21 ms·
This sounds great in mythical theoretical free-market land. But businesses have been making bad business decisions to justify nepotism, racism, sexism, any oth
by wfo 10y ago
This sounds great in mythical theoretical free-market land.
But businesses have been making bad business decisions to justify nepotism, racism, sexism, any other kind of ism you can imagine since the history of business and I haven't ever heard of competition actually punishing any of them for it. Markets just aren't that efficient. The job that two different people for the same job might do just isn't big enough (or, really, isn't predictable enough) to matter. For every position (yes, even CEO) there are hundreds of thousands of people who would do a roughly indistinguishable (at the time of hiring) job.
It's just that culture and regulation change, so the people running businesses and the laws they have to follow change, so business practices improve.
- yuhong 10y agoI suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.
- st3v3r 10y agoSo tell me, what exact dollar amount do you need to make where discrimination against you is ok?
- yuhong 10y agoIt would not be OK just because it is not illegal.
- st3v3r 10y agoYou're depriving people of a legal remedy, so you are de facto making it ok. So why do you want to make it ok to discriminate depending on the job title? Why are some people not deserving of the same protections as others?
- int_19h 10y agoI think it's more of a question of how much leverage do you have. If everyone is discriminating against you, like Jim Crow South, it doesn't really matter how much you make, because you can't go and find a different job easily. But if discrimination is limited, and the job market for this particular job and in this particular area favors employees, then it's a self-correcting problem - people will just walk. And if an effective boycott is possible and will take care of it, why go through the slower and more resource constrained court system?
- yuhong 10y agoThere is also the problems of how to prove discrimination, which is why I suggested this particular compromise.
- st3v3r 10y agoThose problems exist no matter who the victim is. So your "solution" doesn't help anyone except for big businesses.
- yuhong 10y agoFor example, proving that an employee is performing or not is relatively easy with most manual labor jobs. This is why performance reviews are often used in these lawsuits (particularly wrongful termination). This is not true for something like programming. Remember that they were designed back in the 1960s.
- st3v3r 10y agoI fail to see why the ability to get a job easily should be taken into account whether you get to have a legal remedy or not. And quite frankly, I have no faith whatsoever that a boycott would work, or gain any traction at all. We have had numerous stories of companies acting shitty all over, and yet they don't seem to have problems hiring.
- int_19h 10y ago