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The way to reshape labour laws is to offer an alternative job defining the socially minimum acceptable job in a local area. Business then has to compete with t

The way to reshape labour laws is to offer an alternative job defining the socially minimum acceptable job in a local area. Business then has to compete with that to attract labour. No other labour law required. Simple competition sorts it out. That is also has the advantage of being a geographically targeted federal automatic stabiliser that operates far more effectively than interest rate targeting via bank lending, and ends unemployment permanently and forever is just an added bonus.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
No what you really need is federal binding minimum standards for Annual leave (4 weeks ) and Sick pay and minimum wage. Repeal all the right to work laws and massively reduce the ability of employers to use non compeats (us CA as a model here I think)
- justAnotherNET 7y ago
  Then you end up with a situation like France where incompetent employees are hard to fire. No thanks. If I can hire you at will, I can fire you at will. Anything less than that crosses into weird entitlement areas.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay? that is a significant cost to many small businesses. Do you limit it based on how many employees they have? How many hours the employee averages per week? The last time Congress set limits they threw low wage earners under the bus; the now infamous ACA twenty nine hour rule. minimum wage should not be at the federal level, it is a state by state and city by city issue that should be based upon cost of living in that area. federal laws should protect from working without pay and discrimination. if localities wanted to protect low wage earners they woulds step back occupational license requirements for many positions and reduce the burden of fees and regulatory compliance as well; that twenty to twenty five dollar fee some states charge just for a license may not be bad for you or me but for the low wage earner it is very bad. having to pay five hundred dollars for a license to work is no better, but these costs exist and are not income scaled
  - kornakiewicz 7y ago
    > How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay? You don't. Every full-time employee have right to paid holidays, like we have in every other country in the world.
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      That leads to less full-time employees. People will get their hours cut. Maybe we need to consider someone who works more than 15 hours a week full time. Or perhaps the benefits scale for employees based on number of hours worked.
      - kobbe 7y ago
        It works in every other country...
        mcrocop309 7y ago
        Depends what you mean by 'it works'. In 2016 the US had 2000 people becoming millionaires every day. It depends what your goals are. If you want to rest, maybe go to France.
      - kornakiewicz 7y ago
        I wasn't clear. In Europe, part-time employees get their time off pro-rated based on working hours, while full-time ones get minimum required by law (20+ days per year, depending on country). Plus additional ~10 paid public holidays for everyone.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        The US is pretty much the only developed country without mandatory vacation time. This is a solved problem. Just look around how other countries do it.
        linuxftw 7y ago
        If it's such a bright idea, why can't NY and CA do it? They're literally the size and population of many other countries. In the US, the states are free to do whatever they want with wage and employment laws, so long as it doesn't violate the constitution. If CA wants to set the minimum wage to $30/hr + 2 weeks mandatory PTO, they are 100% free to do it. It's pretty much a single party state at this point. Other countries are able to support higher labor rates because they have protectionist tariffs, such as the VAT. But if the US wants to raise tariffs, all of a sudden we're racist idiots. Anyway, a lot of what's perceived to be wrong with the US can easily be solved at the state level, but turns out nobody actually wants to foot the bill for these things.
- snarf21 7y ago
  This is all true, but you also need to remove the ability for healthcare to be based on one employer. You should be able to get your own coverage and contribute to an HSA no matter what job you do. That mobility will make a huge difference
  - whenanother 7y ago
