Still Hating America.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
Even if he wanted to fuck me, Spanky's ineligible.

you don't like a man who would look you in the eye?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
You're dating a cute little hippie chick? I guess you bond over Buckley's view on marijuana legalization?

It was a few years back. She was really hot, but she was so liberal it was painful when she talked. She was born with twelve silver spoons in her mouth, but according to her, because she was a women, she couldn't get anywhere in life. You just can't be accepted in liberal intellectual circles unless you can demonstrate that the establishment has a vested interest in holding you back.

[Spanky]

Unions want to gag free speech at work

By George Will

Good for Adrienne Eaton of Rutgers University's Labor Studies & Employment Relations Department. Her forthright description of a central issue in the debate about the Employee Free Choice Act, which she supports, clarifies why that legislation is symptomatic of a disagreeable tendency in today's politics.


Labor unions hope this exquisitely mis-titled act, which the House of Representatives probably will pass this week, will compensate for their dwindling persuasiveness as they try to persuade workers to join. It would allow unions to organize workplaces without workers voting for unionization in elections with secret ballots. Instead, unions could use the "card check" system: Once a majority of a company's employees signs a card expressing consent, the union is automatically certified as the bargaining agent for all the workers.


Unions say the card-check system is needed to protect workers from anti-union pressure by employers before secret-ballot elections. Such supposed pressure is one of organized labor's alibis for declining membership.


There are, however, ample protections against employer pressures that really are abusive. Tellingly, the act would forbid employers from trying to influence — pressure? — employees by improving their lot: It would fine employers that, to reduce the incentive to unionize, give workers "unilateral" — not negotiated — improvements in compensation or working conditions during attempts at unionization. Clearly, the act aims less to help workers than to herd them as dues-payers into unions.


Under the card-check system, unions are able to, in effect, select the voters they want. It strips all workers of privacy and exposes them, one at a time, to the face-to-face pressure of union organizers who distribute and collect the cards. The Supreme Court has said that the card-check system is "admittedly inferior to the election process."


Repealing a right — to secret ballots — long considered fundamental to democratic culture would be a radical act. But labor is desperate. The card-check shortcut to unionization comes before Congress after last month's announcement that union membership declined, yet again, in 2006, by 326,000.

The percentage of employees in unions fell from 12.5 to 12, down from 20.1 percent in 1983 and 35 percent in the 1950s. The growth area of organized labor is among public-sector employees, 36.2 percent of whom are unionized, compared with just 7.4 percent of private-sector employees.


Today's workforce is marvelously flexible. People entering the labor market at age 18 will have, on average, 10 employers by the time they are 38. Such mobile workers often do not see what value union membership would add to their lives.


What unions are trying to sell is decreasingly attractive to potential members, so unions are doing what declining businesses often do: They are seeking government protection, in the form of a law to insulate them from the rigors of competition. They want government to allow them to, in effect, silence the employers' side of debates about the merits of unionization.


This is where Professor Easton — again, she favors the Employee Free Choice Act — is pertinent. Avoiding the sort of circumlocutions that Washington policymakers often use to conceal their thoughts, she said this to the New York Sun: "Because employers wield so much power, it's hard to figure out what kinds of lines to draw about employer speech."


The Employee Free Choice Act would short-circuit the process of persuading workers through a public debate between unions and employers, the winner of which would be determined by workers casting secret ballots. Welcome to the political culture that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law is shaping. That law, which regulates the quantity, timing and content of political speech, is making it increasingly acceptable for interest groups to attempt to advance their social agendas by limiting their adversaries' speech.


Senate Democrats might not find 60 votes to bring this Orwellian legislation — "free choice," indeed — to a vote. But if it does reach the president's desk, he will veto it. He should have vetoed McCain-Feingold. Its speech restrictions — applauded as virtuous by the (exempt) media — have legitimized talk about "drawing lines" to circumscribe the speech rights of entire categories of Americans, in this case employers.


Much recent academic writing about the First Amendment, and much of the jurisprudence about it, has "balanced" speech rights against other social goods and has valued speech rights primarily as instrumental for other social goods. So there are, alas, ample precedents for this legislative attempt to truncate employers' speech rights.


Still, herewith a modest proposal: Any member of Congress who was elected by a secret ballot should oppose the Employee Free Choice Act.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
Unions want to gag free speech at work

Would you be bothered if many workers wanted to be in unions but are not?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

If this is right, I take back the nice things I said about the Bush North Korea policy. Jesus Fucking Christ on a shingle.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Would you be bothered if many workers wanted to be in unions but are not?

No

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
If this is right, I take back the nice things I said about the Bush North Korea policy.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I was the first to lambast this immolation.

Jesus Fucking Christ on a shingle.

First Adder, then Gatti, now you.

Can we leave the Christian slurs alone?

How about "Mohammed (yes, that fucking guy), Peace be upon him (when he isn't suffering in Hell and beyond for being a murderer, rapist, pedopile thug)?

[andViolins]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Would you be bothered if many workers wanted to be in unions but are not?

