also don’t “exist” in any meaningful sense if they can’t be exercised (any more than Tinkerbell exists). It’s just a nice label. Which isn’t nothing! But they’re not “real” in the sense some people suppose they are, even philosophically.

I think a lot of this confusion stems from focus in US schools on the political philosophy state-of-the-art c. 1776 as an underpinning of a kind of US Civil Religion. Most of that stuff’s kinda crap. Go read the famously influential Second Treatise, it’s actually a pretty easy read and not that long. It’s plainly (to a modern reader) not strong.

This all seems like an awfully pretentious way to say "I disagree with the founding fathers of the US. They lived a long time ago so they are obviously wrong, ammirite?" No, you're not right. Human nature hasn't changed in thousands of years, much less hundreds. While we might have better technology than they did, we're still just a bunch of monkeys trying to get along.

Uh, no. The “natural rights” line of thought has just proven to be more-or-less a dead end, in political philosophy. It’s hard to make a strong argument for it, especially without resorting to the divine. “Rights” are a rhetorical tool—which isn’t nothing, but arguing that they have some reality beyond that is… well, if you can really nail such an argument, you can get some papers published and they’re guaranteed to be influential, put it that way.

Having been wrong about some things doesn’t make someone stupid. Plato got some stuff wrong. Doesn’t make him dumb.

Rights are just another layer of rules in a society. The most fundamental rules, I guess one would say. We can disagree about them but some people pretend to disagree for disingenuous reasons. For example, in almost every part of the world, one has at least some kind of right to self-defense. It's unnatural to not defend one's self. Even the stupidest and wimpiest animals will bite if attacked. Does the parallel with nature make it a natural law? I think one could make the argument. Besides there isn't too much downside in letting people defend themselves within reason.

I think we could get very analytical about some rights of course. The right to not incriminate yourself is a subtle one. But it relies on an argument about a number of biological and practical realities.

Not everything has a parallel so direct as pointing to what animals do. But as social structures are evolved rather than simply imagined, there may be naturalistic arguments to be had in favor of rights that facilitate everyone getting along.

Anyway, that's the overview of how I'd approach it all. It's probably been done by someone. If you happen to know, I'd appreciate the reference.

Part of why the “natural” angle is so hard to argue strongly is that you can use it to advance almost anything as a right, by selecting which parts to highlight. Is defense a right, or is safety—what self-defense seeks—a right? These are very different things, and it’s not clear that either’s more-correct nor that they’re wholly compatible. Does the animal defending itself prefer to defend itself, or would it rather not need to in the first place?

This is the kind of trouble one gets into with these analogies-from-nature, or with the kind of fictional humanity-in-the-state-of-nature stories that used to be in vogue for “proving” which things are or are not natural rights: they’re usually superfluous, because we’re just using motivated reasoning to reach the same conclusions we would have if asked to list what we think ought to be rights without that foundation. Instead of discussing which outcomes are likely and preferred by protecting some set of rights, we waste time deciding which set of from-nature analogies or tales are valid (if we go down this road and find that holding slaves is a right—what then? But we won’t, because the whole thing is just motivated reasoning anyway, so we’ll pick some different set of stories to ensure we don’t end up there—repeat for everything else)

At some point the U.S. will have to either do away with the fiction that corporations are people or just say normalize the notion that the people serve corporations. We should change JFK’s statement a bit. Ask not what corporations can do for you but rather what you can do for them.

We’ve legalized foreign campaign contributions as long as it comes from a corporation so why not ban labor protections and whatnot? The country needs a major reset in terms of governance and representation. Things like banning the labor board brings us closer to having that reset.

I’m firmly of the opinion that the best outcome for the radical left would be a second Trump presidency as it would likely aid in recruitment and disillusionment with the current paradigm.

Let your enemy show how truly debased and unhinged they can be so that everyone is forced to pick a side. People wonder why political discourse has shifted away from “the middle” and it’s because people are realizing they were lulled into relative political passivity during the clinton-obama eras. The number of older Americans who were beneficiaries of the cold-war era American Prosperity are giving way to a younger generation that feels everything was withheld from them (imo rightfully so) by those in power.

