Workplace Equality Is Good for Business
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Let the bigots expose themselves and be punished or not.
To give you a level playing field on which to out-compete companies that won't hire qualified employees who happen to belong to certain groups. The proper way to correct "imbalances of power in the market place" is to use the market place to correct them--in other words, to use the market place as it is intended to be used.
A rather fragile business plan, perhaps not in 2013 USA, but certainly elsewhere in the world and historically. The libertarian argument always seems to assume rational actors playing in ideal conditions. In other words, a situation unlikely to ever arise on its own...
It seems to me you would suggest acceptance cannot be achieved without government intervention, but from where I sit that is exactly what is happening - it just takes time.
Neither did the government passing laws. What ended these things, to the extent that they are ended (try looking up the figures for racially motivated violence in inner cities sometime), was changes in people's attitudes. And those changes are mainly due to compulsory public education plus generational turnover: the old bigots died and their children were indoctrinated with a different mindset.
And that's assuming we magically know who did the damage in the first place, and that it's something other than 'everyone'.
You are misrepresenting my view. The reason for the nudge nudge wink wink is that the government, in allowing polluters to pollute, is acting against the interests of the people it's supposed to represent: it is allowing something that the people, if they were able to make the decision on their own in a free market, would not allow.
In other words, in an actual free market, a potential polluter would not be able to get any special favors from the government: they would have to get explicit permission from every person who would be affected. That's how a free market works: you want to build a factory that puts toxic chemicals in my groundwater? Sorry, no sale.
This is not reality my misrepresentation of your view was better than this one. :(
Where did I say that? You don't need perfect information; you just need the freedom to act on whatever information you have, combined with your judgment about what's important.
none of them think "climate change" is a hoax?
A free market also means we all get to exercise our own judgment, instead of having the government exercise judgment for us.
A: None. The market will take care of it.
The correct answer of course is: it takes one. If a light bulb burnt out, an Objectivist would simply take a new one (from inventory, because they planned for equipment failure) and replace it. What they wouldn't do is suggest it is the responsibility of someone else, ie: "the market".
There are certainly reasonable Objectivists like the one you describe, but they don't include anyone who thinks that all humanity's ills will magically vanish if we just let The Market do whatever it wants. That's why I specifically said Randian Objectivists; Ayn Rand's hypocrisy exemplifies that particular subset of Objectivists.
That's not what I said. I said that the way you fight against racism and bigotry is by using market power: as a customer, you refuse to do business with companies that are racist and bigoted, and as an employee, you refuse to work for them. Or, as an entrepreneur, you start a company that is not racist and bigoted, and out-compete the racist and bigoted companies.
How is your hypothetical world better than one with civil rights legislation?
It seems to me that the actual facts, when the civil rights movement was at its height, were that there was a minority that wanted bigotry to be the standard, and a majority who did not. In my hypothetical world, that majority would have used its market power to make the bigots unable to do business; the only role the government would have had to play would have been to make sure the bigots could not use government power to prop up their businesses.
How would such a hypothetical world be better than the one we have? Need you ask? All the effort we spend today on diversity training, enforcing EEO laws, etc., etc., would be spent on productive effort instead.
and by "correct imbalances of power in the marketplace" i specifically meant "correct for the allowance of human rights abuses by the marketplace because market forces ill-equipped to root them out". the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market will never be the right tool for human rights cases (among many others).
Equal rights to what?
the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy
Which, in the age of the Internet, is easy. The problem is not knowledge: the problem is acting on that knowledge.
For example, Apple has been criticized for employing sweatshop labor in places like China. (Notice that Mr. Cook conveniently does not mention that in his paean to workplace equality.) If you don't think that's a good thing, will you refuse to buy Apple products? Judging by market share, most people's answer appears to be "no".
the pursuit of happiness // income // employment
> Which, in the age of the Internet, is easy
false
And if not, what might it be about this sub-group of people that will never ever "get it" - what's different about them that they simply can't?
I like to think that I am rational, but I still double check myself to make sure I'm not being sexist. Occasionally minor sexist behaviour or thinking still creeps in...
I'm not sure if delusional is the right term - small minded might fit the bill a little better. So if it's due to mental laziness or an inherent dearth of mental ability, perhaps bigotry is difficult to abate without laws to protect minorities.
Nonetheless you ask a good question - with time and exposure can we eliminate bigotry? I hope so. But it's easy to invent new targets for ridicule: Emos, Hipsters, Rockabillies etc. They're not exactly unprivileged minorities, but it shows how easy it is to disparage someone because of their appearance and cultural differences.
I think all of human history shows your hope to be misplaced.
"In sufficient time," perhaps. In the meantime, millions of people are marginalized, exploited, abused, and killed. Those are real human beings, not just statistical stairsteps to Utopia, and I'd prefer to let them have freedom and equality now rather than reserving it for their great-great-great-grandchildren.