    same with pension. either social security should absorb all pension programs or a separate government entity is created. or have a workers’ union control it all. too many companies are being raided or declared “bankruptcy” to hide the dumping of pension obligations.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Oh true but that's not labour law - go back and implement the sort of system (Basicly Germany's ) the US was moving to in the 50's
- neilwilson 7y ago
  And if the statutory alternative job has 5 weeks annual leave, $25 per hour minimum, is 9-5 35 hours per week, with full medical, pension and sickness cover with he job within walking distance (or a short bus ride) of your house? Why regulate when you can compete rubbish jobs out of the system?
- BuckRogers 7y ago
  Closer, and that would help but not change the fundamental problem of who controls the means of production. I think you'll lose in the end, as we see today. You could just remove the tension of the employer-employee imbalance altogether. I'd advocate for public funding of loans for worker owned co-ops. 1 employee/owner = 1 share = 1 vote. Vote on wages, vote on bosses, run it like a democracy. Once people have democracy in their workplace, they'll finally demand it out of our government. Businesses will still fail, some will still survive, but ultimately the proven business models (most businesses) should have this more equitable distribution of profits. There's no reason the 7-Eleven should be hauling profits back to Japan, the employees can own and operate local variants and keep the money in the community. This is how I personally plan on making the world a better place whether I'm a millionaire or have nothing. Organizing and start at least 1 worker-owned cooperative before I die. It's something most of us are capable of doing that truly improves the world where it counts (happiness which comes from a sense of control over your own destiny, and money which the latter equals food and housing).
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Being a coop by ownership rather than direct democracy works better in my opinion - and not sure having a government sugar daddy helps they would impose to much political control.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago
      "Government sugar daddy". That sort of slanted injection won't win many people over that don't already agree. I'm advocating for government loans to start co-ops. Less of a "sugar daddy" than the massive corporate subsidies going on today. You missed the point on a co-op being worker owned, you have to work there to own a share, and have to own a share to acquire a vote. Ownership and direct democracy in one. Solves a lot of problems economically and socially.
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        I have worked for and been a member of a well know tech coop in the uk btw. The previous commentator said the government would be involved in setting thease coops up - now may this is not going to be used by the executive for political ends. I was refereeing the attempt by Tony Benn in the 70's to restructure a uk motorbike manufacturer as a coop.
me_me_me 7y ago
>>Business then has to compete with that to attract labour. Except the fact that they don't, when speaking about low end jobs/seasonal occupations. >>Simple competition sorts it out. Except the fact that businesses eroded work stability and security to shift power dynamic of employer <-> employee massively in employer favor (again largely in case of low end jobs, though (was it) H1-B abuse exploits white collar workers). So employees are desperate to find employment and afraid to loose their current. That really kills any 'wage competition' and is a run to the bottom. "But the rate of pay increase still was markedly less than historical relationships with labor market conditions would have predicted. Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity." by Alan Greenspan [0] This whole idea of 'market will correct itself out' works great on paper, it just doesn't work in reality when you insert people into equation. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/testimony.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/te...
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-Housing) Labor Share We identify two undocumented measurement challenges affecting corporate sector labor shares outside the United States: the inclusion of dwellings and the inclusion of self-employed workers in the corresponding sectoral accounts. Both issues have become more important over time, biasing corporate labor shares downward. We propose two methods to correct for these challenges and obtain `true’ non-housing labor share series. Contrary to common wisdom, the corrected series exhibit stable labor shares across all major economies, except the US, where the corrected labor share declines by 6 percentage points since 1980. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RMTqNNJFUSxeMx9UsObAgqUeb3HU2K8i/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RMTqNNJFUSxeMx9UsObAgqUeb3H...
