claudeganon

This is a uniquely American notion of employment. “Do my bidding or be done away with” is not the norm across countries with strong unions and worker protections.

Not universally though. In countries with stronger labor protections and unions, you can’t just fire people for philosophical disagreements (not without those disputes being mediated anyway).

I don’t understand how we arrived at some conception of workplaces as little dictatorships, where bosses can treat people however they want and that’s somehow good or legitimate.

Or they could just actually unionize instead of this reactive outrage. It’s unlikely Gebru would have been fired under these circumstances if she had a union contract.

So if you don’t do what your boss says at a job, even if you disagree, your boss can fire you, and this is good. But if you tell your boss that they should do something or you’ll quit, this is bad and makes you unemployable.

You realize that this is just an argument that whoever is in a position of authority over you is right by virtue of having that authority?

Ever since GPT-3 was released, HN has been like this.

Miles long breadlines, widespread homelessness, mass deaths from disease and despair, an indifferent, ravenous oligarch class, enough money spent to solve all these problems on pointless war in literally the exact same place where the USSR conducted a pointless war that bankrupted them...

Even achieving something comparable to prior year’s flu vaccination would not bring us anywhere close to the herd immunity threshold though. I’m not as concerned with production of the vaccine itself as the logistics involved. I find it hard to believe that a country that otherwise can’t deliver the basic protective necessities to frontline workers is suddenly going to pull out a logistical miracle out of their hats.

Having a disease ravage a country, kill friends and family, while the government does almost nothing to help, with millions upon millions of people say it’s a hoax or conspiracy, tends to have that effect on people.

The consequences of living in a failed state are something very few Americans are equipped to deal with using anything besides denial or extreme precaution. Maybe we can ask some people who survived Russia in the 90s what the right course of action should be.

I’m skeptical that vaccine production and distribution will in the US will scale that well. I certainly hope that it will happen, but given that the country has failed on just about every other pandemic related front tempers my perspective.

I agree that there is a broader diversity of a thought, but there’s also a dominant, conservative streak when it comes to deferring to corporate authority. This is unsurprising since many people on this site get paid a lot of money by the same people being critiqued, but does represent a kind of self-selection toward servility.

Yes? The U.S. did worse than them too.

Right, I was just responding to the question, whose posing is often used to suggest that the US is the best of all possible resource allocation worlds. I don't want to live under a regime like the CCP, but we did just run this experiment and the U.S. system of resource allocation failed miserably.

The Chinese government is a horrible, authoritarian nightmare, but still somehow does better at managing the country's resources than the American ruling class. The pandemic, now over in China, while our nurses tape garbage bags to themselves as thousands die daily, has proven that definitively.

>Is it hypothetical that a business that a retail business offers their employees lavish benefits and sells commodity products will be put out of business by lower prices from Walmart/Target/Amazon/Best Buy/etc?

None of your examples are headquartered in California, nor would any of these companies stop operating in the most populous state in the US with its largest economy were worker protections put in place.

>Is it hypothetical that manufacturing facilities relocated to China to be able to sell products at cheaper prices than their competitors?

The hollowing out of the industrial core was a bipartisan decision made in the 1990s with full support of Democrats, so its a bit rich to say "if we don't let them treat people bad, they'll make it even worse than we already helped them make it." The same power that them globalize manufacturing can force its return to the U.S. Again, every other developed country with a strong industrial base engages in this kind of protectionism for strategic and national security reasons. Germany is again, here, a salient example.

>Does not mean that one of the two parties in the US is not trying at least a little bit.

You keep insisting this without providing evidence of its reality. What major worker protections have been advanced and put into law by Democrats since the Obama presidency?

Alcohol manufactures have also dumped massive amounts of money in lobbying against marijuana decriminalization because they don't want the competition.

What do worker protections have to do with taxes? Again, what is stopping California Democrats from putting into place similar workplace protections as exist in the EU? In Germany for example, it's illegal for worker's to be surveilled using spyware apps that are permitted for use by every business in California. Why are Democrats incapable of addressing this?

Housing and healthcare are more difficult problems, but ones that have, again, been solved in just about every other developed country, including many with smaller economies than that of California. Hypothetical capital flight is just another among a litany of excuses used to justify their failure.

California is controlled top-to-bottom by Democrats and still has remarkably poor worker protections by the standard of any other developed country and is even worse when you compare things like the state of housing, poverty, and healthcare. They have tremendous latitude to make better conditions for workers and yet somehow this never pans out in California or other "blue" states. At what point do these excuses wear thin?