So yea, let Elon and Bezos blow up the NLRB, I’m sure it will help shares in the short term and drive labor militancy in the long term. Win win!

They tried to overturn the last election, and only by the grace of people that stood up when it mattered did that fail. If they seize power again, they will not give it up peacefully. They've already purged all dissenters from within their own ranks, and if given the opportunity to fill out the government with their own ranks they will take it.

We shouldn't be rooting for political violence, which is what you're talking about.

The republicans have had this view for as long as I can remember. They have wanted to demolish the welfare state, and to turn this place into the Corporate States of America. And of course, they've added on extremist Christians and white nationalists to their ranks.

And now, the R's pulled the curtain on their Lee Atwater-esque double-speak and now just say what they want.

Sure, the big bugaboo right now is Trump, but he's just the current symptom. Listen to any of the current to republicans - it's either trumpean say-it-like-you-mean-it, or coded language that means the same thing.

This country is already eating itself from the inside out, primarily because those types are already in lifelong positions, and otherwise controlling the bureaucracy.

I'm expecting a civil war out of this. Except it won't be "North vs South", but "rural+suburb vs urban". And urban is the BIG coastal cities.

We're still deciding on whether to plan for civil war, or to GTFO out of here. Either way, it'll probably happen within 10y, or less if Trump is elected.

This is what the phrase "cut off your nose to spite your face" was created to describe.

How did this work out the first time around? Did it bolster the left's recruitment efforts so much that they became the kingmakers poised to win big majorities and revolutionize society top to bottom at the end of his term? No, it did not.

Did it instead directly result in the composition of the Supreme Court that may actually agree with Amazon's argument in this case? Yes, it did.

The second time around would be just the same. You'd find yourself surprised by the apparent complacency of most people in not taking up your cause, while seeing things you care about get worse in tangible ways.

> The second time around would be just the same. You'd find yourself surprised by the apparent complacency of most people in not taking up your cause, while seeing things you care about get worse in tangible ways.

Would be even worse. Even for Trump's audacity, he still had to at least vaguely attempt to be re-electable for a second term. If he's re-elected now, no such "restraint" on his excess (and I shudder to think what he will attempt to do as the end of the second term approaches in the realm of whether he actually wants it to end - this is the man who openly admires dictators and says he aspires to be one).

Accelerationism was always popular on the 'left' but it never worked out.

Yep. It can ALWAYS get worse.

You are strongly underestimating the stupidity of these people.

There is a reason for the saying “a conservative would let their leaders shit in their mouth as long as they thought a liberal might have to smell it”.

These people are highly conditioned to believe that them losing is actually a win so long as someone else is also losing and they STILL vote for it.

Thinking that losing even harder is going to sway these people is off base. They enjoy losing. They don’t care if they lost even harder.

Even when they recognize that they lost, which is a hugely rare occurrence (they’re not hurting the right people, for example), they just blame the left anyway.

Right wing politicians are on record stating “well why didn’t you stop us!? This is your fault!” When they shit blows up in everyone’s face.

We really need to stop projecting our morality on to these people. They do not care, and when they do care, it’s your fault, not theirs.

What gets me about opposition to unions as limiting a free market is that unions solve a very real problem with the efficiency of employee negotiations. A union is a much more efficient way to discover what the employees want from their workplaces than negotiating individually with them one by one.

When negotiations break down, the union makes it clear and potentially strikes or takes other steps to pressure the company. When individual employee negotiations break down, you get churn and underperformance and dissatisfaction. People will often see burnout or mismanagement and assume it's an individual issue vs a breakdown in the contract between workers and the company.

You know what else gets me about union opposition? Unions help everyone. When I was managing union employees, despite not being in the union as a manager myself, I was paid better, had better benefits, etc... Rising tides lift all ships.

That’s generally how it works in Germany. We have had more strikes than usual the last few years, but they’re usually really short.