nvahalik 7y ago
> ends unemployment permanently and forever is just an added bonus. Until those businesses which cannot survive in this model go away so even the part time job they had won't be around anymore...
- 49531 7y ago
  As a society, should we really tolerate businesses who can only exist via exploitation?
  - moate 7y ago
    This is the point that really needs to be driven home. "But what about all the jobs that will close when we make better labor standards" should always be met with "these companies shouldn't exist in that form". Taken to an extreme: Were abolitionists more concerned with freeing slaves from the labor abuses they were living under, or the long term prospects of the plantations and their business models? Sometimes the business isn't worth the social costs.
    - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Wow, jumping right to slavery. Next, Nazis? My mother-in-law lived thru the invention of the 'minimum wage' in the US. She saw the damage it did, the thousands out of work because their job wasn't worth minimum pay. The temporary jobs disappearing, part-time workers fired. And full-time workers working double-jobs to do the work of the missing low-paid workers. It was indeed a hard time. Better times came after the minimum wage. But to cavalierly dismiss jobs with "these companies shouldn't exist" sounds a lot like "let them eat cake".
mrfusion 7y ago
Or just do a UBI instead of giving people busy work.
- rpmisms 7y ago
  I have a few questions: - Where does the money for UBI come from? - How do you propose to deal with the sudden spike in rent prices that's almost exactly the UBI amount? - What do you do when welfare faring becomes socially acceptable?
  - zwkrt 7y ago
    Welfaring should be socially acceptable. Why should people have no choice other than to work?
    - krapp 7y ago
      Welfare would be more socially acceptable in the US if it weren't culturally associated with non-white populations and a creeping "socialist agenda."
    - tomschlick 7y ago
      Because generally taking money from others which is meant to be for people on hard times, and giving nothing back in return is looked down upon. As it should be.
      - zwkrt 7y ago
        But all these sentiments are wrapped up in the way things are now. Why is welfare only meant for people who have fallen on hard times? I would think that working at McDonalds is a kind of vindictive welfare for people who have fallen on hard times, and UBI is a lot more humanitarian than making someone’s life a living hell because a large company has convinced us their employees aren’t indentured servants.
        tomschlick 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throwaway_law 7y ago
>No other labour law required. Simple competition sorts it out. We have seen how no labor laws combined with competition works, we get: 80 hour work weeks with no over time, no benefits, dangerous work conditions, and even exploitative child labor. There is legitimate use of contractors in lieu of employees, but UBER and gig economy as a whole are very hiring what are clearly employees, under the law, as contractors in order to skirt regulations.
- neilwilson 7y ago
  Ok. Explain how you can have 80 hour weeks with no overtime when the statutory alternative job in the local area is 35 hours a week, $25 per hour, 9-5 steady work about half a mile away from their house with full health care, pension and sickness cover. How does the 80 hour week person get any labour?
  - mises 7y ago
    Potential for growth, probably. I may have more ambition than to make more than $45,500 per year for most of my career. I'd rather make six figures, save, and retire to a comfortable lifestyle. I've worked plenty of 80-hour weeks towards that goal, and I will doubtless work plenty more.
- ericmcer 7y ago
  I think free market forces would work better if we had a culture that was less work centric. We have created a culture that places high value on work ethic, income, and personal achievement. Those are great things, but they are also great qualities for employers to exploit. If we viewed overworking, putting in 60 hour weeks or doing risky work for more money as something unhealthy and greedy, rather than as commendable, free market forces might work better.
  - smallgovt 7y ago
    The class of people who have bandwidth to worry about values like work ethic and personal achievement aren't the ones who are being exploited by employee vs IC misclassification.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