What evidence do you have that humans would reach this lollipop level of appreciation and understanding, even in geologic time? Genocides occur even today between peoples for reasons that many even educated people have difficulty deciphering. As well, go look at the comments on YouTube and see if humanity is advanced. I mean really ...
The reason I asked that particular question (and I guess I didn't do a good job of it), and used the word "delusional", is because I personally think there are in many cases vast differences between sub-groups, and these differences are of varying incompatibility. Many of them are imagined (false stereotypes), but many are not, and I also find it naive, this idea that all we have to do is pass some laws to force integration and then suddenly everyone is going to see the hateful errors of their past ways.
As you correctly point out, there is a lot more in history to suggest we cannot "all just get along" than there is to support a unified utopia. Also, in politically correct forums such as these where most participants have a much less diverse background than they'd like to think, there seems to be this pervasive idea that the fault lies all on one side. Listen to some rap music, or go visit one of the more extremist feminist forums, or an atheist forum, where the participants really speak their minds, and you'll see there is plenty of irrational bigoted hatred everywhere, not just from the privileged white male.
To me, the idea that you can solve a problem when you insist on being ignorant of many aspects of it is rather foolish.
Then why is the WSJ article titled "Workplace Equality Is Good For Business?" Shouldn't it be titled "Workplace Equality Is Good, But We Need To Force Businesses To Do It By Law"?
It is possible for something to be good for business, but for the free market to not choose it. The free market, after all, is simply a collection of human participants, none of whom are perfectly informed nor perfectly rational.
There seems to be a weird belief in some circles that the free market tends to arrive naturally upon a globally optimal solution.
There is a much more widespread weird belief that governments can do so, even though the track record of governments is worse than the track record of free markets.
Which seems to jive with the notion that neither a monolithically planned, nor entirely laissez-faire system, are likely to produce optimal results.
No, the most popular notion in the western world is a nominal "free market" with massive regulation. For example, here are the rules that a "free market" business in the US has to abide by:
https://www.federalregister.gov/
Note that this is a daily journal: in other words, the "current issue" is just the rules that got issued today.
Not to mention that we have central control of the financial system (the Fed and other countries' central banks), education (in the US there is at least some control still at the local level, other developed countries control everything at the state or national level), and trade--here, for example, is the current list of US tariffs:
Business is moderately regulated in the US, especially compared to other industrialized societies. The mere existence of a large number of rules doesn't mean that the regulation is onerous.
So if you're a small business, it's not "onerous" to have to look through myriads of rules to make sure you aren't violating one? To the extent that these regulations are not "onerous", it's because they're ignored, not because they actually work.
How good would the article be if we were in a time that people may freely be as racist as they want and there were not any social stigmas in the majority about being racist and such racism was commonplace? You would have widespread discrimination and your silly little wouldn't solve anything about it. For those playing at home, this was the status quo in the US at one point. You may argue, as libertarians may, that this is all perfectly fine and is the "moral" way but as usual, with your view of "freedom" we would not have a world many would want to live in.
No, the article that started this thread was from the WSJ, and I was asking a question about it, not endorsing it. Please read before knee-jerk reacting.
It turns out "Military Integration" => "Less racist military", for instance, rather than the other way around.
So yeah, "Force Businesses to Do it by Law" is unfortunately the necessary step
However, that’s not typically what the argument is about. Those who are opposed to this are often not opposed to other (either some or all) protected classes. That, to me, seems like an untenable view. You cannot have religion and sex as a protected class but not sexual orientation.
If I look at the protected classes I see one very obvious and big gap and that’s sexual orientation. It’s unquestionably incredibly bad policy to selectively exclude that (that is, if you are not a bigot).
Yes.
Realize that it's a reactionary position to take, but it just seems right. If someone wants to run their business with bigotry, so be it. I won't respect them, but I'd respect their "right" to do so.
I realize that there counter argument is that I've never lived in a time in which such regulation was needed, I never experienced Jim Crow, etc - and of course today Jim Crow still exists, in a way, for homosexuals.
But it just seems like another case of "two wrongs make a right." Forcing others to adhere to our own moral preferences seems fundamentally and deeply flawed. There must be another way.
I bet you're fine forcing others to adhere to your own moral preferences re: burglary, assault, rape, and murder.
Forcing others, particularly at the barrel of a gun, as libertarians are fond of saying is what laws are. Perhaps you believe we shouldn't force people away from murdering or robbing others? If restaurants poison the food of customers, the market will work it out? This straw man is no sillier than the idea that preventing discrimination is as reprehensible as the discrimination itself.
This is both trivializing and infantilizing. The central premise of geneticism is that these things are wrong, and the only reason we shouldn't discriminate against these people is because they can't help but be wrong.