In my particular industry, having a very strong but pragmatic union that the companies know can make their very expensive production lines stop motivates everyone to quickly work things out.

I decided to finally join IG Metall after they got us a quickly-negotiated 8% raise during the post-Covid inflation. They were realistic enough to give phase-in time, so there’s still been some sting for us, but we’ve not felt motivated to strike.

Unions do not help everyone. Unions often impose artificially high labor costs, which results in a lower amount of jobs being created. The real impact soon becomes apparent when companies start to lay off those union employees because their margins are slim and they try to automate as much as possible, instead of hiring people to do the job.

See the recent UPS layoff, just after 6 months of a great union deal: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/difficult-disappointing-ups-l...

With slaves or prison labor you can sustain even smaller margins, can have many more people employed and you can avoid automation for much longer.

> plans to lay off 12,000 employees to save $1 billion in costs

( 1000 000 000 / 12 000 = 83 334 )

> The mass layoffs mainly target management-level and contractor positions.

> She attributed the weak performance to increased labor costs, challenges in the broader U.S. economy, freight complications abroad and the disruption tied to labor negotiations last summer that diverted business to rivals.

https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/ups-ceo-says-delivery...

> The deal will also create 7,500 new full-time union jobs at UPS (NYSE:UPS) and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, giving more opportunities for part-timers to transition to full-time work.

7.5 + 22.5 - 12 = 18 ?

These efforts may succeed.

The current Supreme Court is on a tear of revoking precedents and inventing new legal standards. One is historical tradition, which is nonsense. Another is the major questions doctrine, which is also nonsense. It basically says that if the court decides an issue is important enough the court can overrule the other two branches.

This is coming to a head this term with a case that threatens to overturn another Supreme Court precedent called Chevron. This 40 year old decision says that courts should give deference to regulatory agencies where there’s ambiguity.

Congress and multiple administrations have relied upon this when writing law. It’s what allows the administrative state to exist and function.

This court seems set to decide that Congress has to be explicit on every little thing, which is completely unworkable. And that’s the point: to cripple executive oversight.

It’s the rich and powerful neutering regulations and oversight to the detriment of everyone else so they can make even more money because regulations hurt profits.

That’s all that’s going on here.

The major questions doctrine itself is a relaxation of strict separation of powers. Normally there is strict separation between lawmaking, judicial functions, and enforcement. MQD at least allows the "minor questions" to be exceptions. I know that a lot of people think separation of powers is inefficient and outdated, but it's still the law of the land.

I see the "major questions doctrine" the opposite way. I see it as a power grab by the judiciary to deign to decide that some things are too important to trust to the text Congress wrote into the laws they passed. The Court is telling Congress "you weren't specific enough when you wrote this law and the agency is taking advantage of your ambiguity, and we won't allow it". Instead, the Court should say, "what this agency is doing is plausibly within the bounds of this legal text due to its ambiguity".

If Congress would like to clarify, they are free to do so. The Court should not be saying "we believe this is too important of an issue for ambiguity to allow this action", they should only ever say "we believe this action is unambiguously in violation of this law".

(And FWIW, what I described is pretty much just what Chevron deference already is.)

> If Congress would like to clarify, they are free to do so.

Unfortunately, Congress is, and has been for a long time, nonfunctional. Besides routine reauthorizations and trivialities like renaming post offices, how often in the past 20 years have we seen actual, significant legislative action? What's legal and illegal today is roughly the same as what was legal and illegal back in the '90s, and it will probably be roughly the same in the 2050's. We've totally ossified and are incapable of meaningfully changing outside of judicial interpretations and "legislating from the bench."

> Unfortunately, Congress is, and has been for a long time, nonfunctional.

But that is, in my view, irrelevant to the question of whether the Supreme Court should or should not usurp their power.

Sure, but if we're saying they shouldn't, then we're saying that the law should just be frozen in time, essentially forever (but at least for the lifetime of anyone who is alive today). The last time that a single party had 1. a majority in the house and 2. >60% of the senate was 1979, and that's what it takes to pass anything besides routine, insignificant legislation. And thanks to gerrymandering and political entrenchment on both sides, I can't think of anything short of a war that could draw us out of the stalemate.