No what you really need is federal binding minimum standards for Annual leave (4 weeks ) and Sick pay and minimum wage. Repeal all the right to work laws and massively reduce the ability of employers to use non compeats (us CA as a model here I think)

justAnotherNET 7y ago
Then you end up with a situation like France where incompetent employees are hard to fire. No thanks. If I can hire you at will, I can fire you at will. Anything less than that crosses into weird entitlement areas.
Shivetya 7y ago
How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay? that is a significant cost to many small businesses. Do you limit it based on how many employees they have? How many hours the employee averages per week? The last time Congress set limits they threw low wage earners under the bus; the now infamous ACA twenty nine hour rule. minimum wage should not be at the federal level, it is a state by state and city by city issue that should be based upon cost of living in that area. federal laws should protect from working without pay and discrimination. if localities wanted to protect low wage earners they woulds step back occupational license requirements for many positions and reduce the burden of fees and regulatory compliance as well; that twenty to twenty five dollar fee some states charge just for a license may not be bad for you or me but for the low wage earner it is very bad. having to pay five hundred dollars for a license to work is no better, but these costs exist and are not income scaled
- kornakiewicz 7y ago
  > How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay? You don't. Every full-time employee have right to paid holidays, like we have in every other country in the world.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    That leads to less full-time employees. People will get their hours cut. Maybe we need to consider someone who works more than 15 hours a week full time. Or perhaps the benefits scale for employees based on number of hours worked.
    - kobbe 7y ago
      It works in every other country...
      - mcrocop309 7y ago
        Depends what you mean by 'it works'. In 2016 the US had 2000 people becoming millionaires every day. It depends what your goals are. If you want to rest, maybe go to France.
    - kornakiewicz 7y ago
      I wasn't clear. In Europe, part-time employees get their time off pro-rated based on working hours, while full-time ones get minimum required by law (20+ days per year, depending on country). Plus additional ~10 paid public holidays for everyone.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      The US is pretty much the only developed country without mandatory vacation time. This is a solved problem. Just look around how other countries do it.
      - linuxftw 7y ago
        If it's such a bright idea, why can't NY and CA do it? They're literally the size and population of many other countries. In the US, the states are free to do whatever they want with wage and employment laws, so long as it doesn't violate the constitution. If CA wants to set the minimum wage to $30/hr + 2 weeks mandatory PTO, they are 100% free to do it. It's pretty much a single party state at this point. Other countries are able to support higher labor rates because they have protectionist tariffs, such as the VAT. But if the US wants to raise tariffs, all of a sudden we're racist idiots. Anyway, a lot of what's perceived to be wrong with the US can easily be solved at the state level, but turns out nobody actually wants to foot the bill for these things.
snarf21 7y ago
This is all true, but you also need to remove the ability for healthcare to be based on one employer. You should be able to get your own coverage and contribute to an HSA no matter what job you do. That mobility will make a huge difference
- whenanother 7y ago
  same with pension. either social security should absorb all pension programs or a separate government entity is created. or have a workers’ union control it all. too many companies are being raided or declared “bankruptcy” to hide the dumping of pension obligations.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Oh true but that's not labour law - go back and implement the sort of system (Basicly Germany's ) the US was moving to in the 50's
neilwilson 7y ago
And if the statutory alternative job has 5 weeks annual leave, $25 per hour minimum, is 9-5 35 hours per week, with full medical, pension and sickness cover with he job within walking distance (or a short bus ride) of your house? Why regulate when you can compete rubbish jobs out of the system?
BuckRogers 7y ago
Closer, and that would help but not change the fundamental problem of who controls the means of production. I think you'll lose in the end, as we see today. You could just remove the tension of the employer-employee imbalance altogether. I'd advocate for public funding of loans for worker owned co-ops. 1 employee/owner = 1 share = 1 vote. Vote on wages, vote on bosses, run it like a democracy. Once people have democracy in their workplace, they'll finally demand it out of our government. Businesses will still fail, some will still survive, but ultimately the proven business models (most businesses) should have this more equitable distribution of profits. There's no reason the 7-Eleven should be hauling profits back to Japan, the employees can own and operate local variants and keep the money in the community. This is how I personally plan on making the world a better place whether I'm a millionaire or have nothing. Organizing and start at least 1 worker-owned cooperative before I die. It's something most of us are capable of doing that truly improves the world where it counts (happiness which comes from a sense of control over your own destiny, and money which the latter equals food and housing).
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Being a coop by ownership rather than direct democracy works better in my opinion - and not sure having a government sugar daddy helps they would impose to much political control.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    "Government sugar daddy". That sort of slanted injection won't win many people over that don't already agree. I'm advocating for government loans to start co-ops. Less of a "sugar daddy" than the massive corporate subsidies going on today. You missed the point on a co-op being worker owned, you have to work there to own a share, and have to own a share to acquire a vote. Ownership and direct democracy in one. Solves a lot of problems economically and socially.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      I have worked for and been a member of a well know tech coop in the uk btw. The previous commentator said the government would be involved in setting thease coops up - now may this is not going to be used by the executive for political ends. I was refereeing the attempt by Tony Benn in the 70's to restructure a uk motorbike manufacturer as a coop.

me_me_me 7y ago

>>Business then has to compete with that to attract labour. Except the fact that they don't, when speaking about low end jobs/seasonal occupations. >>Simple competition sorts it out. Except the fact that businesses eroded work stability and security to shift power dynamic of employer <-> employee massively in employer favor (again largely in case of low end jobs, though (was it) H1-B abuse exploits white collar workers). So employees are desperate to find employment and afraid to loose their current. That really kills any 'wage competition' and is a run to the bottom. "But the rate of pay increase still was markedly less than historical relationships with labor market conditions would have predicted. Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity." by Alan Greenspan [0] This whole idea of 'market will correct itself out' works great on paper, it just doesn't work in reality when you insert people into equation. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/testimony.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/1997/february/te...