The argument then becomes that we shouldn't discriminate against people for something they can't change - the chief implication that, if it could be changed, it should.
That whole line of argumentation is horseshit and concedes the most important point of all to the fundamentalists: that one's sexual orientation or gender identity can be morally reprehensible.
What? The central premise of geneticism is that genetics underpins the majority of human attributes and behavior. (Note: I do not personally believe this.)
Notice that arguments that homosexuality is genetic is preceded by arguments that homosexuality is a choice. Instead of defeating the thoroughly shitty notion that homosexuality is inherently wrong, the argument is instead steered towards "yeah, but they can't help it".
Without the choice angle, geneticism would just be a footnote. Whether or not orientation and gender identity are genetic is entirely irrelevant to the morality debate, and its presence in the debate predicates upon the assumption that, if it weren't genetic, the morality of the situation changes.
This stretches beyond the sexuality debate, of course. Whenever the argument is made that we shouldn't discriminate based on things people can't change, the implicit baggage argument is that if we could change those things, we should.
The correct rebuttal is "there's nothing wrong with being gay/bi/black/yellow/red" not "but they didn't choose to be gay/bi/black/yellow/red".
Then I deny the existence of 'geneticism' as you apparently define it, and say it's a strawman argument against the notion that anything is determined or influenced by genetics.
At some point, a person doesn't have to themselves have bigoted beliefs to be a part of a rotten system. Inaction is sufficient. I don't think our concern should be for preserving every last drop of agency of people who have already made it into positions of wealth and influence when we have people at major disadvantage in the workforce for personal characteristics they had little or no agency in determining.
My favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, Mother Night, is about the war crimes trial of a fictional all-star propagandist for the Nazi party. As the book proceeds, you learn that he was probably actually a double agent working for the US while not sincerely trying to be such a great propagandist. Yet he was a great propagandist, and his insincere work was of great service to evil. It brings up the question of whether intention really overrides the appearance and results of your actions.
So why should my taxes go to help fund their bigotry?
additionally, the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market is ill-equipped to encourage good employment behavior.
I also submit that if you think discriminating against blacks and women was good for business (a defensible claim), then you probably ought to be disagreeing with Tim Cook about whether sexual-orientation-based discrimination is good for businesses [1]. In my view, that would make the case for anti-discrimination legislation stronger, not weaker, because if both prevailing biases and good business sense favors discrimination, then we really need to act.[2]
[1] Perhaps you could believe the former but not the latter. They seem pretty parallel to me though, so I'd be curious what you thought the differences were.
[2] You could disagree with this too and simply be a lassez-faire fundamentalist, but that would render your original question kind of pointless.
Tim Cook was making the same assumption in the article when he said that workplace equality is good for business.
Also, the "barriers to entry" came from those state and local government regulations I referred to; asking the Federal government to provide a level playing field would have meant asking the Federal government to force state and local governments to remove those barriers to entry.
I am suggesting that when entering the market is already difficult (which is true of many American industries where discrimination might be a problem), a new firm being nondiscriminatory is unlikely to be a sufficient competitive advantage to displace existing firms.
It is possible for nondiscrimination to be beneficial for already existing firms but not an immediate, substantial, and sure-fire competitive advantage.
With a level playing field, I don't think entry into the market is as difficult as you claim for many areas of businesses. The discrimination that the civil rights movement protested against wasn't discrimination about who could build new semiconductor chip fabs: it was about who could ride at the front of the bus, or who could stay at which hotels. In a free market these would be easy businesses to get into; the main barriers to entry are government regulations.
The ENDA isn't about accommodation discrimination (buses, hotels, etc.), though, it's about employment discrimination. Discriminating against potential customers is obviously bad business, and the competitive benefit for not discriminating might be decisive. Even so, government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination (to the extent that when it occurs, it's seen as a throwback and an outrage).
The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation. The initial capital outlay is substantial, and established firms would be likely to have lucrative exclusive contracts with businesses. Potential riders would take a long time to trust a new bus service, and it would have to operate at a considerable loss for quite some time to build up a reputation.
After government action had enabled it in the first place. Jim Crow laws didn't just prevent blacks from riding at the front of the bus: it prevented blacks from starting their own bus companies.
The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation.
If all the bus services in town discriminate against blacks by making them ride at the back of the bus, but there's no government regulation, a new bus service, even if it's just a single bus, that does not impose that restriction has an immediate customer base: all the blacks that don't want to ride at the back of the bus. (We're assuming that this is a substantial number, which seems historically accurate.) Similar remarks apply to any other product or service where discrimination exists. I find it extremely implausible that, in the absence of government regulation, there would not have been many, many entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of such opportunities, or people to fund them.