There are lots of things that could draw us out of the stalemate. Not all of the possibilities are good, but I can't think of any that are worse than ceding the legislative power to a committee of 9 people who are unelected and appointed for life.

For instance, if the current legislative system really is broken beyond repair, even a whole new constitutional convention would be a better very bad option than "the Court does all the legislating now".

And a better bad option than that would be for more things to be done via executive action and agency rule-making. The executive is at least subject to the peoples' will every few years.

But I don't think it's true that there is no way to make the legislature work. I think filibuster reform is the place to start. You're right that getting to 60 votes for every single piece of legislation in the Senate is an absurd requirement. But it is not true of every piece of legislation, and there are very recent success stories (the Inflation Reduction Act) of passing useful legislation through simple majorities of both chambers. I think just having that capability for more bills would go a long way. And it only requires a simple majority (and significant political backbone) to reform the filibuster. I think it will happen soon, as the legislative stalemate and rule-by-Court is an increasingly frustrating situation to the electorate, and not just for one side or the other.

And I don't think the stalemate in the House is actually a systemic problem. There are some rule changes at the margin that I think would be useful; decreasing the power of leadership in favor of the committees for instance. But the reason the house is dysfunctional right now (besides that the party in the majority is itself just very clownish at the moment) is that it is incredibly closely divided, reflecting an electorate that is itself very divided. The biggest improvement we could make to that would be gerrymandering reform, but even without gerrymandering, the House wouldn't have a large majority one way or the other. Even the national popular vote is consistently within 5 points each election. We just don't have strong political consensus at the moment, and the House reflects that, as it should. Legislating from the bench is the worst possible solution to that problem!

Rational companies go to the absolute extent of the law. If they don't then some other company will and they will die. That means I don't look at a company and call it 'evil' based on them taking advantage of legal thing x, y or z. What defines evil to me are companies that lobby for or support in other ways expanding harmful policies or reducing protections for people. I honestly don't know the details of the arguments involved here but the high level read smells of evil.

> If they don't then some other company will and they will die.

This really isn't true. There are many companies out there that go above and beyond, in terms of acting ethically. In fact, it can be a competitive advantage to do so, for many reasons. (One, being employees who believe in your mission and buy into it, are far more likely to be productive long-term employees.)

I should qualify 'when it helps them make money'. There are lots of companies that do use the optics of 'being kind' to make money. Additionally, there are companies have influential people leading them that sway their actions in 'nice' ways at the expense of profit but this isn't, strictly speaking, rational behavior for a company. The reality is that the majority do go to what they believe to be the limits of the law so long as it helps them make a profit and this is totally ok. It is the companies that then lobby to change the limits to favor themselves at the expense of actual people that I believe are evil.

Acting ethically can be turned into a PR boost, but it would take time and money to do so.

Corporate personhood is unconstitutional, the rights of human beings don't apply to imaginary legal constructions designed to protect the holders of capital from having any criminal or civil responsibility for the actions of the corporations that they ultimately control.

It's a system in which major shareholders benefit from the criminal and reckless behavior of executives (who get large bonuses for taking the risk, although as the 2008-2009 subprime mortgage fraud episode demonstrated, even they don't face much real risk for engaging in criminal activities on behalf of their shareholders).

At the very least, if corporations are people, they should be subjected to the death penalty for engaging in egregious misconduct - state seizure of all corporate assets with no compensation to shareholders followed by restructuring makes sense in such cases, e.g. Boeing, Purdue Pharma, etc.

The history of corporate personhood entering into the American legal system is absolutely bonkers. This whole article is worth a read, but I'll pull out the short version too https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corpora...

How did this idea enter the legal system? This is the work of a few men.

Justice Stephen J. Field was angry about the case Santa Clara County v Souther Pacific Railroad. He was incensed because the court refused to answer the question of whether or not corporations were people.

