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Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts Barring Class Actions (nytimes.com)
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to prohibit workers from banding together to take legal action over workplace issues. From a report: The vote was 5 to 4, with the court's more conservative justices in the majority. The court's decision could affect some 25 million employment contracts. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the court's conclusion was dictated by a federal law favoring arbitration and the court's precedents. If workers were allowed to band together to press their claims, he wrote, "the virtues Congress originally saw in arbitration, its speed and simplicity and inexpensiveness, would be shorn away and arbitration would wind up looking like the litigation it was meant to displace." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement. In her written dissent, she called the majority opinion "egregiously wrong." In her oral statement, she said the upshot of the decision "will be huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well being of vulnerable workers."
Would you be against them if workers had a genuine complaint and their employer generally treated them like sub-humans? Say they were exposed to toxic chemicals without their employer telling them or giving them proper protection, and are now paying through the nose to deal with health problems 20-30 years later.
Unions walk away because Almost every real option to fight back has been outlawed and the union can't go outlaw unless it has much much larger buy in from the working class. And the working class ain't buying in because the unions are perceived as innefective. It's a vicious cycle really
Maybe it's time for the Wobblies to stage a come back. Put a real nemesis for bad bosses to fear back into the mix
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I personally think unions are a horrible idea. Except in America where they can only be described as essential. Most western countries exited the industrial revolution with strong workplace protections thanks to the unions of the time making the concept somewhat obsolete in the current age. Somehow this didn't happen in the USA, and the us vs them mentality along with the desire for governments to not exist and generally stay out of everyone's business is stronger than ever.
That's an argument for making it more difficult to get out of jury duty. Also, I know quite a few people who got called for jury duty in NYC and don't fit your description. The city made it much more difficult to get out of jury duty sometime in the 90s, and the system is apparently working.
Being highly uninioned in a country that already implements many of the most costly demands of labor isn't exactly a huge feat.
Union Workers - "We demand reasonable cost healthcare"
American Businesses - "No way, we would go bankrupt"
German Businesses - "uh, what? We don't have anything to do with your healthcare costs"
Union Workers - "We demand 4 weeks of vacation!"
American Businesses - "No way, we would go bankrupt"
German Businesses - "But we already give you 6 if you count holidays. It's the law afterall"
etc. etc. etc.
And, in a labor camp, you don't get a choice....I"ve yet to see any area of work in the US where they hold a gun to your head, and force you to stay as an employee against your will and not allowing you to quit and seek out alternative employment.
Being poor is effectively illegal. If you don't have money, you wind up having to do illegal things to exist. Some of these things are only mildly illegal, but they can lead in various ways to loss of possessions. Penalties for a lot of typical homeless behavior include fines... against people who don't have money. If you get into enough of this trouble long enough, they'll lock you up for long intervals — either in a prison rape factory, or an insanity-inducing facility for the criminally insane.
It's better than a literal labor camp, but there's definitely a similar mechanism at work. As it turns out, people work harder if they think they're getting a good deal. Most people are pretty easy to fool, so you fool 'em. The remainder you either lock up as a warning to others, or scare into working (by locking up that middle group.) Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that; there are various shades of tricked and scared. Foundation of society, anxiety, suppress it if you can.
Or, have I missed something these past few decades?
If you have a roof over your head and know where your next paycheck is coming from, you are one of the 8%... worldwide. The rates are much better here; The current U-6 unemployment rate is 7.8%, but even that fails to account for at least 7.5 additional million workers who are unemployed. The U-2 is based on a claim of 6,346,000 unemployed workers, and it is little more than half of the U-6; This puts the total actual number of unemployed at somewhere in the vicinity of twenty million, with a rate of around 10 or 11 percent.
So uh, congrats on being part of the 90%, I guess. But that percentage is headed downwards. Young people are choosing to stay in school longer; I know for my part, when I did that it was because I didn't know what else I was going to do with myself, and there was grant and loan money available to me as a student. Others are no doubt working on more advanced degrees, in the hope that will differentiate them from other applicants, and it will; but in this economy, most of them are taking on massive student loan debt for that purpose which may never pay off.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And they have yet to see an American actually living there eager to return to the home of the "free", after they've seen through all the bullshit brainwashing they've grown up with.
LOL.. SO you are upset with workers who refuse to join the union and pay dues to get a job? This isn't the company's beating the Union, this is the Union not being relevant and efficient enough to be worth the dues they collect so workers abandoned them.
And it's "right to work" states you are upset with... You know the ones with the low unemployment numbers to go along with those low percentages of union jobs? Employers LOVE "right to work" states... You *SHOULD* be griping about the NLRB letting the likes of Boeing and auto makers farm out work to non-union shops in right to work states, but no... You are shooting at the wrong problem.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
America is the land of "senseless rules." Hence their prison population of approximately 1% of all American adults.
In Western Europe, they don't normally bother with you unless you're caught harming someone.
"Average" GDP is basically a bullshit statistic, pardon my English.
It's only useful in context.
(1) What % of income is paid in tax? What services are given to taxpayers? i.e. if health care is subsidized or free, it means lower costs of living since people aren't paying private insurance premiums on top of taxes.
(2) What are costs of living? Housing costs? Does each family need two cars? Is university education free or cheap?
(3) What is the MEDIAN income? Not average, which can be skewed higher by a few very high incomes. But the median is a useful measure of standard of living.
(4) Other non-monetary means of measuring standard of living. Free time. Time spent with family. Etc and so forth.