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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