> When the Court issued its decision on this second case, the justices expressly declined to decide if corporations were people. The dispute could be, and was, resolved on other grounds, prompting an angry rebuke from one justice, Stephen J. Field, who castigated his colleagues for failing to address “the important constitutional questions involved.” “At the present day, nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations,” he wrote, and they deserved to know if they had equal rights too.

The mechanism that decisions were communicated in the 1880s was to publish official volumes of decisions. J.C. Bancroft Davis acted as the court reporter for the volume containing this case and wrote up an inaccurate summary of the case.

> The reporter in the 1880s was J. C. Bancroft Davis, whose wildly inaccurate summary of the Southern Pacific case said that the Court had ruled that “corporations are persons within … the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whether his summary was an error or something more nefarious—Davis had once been the president of the Newburgh and New York Railway company—will likely never be known.

Justic Field seized upon the incorrect summary and would inject his preferred reality into an unrelated case.

> Field nonetheless saw Davis’s erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.

It is that completely made up precedent that then became the foundation for legal corporate personhood.

Corporate personhood includes the ability for corporations to own property, enter contracts, and serve as plaintiff or defendant.

And corporations have civil rights only as a tool of shareholders' civil rights. For example, Citizens United was a corporation formed expressly for the purposes of political speech.

Corporate personhood is a way for a “corporation” to take responsibility for the actual humans that comprise is. It’s a passing of responsibility from the real to the unreal.

All founders/CEOs should be responsible for their creations. You want to helm a massive, un-democratic monster of “innovation and job creation” in order to accrue wealth? Fine, but you’re putting yourself at a major risk.

It sounds like you are confusing corporate personhood with limited liability.

Show me Asset Forfeiture before the company is proven guilty because the money committed the crime!

Until corporations can be arrested, they cannot be given the same rights as people.

NLRB was set up by Congress to enforce the National Labor Relations ACT! So it's basically a court that's set up to adjudicate Labor Disputes and enforce Labor Laws/Regulations and promote negotiated solutions rather than Strikes and Walkouts. And in fact if there's a strike planned then the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service has to be notified in advance of any Strike Vote! Go on strike without notifying the FMCS and the strike is not legal and can result in a Union losing their case there in Labor Court(NLRB).

So if one wants to go back to the old days of the Pinkerton Thugs and wildcat strikes and outright social conflict then just try and get rid of the NLRB and related Laws and Courts.

Right — but there’s a broad question of if Congress can establish special courts. This is being asked about more than labor, including taxes and regulations.

The rise of special administrative courts is arguably denying people their rights to be heard in courts, which while you say benefits average people here, is also harming them when in disputes with the FDA/USDA.

Should we save labor unions at the cost of Big Ag destroying small farmers?

Unfortunately, there’s not a simple solution here. (Though, I’m generally against the rise of the administrative state — so I think special courts are inherently wrong.)

> Right — but there’s a broad question of if Congress can establish special courts. This is being asked about more than labor, including taxes and regulations.

The issue isn't with Congress establishing special courts – it is establishing these special courts as part of the executive branch instead of as part of the judicial branch.

If Congress was to establish a specialist Article III "United States Labor Relations Court", the constitutional argument being made here by Amazon/SpaceX/etc would not apply. Instead, Congress decided to establish a "National Labor Relations Board", which is not an Article III court, it is an Article I tribunal, [0] and the constitutional question being raised here is about the constitutionality of Article I tribunals.

(I doubt SCOTUS is going to find all Article I tribunals unconstitutional – military courts-martial are an example of an Article I tribunal which SCOTUS is highly unlikely to find to be unconstitutional – but it is plausible they may soon [1] rule against their use in regulatory matters such as labor or securities regulation.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tribunals_in_the_Unite...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_v._Jarkesy

Corporations are not the same as People and The Citizens United SCOTUS decision was the most slippery slope there. And if you want to Weather some really serious social strife not seen since the last Gilded age then just go right back to the late 19th century and early 20th and look at Labor History in the US.