Would you be bothered if, in order to help convince you to sign an union authorization card, a couple of union organizers showed up at your wife's workplace to tell her that it sure would be a great idea if Ty signed a card?

aV

[Replaced_Texan]

This is my favorite foreign policy story of the year.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
No

In other words, you're happy to post stuff ostensibly concerned with a worker's right to speech, but you don't care what they say or want.

This is, of course, apropos of the Will column. Empirically speaking, it's very, very difficult to unionize, and many more workers would like to be in unions than can be in unions. The impetus for the proposed change in voting rules is that voting in these elections does not seem to do a good job of realizing the voters' preferences.

In the real world, lots of companies fire workers who try to unionize. If they caught doing it, they have to re-hire the worker and give him or her back pay, but this doesn't seem to be much a disincentive. Do you think Will has ever noticed this kind of threat to free speech? Have you?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
In the spirit of bipartisanship, I was the first to lambast this immolation.

It only just came out that the Administration now says North Korea wasn't enriching uranium. Which was the ostensible reason that we cut off the other deal with them five years ago, prompting them to start enriching plutonium and build the bomb.

I'm not criticizing what you've said at all, but I think the recent news is much, much worse than what you previously were saying.

Can we leave the Christian slurs alone?

That's what Episcopalians say when they get really excited.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In other words, you're happy to post stuff ostensibly concerned with a worker's right to speech, but you don't care what they say or want.

This is, of course, apropos of the Will column. Empirically speaking, it's very, very difficult to unionize, and many more workers would like to be in unions than can be in unions. The impetus for the proposed change in voting rules is that voting in these elections does not seem to do a good job of realizing the voters' preferences.

In the real world, lots of companies fire workers who try to unionize. If they caught doing it, they have to re-hire the worker and give him or her back pay, but this doesn't seem to be much a disincentive. Do you think Will has ever noticed this kind of threat to free speech? Have you?

demo party platform:

1 we will make it easier for US manufacturing jobs to be unionized, so that corporations that are fighting to keep jobs in the US have extra economic friction to overcome when going against $1 a day Chinese workers.

2 We will protect our environment by inacting regulations that reach to the limits of what could possibily be harmful, so that those same corporations will have to spend billions to comply, and still compete with Chinese competition that has no such aanalog.

3 We will stem the lose of US manufacturing jobs.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by andViolins
Would you be bothered if, in order to help convince you to sign an union authorization card, a couple of union organizers showed up at your wife's workplace to tell her that it sure would be a great idea if Ty signed a card?
aV

Why can't we answer "Yes" to both questions?

Look, my firm's labor group made its reputation helping employers bust unions back in the old days (they don't like us to put it that way but its the truth) -- and we still have a general prohibition on representing employees in disputes with employers. But anyone who says unions were unecessary, or were/are all bad is either a fool or woefully ignorant of our history.

The world has changed, but anyone who loves America and loves freedom should recognize that employees should still have the right to organize and bargain collectively if they can. That said, the devil is in the millions of details, and there are plenty of abuses on both sides. So, we try to check the abuses and avoid having the corrupt bastards from either side completely control the policy, and we move forward somewhere along a middle line.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
It only just came out that the Administration now says North Korea wasn't enriching uranium. Which was the ostensible reason that we cut off the other deal with them five years ago, prompting them to start enriching plutonium and build the bomb.

(a) Didn't they merely downgrade the intel assessment from "high degree of confidence" to "mid-level of confidence" or some such? That's not the same as what you -- or a bunch of articles -- are saying.

(b) An NPR report last night quoted an anonnymous admin. source (who may just be spinning BS), as saying that they are still highly confident that NK _had_ such a program, but only have medium confidence that the program is ongoing. That seems to me to be different than the sound bites of the Congressinal testimony that I've heard -- but what is clear is that this is sure being spun around and around as a political issue.

I think the most salient point is that we probably could have got this deal back in 2002 before NK threw a fit, kicked everyone out, and built plutonium bombs. So, if you're going to do this at all -- which I think is probably a good idea -- they really fucked up by not doing it in 2002.

S_A_M

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

"The impetus for the proposed change in voting rules is that voting in these elections does not seem to do a good job of realizing the voters' preferences"

It’s a secret ballot. Why would they not express their wants in a secret ballot? This is just people deciding they know what is good for people, rather than letting people decide for themselves. Same philosophy as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The people can't look out for themselves, so we will treat them like children and decide what is best for them.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In other words, you're happy to post stuff ostensibly concerned with a worker's right to speech, but you don't care what they say or want.

'

I am concerned with everyone’s "right" to free speech. When the government comes and tries to prevent people from speaking their mind, I don't like it. But I don't see the government infringing on anyone’s right to free speech in this case. Do you?

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
In the real world, lots of companies fire workers who try to unionize. If they caught doing it, they have to re-hire the worker and give him or her back pay, but this doesn't seem to be much a disincentive... Do you think Will has ever noticed this kind of threat to free speech?

The best way to improve the lot of the worker is to increase the demand for jobs. The United Auto Workers don't need a union; they need a CEO that can figure out how to sell cars. So if Unions are going under, don't expect me to care.