barry-cotter 7y ago
Revisiting the Global Decline of the (Non-Housing) Labor Share We identify two undocumented measurement challenges affecting corporate sector labor shares outside the United States: the inclusion of dwellings and the inclusion of self-employed workers in the corresponding sectoral accounts. Both issues have become more important over time, biasing corporate labor shares downward. We propose two methods to correct for these challenges and obtain `true’ non-housing labor share series. Contrary to common wisdom, the corrected series exhibit stable labor shares across all major economies, except the US, where the corrected labor share declines by 6 percentage points since 1980. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RMTqNNJFUSxeMx9UsObAgqUeb3HU2K8i/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RMTqNNJFUSxeMx9UsObAgqUeb3H...

nvahalik 7y ago

> ends unemployment permanently and forever is just an added bonus. Until those businesses which cannot survive in this model go away so even the part time job they had won't be around anymore...

49531 7y ago
As a society, should we really tolerate businesses who can only exist via exploitation?
- moate 7y ago
  This is the point that really needs to be driven home. "But what about all the jobs that will close when we make better labor standards" should always be met with "these companies shouldn't exist in that form". Taken to an extreme: Were abolitionists more concerned with freeing slaves from the labor abuses they were living under, or the long term prospects of the plantations and their business models? Sometimes the business isn't worth the social costs.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Wow, jumping right to slavery. Next, Nazis? My mother-in-law lived thru the invention of the 'minimum wage' in the US. She saw the damage it did, the thousands out of work because their job wasn't worth minimum pay. The temporary jobs disappearing, part-time workers fired. And full-time workers working double-jobs to do the work of the missing low-paid workers. It was indeed a hard time. Better times came after the minimum wage. But to cavalierly dismiss jobs with "these companies shouldn't exist" sounds a lot like "let them eat cake".

mrfusion 7y ago

Or just do a UBI instead of giving people busy work.

rpmisms 7y ago
I have a few questions: - Where does the money for UBI come from? - How do you propose to deal with the sudden spike in rent prices that's almost exactly the UBI amount? - What do you do when welfare faring becomes socially acceptable?
- zwkrt 7y ago
  Welfaring should be socially acceptable. Why should people have no choice other than to work?
  - krapp 7y ago
    Welfare would be more socially acceptable in the US if it weren't culturally associated with non-white populations and a creeping "socialist agenda."
  - tomschlick 7y ago
    Because generally taking money from others which is meant to be for people on hard times, and giving nothing back in return is looked down upon. As it should be.
    - zwkrt 7y ago
      But all these sentiments are wrapped up in the way things are now. Why is welfare only meant for people who have fallen on hard times? I would think that working at McDonalds is a kind of vindictive welfare for people who have fallen on hard times, and UBI is a lot more humanitarian than making someone’s life a living hell because a large company has convinced us their employees aren’t indentured servants.
      - tomschlick 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

throwaway_law 7y ago

>No other labour law required. Simple competition sorts it out. We have seen how no labor laws combined with competition works, we get: 80 hour work weeks with no over time, no benefits, dangerous work conditions, and even exploitative child labor. There is legitimate use of contractors in lieu of employees, but UBER and gig economy as a whole are very hiring what are clearly employees, under the law, as contractors in order to skirt regulations.

neilwilson 7y ago
Ok. Explain how you can have 80 hour weeks with no overtime when the statutory alternative job in the local area is 35 hours a week, $25 per hour, 9-5 steady work about half a mile away from their house with full health care, pension and sickness cover. How does the 80 hour week person get any labour?
- mises 7y ago
  Potential for growth, probably. I may have more ambition than to make more than $45,500 per year for most of my career. I'd rather make six figures, save, and retire to a comfortable lifestyle. I've worked plenty of 80-hour weeks towards that goal, and I will doubtless work plenty more.
ericmcer 7y ago
I think free market forces would work better if we had a culture that was less work centric. We have created a culture that places high value on work ethic, income, and personal achievement. Those are great things, but they are also great qualities for employers to exploit. If we viewed overworking, putting in 60 hour weeks or doing risky work for more money as something unhealthy and greedy, rather than as commendable, free market forces might work better.
- smallgovt 7y ago
  The class of people who have bandwidth to worry about values like work ethic and personal achievement aren't the ones who are being exploited by employee vs IC misclassification.