I do not see what this has to do with Small Farmers any more that any other business and really if you like depressions then just keep moving more wealth from the Middle Classes and moving the up to the 1-5% richest in the US and you will get that depression to clean/balance that all out there. The US is a consumer economy and the Middle Class in the US is Directly/Indirectly the creation of the Labor Movement in the US and there's no getting around that fact in the history of the US. The US has been in a New Gilded age since the 1980s and that's about ready to begin being turned back towards being more Labor Focused and moving the Tax Burden back onto the Corporations and off of the backs of the Middle Class that are not really Middle Class if one looks at the cost of Living currently!

Big ag also has many advantages in the regular court system. Like simply having more capital.

Of course — and even more advantages in special administrative courts, where even reaching a regular court to assert your rights is so expensive most small farmers can’t afford it and where Big Ag doesn’t have to expend any money at all since their paid-for pol does the fighting using taxpayer funds.

Removing special courts doesn’t solve the disparity; but it does improve the situation for small farmers trying to provide their communities with wholesome foods.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

Let’s be unpopular today…

The Board may be a good thing, it may be a bad thing, ane plaintiffs have an agenda (100%). But the court is not supposed to rule on that at all, or what is right and wrong. It’s supposed to rule on the law.

If the NLRB they’re operating a parallel court system outside of the regular court system, where they’re both a prosecutor outside normal Executive Branch oversight, and a judge outside the Judicial Branch, that’s exactly the sort of thing a Supreme Court full of (establishment) conservatives is going to strike down, not because they hate labor (though it might also be true) but because it violates the power structures prescribed by the Constitution, and their philosophy is that these should actually be upheld. The legislature doesn’t just get to set that sort of a thing up to be independent of the other two branches, any more than they get to have a general police power; it’s a usurpation.

> The legislature doesn’t just get to set that sort of a thing up to be independent of the other two branches, any more than they get to have a general police power; it’s a usurpation.

This is a profound misunderstanding of how checks and balances work. The legislature absolutely has the ability to produce statues and dictate their regulation, and the judicial branch absolutely has the ability to conduct judicial review over statues and whether their regulation exceeds the scope of the proscribed statue. Neither has supremacy over either; they're equally empowered branches of the government.

What the judicial branch isn't empowered to do is to diminish the regulatory authority of the legislative branch. It can review individual laws and their regulatory scope, but it can't erase Article I, Section 8 itself.

Corporations are created [and recognized] by and UNDER Government. Their owners are provided the privilege of limited liability because of it. IF they wish to not be under the regulations then the owners can operate outside of their corporate veil and be fully liable for any and all actions they collectively take...

This is the argument conservatives made in the 1950s and 1960s against blacks having the right to vote, drink from water fountains, swim in public swimming pools, sit anywhere on a bus etc. They said they were not against blacks per se, but against federal encroachment, communists in the civil rights movement etc.

Isn’t it funny that your country is a democracy maybe, but every company is a dictatorship?

Exactly. Some years ago I worked with a Russian who had been previously laid off from a megacorp. He couldn't make sense of it still a couple years later. I said "Think of it this way, every corporation is like a mini-Soviet Union complete with a five year plan" To which he replied: "No, at least in the Soviet Union they always had a job for you"

Yes it's funny. It's also no secret, and people talk about it. They make musicals about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKC8iPeIvEA Also, what about families? Aren't those dictatorships too or is the similarity superficial?

You make a strong argument for dictatorship.

Competing dictatorships of experts seem pretty efficient when workers are free to move.

Amazon joins SpaceX.. la creme de la creme

Don’t foget Starbucks and Trader Joe’s!

These seems to dovetail with an existing case involving the SEC and it's authority that is under review by the Supreme Court:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/sec-v-jarkesy-the-t...

well I have a gripe with the existence of Administrative Law Judges

but ouch, didn't see the NLRB coming being the one on the chopping block to cause this change

hope congress, the people, or the states and their people will create a system that is more durable

I’m all for accelerating this outcome, just always a shock to see what angle it comes from

Regardless of this terrible concept, at-will workers will always have substantial power here. Any time they walk out as a unit, the company is dead until the rift is resolved.