How would you know?
Purely competitive markets are a mathematical abstraction
So are government regulations that magically apply just the "right" correction for a "market failure".
And yet he supports a law to force everyone to adopt those policies. It's like he doesn't actually believe "workplace equality" is good for business and would like to use the government to level the playing field he tilted against himself. If he really believed the policy was good for the bottom line, from a financial perspective he'd be overjoyed to compete against companies that don't have a similar policy.
The most likely explanation here, IMO, is Apple's policy actually hurts the bottom line a tiny bit, but the PR value outweighs the problems. But note if this is the case the law he's pushing will be a net (small) negative for other companies.
It's like telling US Sugar that it'd be a net gain for them to lose their tariff protections.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/25/news/fortune500/walmart_wage...
My source is the (then) CEO of Walmart.
All that aside, you may be right that it was a chiefly PR stunt and perhaps Walmart is in fact a poor example.
I was enjoying this discussion until your edit.
I'd venture that most well run and dominant companies pay more than their competitors. This is likely (speculation ahead) because these companies know that they must obtain and retain higher quality employees than do their competition.
Even for Walmart, their employees are the most important asset. From top to bottom. People like you and me (I'm assuming you've never worked there - I haven't) aren't aware, but supposedly Walmart really does treat their workers well. All in relative terms of course... And based upon pure hearsay of course.
Finally, regarding whether or not it was a publicity stunt: Maybe I'm jaded, but I consider everything that a corporate employee says publicly and in official capacity to be a publicity stunt, almost by definition.
Let's take an example. Southern Baptists, or any group you like, want to grow their numbers. Lets say they succeed and gain a majority of followers in the US. All of a sudden it can be a boost to business to comport with whatever discriminatory practices are popular with the majority. The invisible hand moveth.
If you really believe this, then your response should not be to ask the government to pass laws forcing such companies to be "rational". Your response should be to start a "rational" company that out-competes them, by hiring all the talented people that can't get jobs at the bigoted company, and thereby drive the bigoted company out of business.
I find it depressing that I have to bundle this industry into the same basket as other companies and industries that other women complain about on the female-dominated forums I frequent. Meritocracy? hahahahahahahaha
Have you considered not doing business with companies whose hiring or employment practices you don't like? Or forming your own company to out-compete them?
I think the answer here is that the advantages it confers aren't sufficient to allow an upstart to overcome its disadvantage--namely, market position. Having more rational hiring practices is not a trump card. Lots of poorly run companies beat well-run ones all the time, but it doesn't mean they wouldn't be more successful as better-run companies.
I'll also note that there are a number of confounding factors that make non-discrimination more attractive when enforced corrosively. For example, let's say you're an industry with widespread discrimination against gay people. Gay people leave the industry, and are thus not readily available to those willing to hire them. And perhaps they're typically less experienced because of that discrimination, so that makes it less useful to hire them. A sort of tragedy of the commons in the labor market. It's still irrational to discriminate, just less so, and perhaps the disadvantages of doing so fit under the noise floor. But with legislation, the feedback loop works the other way, and it makes a lot more sense to hire from this now larger and more experienced labor pool. Could increase the overall output a lot more than having one company float to the top through marginally better hiring.
It absolutely was, because at that time in much of the country if you hired a black guy all his coworkers would refuse to work with him. White people would refuse to patronize your business.
They were prevented from doing so by government regulations--state and local government regulations.
Antidiscrimination laws advance human flourishing and cause our society to be more just. Therefore they are worth having.
Senate Vote on Workplace Bias Against Gays a Test for G.O.P.
Perhaps it is risky for Apple to take such a stance, but it is most certainly good for Tim Cook!
Maybe not (at least not immediately), but if something is "good for business", it must confer some competitive benefit. Otherwise what does "good for business" mean, exactly? And the competitive benefit is really enough to ground the question I was asking.
Cook isn't trying to make a persuasive factual argument, he's making an endorsement, the power of which comes from his role at a major American firm. I have no doubt that he personally believes that workplace equality is beneficial to business. The argument against assumes that he's a bloodless psychopath who is willing to condone discrimination as long as it improves his bottom line.
If you're a white heterosexual male with no disabilities you don't care. carry on, business as usual. If you're not white, or not straight, or not male, or if you have some kind of disability, or etc etc you care because you don't want some fucking arsehole denying you a job purely because of that difference.
That said, I'm not sure I understand your position; are you saying you want the government to force the arsehole to give you a job? Do you really want to work for that kind of arsehole? Wouldn't you be better off getting a job from someone like Tim Cook, who doesn't need to government to force him to uphold workplace equality?
Yeah, he's "out" but he's not really "out."
Good for him for taking a step.
If the government prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of religion, then why not also political beliefs? There is little difference between the two.