Other people’s labor is not a company’s private property. That was known as slavery and we have mostly abolished it in the developed world.
But my point is that all of your arguments rest on an unquestioned assumption about how ownership translates to authoritarian control of others without explaining how or by what justification that power is arrived at.
The answer of course is that it’s a social construct enforced by states to varying degrees, present and historically, and thus no way inherent to the thing itself. Appeals to status quo are therefore not justifications for the validity of the relationship, as it has changed over time, proving malleable to all kinds of political and social forces (e.g. the abolition of slavery, the formation of unions, worker collectives). Defending an authoritarian relation to property as it relates to other people’s labor thus require an actual and explicit defense, which you have so far not provided.
Literally any country with strong laws protecting strikes and work stoppages? In many parts of Europe, I can convince my coworkers that our bosses are treating us unfairly, unsafely, etc, we can walk off the job and not get fired. I doubt any employer would want us to do that, so it would be entirely against their “direction.”
This is a uniquely American notion of employment. “Do my bidding or be done away with” is not the norm across countries with strong unions and worker protections.
Not universally though. In countries with stronger labor protections and unions, you can’t just fire people for philosophical disagreements (not without those disputes being mediated anyway).
I don’t understand how we arrived at some conception of workplaces as little dictatorships, where bosses can treat people however they want and that’s somehow good or legitimate.
Or they could just actually unionize instead of this reactive outrage. It’s unlikely Gebru would have been fired under these circumstances if she had a union contract.
So if you don’t do what your boss says at a job, even if you disagree, your boss can fire you, and this is good. But if you tell your boss that they should do something or you’ll quit, this is bad and makes you unemployable.
You realize that this is just an argument that whoever is in a position of authority over you is right by virtue of having that authority?
I lived in LA for a long time and I would say NYC has it beat by a large margin when it comes to bourgie restaurants. Most of the hip places in LA are uniformly terrible, the places that have been around a long time are about as good as the same kinds of places in NYC, and the various ethnic restaurants are better in LA (assuming they’re in their neighborhood enclaves).
Not the OP, but the ADA only requires that existing businesses/services accommodate disabilities, not provide them where they don’t exist. There’s no mandate to provide transportation for the disabled in the US.
Unsurprisingly, Uber and Lyft have also been violating the ADA for pretty much their entire existence, arguing that they don’t have to comply and settling with states and cities when they lose cases:
Medicare for All is widely popular in the US. The insurance industry, hospitals, and employers who want leverage over workers buy off politicians to prevent it from happening.
Collective problems require collective action. We aren’t born into a just or meritocratic world, but one defined by the wealthy and powerful, who themselves form blocs to defend their interests. You can certainly try to take them on by yourself, but history suggests you won’t be very successful.
...but Unions and union-backed political parties are who won all of these benefits in social democracies?
You seem to have the entire thing backwards: the failure to build and grow unions in the US has resulted an absence of power and political representation for working people. Without this counterbalance, the rich and corporations have used the state to enshrine benefits for themselves and total power over workers.
This is not true. Unionization based on enterprise-level votes was put in place with NRLA in 1935. The NRLA and Taft-Hartley would have to be amended or replaced to change this. I have no idea if large unions have ever lobbied against replacing them at the Federal level, but there hasn’t (in recent history) been any serious push to do so that these unions would oppose.
If the evidence is that American institutions fail where the vast majority of developed countries succeed, the onus would seem to fall on the “American” part and not the institutions. The same logic applies for healthcare, public transportation, and representative democracy.
Your intuition is correct. Workplace-based bargaining was put in place with NRLA in 1935, which requires that unions be formed on the basis of shop votes. This was done to prevent labor from having the same political power that sector-wide unions have in Europe. The sector-wide Hollywood unions were grandfathered in, which is why they remain as successful and powerful as they are today.
Unfortunately, a lot of people in tech ascribe to a kind of utopian imperialism. It doesn’t matter what people themselves want, it’s about what engineered fantasies can be imposed upon them.
Vancouver is fixing the problem that the parent said is the solution - build a bunch of luxury stock to solve your housing crisis. It doesn’t work out that way in reality, which is what they’re now addressing.
...or international investors buy them up as an asset store or to launder money, leaving them mostly vacant. We unfortunately live in the real world, not an economist’s toy box, and have the example of Vancouver to prove it.
I know that China relied heavily on deliveries for food and essential goods in Wuhan, but also seemed to be having people doing deliveries kitted in protective gear.
Not sure how this affected transmission, but doubt the same protections will be in place for delivery workers in the US because of shortages masks, gloves, etc.
But my point is that all of your arguments rest on an unquestioned assumption about how ownership translates to authoritarian control of others without explaining how or by what justification that power is arrived at.
The answer of course is that it’s a social construct enforced by states to varying degrees, present and historically, and thus no way inherent to the thing itself. Appeals to status quo are therefore not justifications for the validity of the relationship, as it has changed over time, proving malleable to all kinds of political and social forces (e.g. the abolition of slavery, the formation of unions, worker collectives). Defending an authoritarian relation to property as it relates to other people’s labor thus require an actual and explicit defense, which you have so far not provided.