Undoing the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 would be a tragedy but even then, the workers were getting employers' ears.

I'm surprised there is so little interest in this story on HN. There are three different submissions for this which reached the front page, but then rapidly dropped to below page 3.

No one ITT mentions that the constitution can be ammeneded. Instead of arcane arguments we could try to make new compromises with each other.

Meta: I find it so hard to believe this comment thread is comprised of actual citizens/humans making these comments and not shills/bots intentionally manipulating the conversation.

I truly wish I had the ability to look into accounts and see their post history, connection history, see what accounts they have, see which accounts are upvoting and downvoting, see if this is actually organic conversation or to what degree it's all manipulated.

How insane is it to be at the point where we have no visibility into whether we're conversing with other people or are being completely manipulated? I don't know how society can move forwards like this. We need some sort of transparency.

I don't think the idea of a "public square" is long for the internet, if it hasn't already been abandoned. Enforced social (and possibly evolutionary) norms scale in-person to a couple hundred people, but not thousands or millions of semi-/anonymous participants.

If I want to be sure I'm talking to real people, the only way is to know them IRL. My personal solution is to set up my own town squares exclusive to my friends, but that doesn't scale either.

I don't know if there's a solution.

I use my True Name™ to remind myself this could be subject to legal discovery (through no fault of mine). But I like the marketplace of ideas not caring about the pedigree of a good idea.

Feels like there is a balance between ensuring good protection and still allowing markets to be efficient.

These mega corps are the product and the cause of America being the wealthiest country on earth.

America isn't wealthy, only the shareholders are.

Per the Fed: https://www.stlouisfed.org/institute-for-economic-equity/the... ("The State of U.S. Wealth Inequality | February 05, 2024")

> How much wealth inequality is there in the U.S.?

> The top 10% of households by wealth had $6.5 million on average. As a group, they held 66.6% of total household wealth.

> The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $50,000 on average. As a group, they held only 2.6% of total household wealth.

Let's not forget that the US poverty line is artificially kept low using an outdated formula to generate better outlooks and not show the economy has been destroyed since the 1960s for the average person.

Officially the formula is

>The official poverty line as currently defined by the Census Bureau is "three times the cost of a minimum diet in 1963" – meaning it's measured by how much families spent on food five decades ago.

If the poverty formula were correctly updated to reflect shelter (i.e. housing/rent), I bet 50% of Americans would be classified as living in poverty.

According to Wikipedia, not USA is the wealthiest country on earth.

Cause of 1% of Americans owning all of the wealth of America.

Europeans crossing the oceN, committing genocide against the native population and having a slave and Jim Crow society in the resource rich third biggest land mass country in the world is what made America rich.

(China has the fourth largest land mass and on some measures is wealthier than the US)

Some of those things actually made us poorer. Why weren't the natives rich with all that land?

Slavery was constitutional.

Actually still is if you are found convicted of a crime. 13th amendment section 1. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/

On the face of it Amazon seems to be clearly in the right. What's the argument the other way?

I think the problem is the original purpose of unions has been a line bit distorted. Originally it was supposed to protect workers from getting injured and making human capital just expensive enough to make your employees valuable assets you retain.

I have to be careful with my next comment, because reading it on the internet can sound like I personally look down another group of people, which I do not; my goal is to point out that it is not skilled labor.

When we’ve gotten to the point of “package handler unions” and “barista unions”, I think the system is abused. I completely agree with thongs like fire sprinkler installer unions on the other hand.

The other issue i have is forced union dues. Nobody should be forced into paying a private organization money. That is comically unconstitutional

Most of this is inaccurate.

The history of unions is long and complex. Although there has been tension historically between craft unionism and industrial unionism (the original term for lower skilled work), that was mostly in the pre-war period and not really related to the purpose of unions.

No one is forced into paying union dues now anymore than someone is forced to take any particular job. Workers negotiate a contract with their employer that includes a commitment to include all employees as part of the union. It's just a contract.

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