The beliefs of individual members of the Democratic Party are largely irrelevant compared to how they function collectively as a political body at both the state and national level. With that view, they've been definitively anti-worker since the Clinton era and have been shifting further and further right since Reagan's presidency.

The obstacle to change in this country is not the Republican party, but Democrats who use them as an excuse to mask their similar, steadfast allegiance to business interests at the expense of everyone besides white collar workers.

Yeah, its almost like by law in Norway, employers have to provide 25 days of paid leave, whereas in the US, people have to behave "irresponsibly" to have a semblance of a normal life, free of work.

There's a bipartisan consensus that working people should be screwed. Uber's c-suite is staffed by Democratic Party insiders and they just got Prop 22 passed, Democratic leaders just came out in support of a stimulus bill that indemnifies companies against COVID-related harms they place their employees in to keep making money. You can find no shortage of well-paid liberals on this site that will tell you that unions are the scourge of the earth, despite their political influence being responsible for just about everything that makes the EU a better place for workers.

Not taking money from the people you’re covering is the barest minimum of journalistic ethics. Regardless, of whether you or I agree with anything else on that site, Adam Davidson, or whoever else, failing to meet that basic standard should be patently disqualifying. The fact that he was the host of a flagship, economic reporting show, even more so.

There are many other reasons I find it hard to take NPR’s claims of impartiality seriously, but this one is so glaringly wrong that it speaks for itself.

It's a distinction without any real difference. You could make the same argument about Planet Money, an NPR show, that went out of the way to provide cover for the banks during the financial crisis, had their host attack Elizabeth Warren in an interview, all while taking money from the same industry. Adam Davidson (the host who attacked Warren) of course then also went on to collect all kinds of "speaking fees" from financial institutions.

https://shameproject.com/profile/adam-davidson/

NPR, despite what the parent linked, does almost nothing to police these conflicts.

If you read something like the Financial Times, it’s actually far less propagandistic than most “business news.” It mostly just reports the raw, unfiltered reality of Capitalist exchange. There are actually quite a few Marxists who like the paper for this reason.

When contrasted with something like Marketplace, which ceaselessly and glibly spins the darker realities of our economy to somehow be “upbeat” or “positive,” the difference becomes more obvious. And this is an editorial and ideological choice made by NPR, pursuing this framing.

They hire H1Bs because it's much harder to change jobs with the visa. In an industry that otherwise has high turnover, even for people in the > $500k range, this gives the companies leverage over workers that they wouldn't otherwise have.

It's not limited to the Bay Area. They do the same thing in the Midwest for industries with high-turnover. They use the same, obviously dishonest tactics, like only advertising positions in the classified sections of local newspapers, where no one would ever look for them.

I'm fully in favor of immigration (mom is an immigrant and so is my partner), but the H1-B system was obviously designed to create a tier of second-class workers who fear losing their sponsorship and thus tolerate lower wages and worse treatment. These visas need to be fully portable at any time, offered for positions only at above market rates, with greencard queue times also being drastically reduced and made independent of employer sponsorship.

I mean this with all due respect, but highlighting NPR's own defense of their editorial practices is hardly convincing.

NPR routinely runs editorial pieces that were pitched to them by corporate sponsors or their fronts like think tanks. They likewise have have discussion panels featuring these groups' talking heads. Listen to a few episodes of Marketplace if you want the most obvious corporate propaganda imaginable. Their impartiality is laughable.

See also Google conspiring to suppress worker wages for many years until they were caught and given a slap on the wrist.

Neonazis were used to intimidate immigrant workers at Amazon facilities in Germany a few years ago, so it's not exactly "history" for "old comrades.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amazon-used-..."

You actually believe that NPR doesn’t edit articles to protect the people who fund them?

You’re incorrectly conflating the two cases described in the article. Berland was fired for viewing other’s calendars, Spiers for the notifications.

The NLRB ruled both firings were illegitimate and their actions protected under labor law. So no, she was within her rights and the NLRB said she’s to be reinstated.

The NLRB has no direct enforcement power, so how it resolves itself will be dependent on if the NLRB pursues Google in the U.S. Court of Appeals, they settle out of court, or otherwise. My guess is that they settle because an NLRB ruling against you isn’t likely to work in your favor in the event of an employment lawsuit. But regardless, what Spiers did stands as a favorable precedent for workers in the event of other disputes with similar circumstances.