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by shadowgovt 1166 days ago
This is a country of over three hundred million people. Independence past a certain degree is intractable.

I recommend if you don't like the rules and are too lazy (as you've self-described) to do the hard work to change them, you should consider changing countries. After all, your remedy for employees who don't like working for employers who break the Equal Employment Act is they should change companies.

If that solution seems unpalatable, meditate upon why it is inappropriate to suggest that employees who don't like being discriminated against should just use the remedy of changing employers.

1 comments

I don't live in the US.

What socialist like you keep forgetting is that somebody has to provide the jobs that you claim the rights to. If nobody provides the jobs, you can make laws all you want, people still won't have jobs.

We've been running that experiment for upwards of a century.

It turns out there are a couple motivating factors for why people form companies, including:

1. There's something they want to do and they need a lot of people to do it

2. They want to make a lot of money

3. They want to set their own work conditions

Socialist policies don't really impact motivation 1 (in fact, they can enhance it; one way American firms are hamstrung relative to their international peers is they have to pay directly for healthcare for their employees, whereas other countries treat that as a national-level responsibility that doesn't come asymmetrically out of various firms' pocketbooks). And motivation 2 is still satisfied if they're making $10 million instead of $10 billion, so long as $10 million is the number you're making when you're "winning the game." Motivation 3 is still very much a liberty that every company owner has, with only a few curtailments (not really any more than the notion that my driver's license gives me liberty to drive on public roads, even though I'm not allowed to drive on the left side of a divided road directly into oncoming traffic).

People have been predicting "socialism will kill the desire to make work for people" for decades as myriad nations have developed stronger government support for citizens' needs, and it hasn't happened. Sooner or later, one has to accept the evidence is against the "socialism kills jobs" hypothesis.

The US has more socialist policies in place right now than ever before, and unemployment is under 4%.

Most companies don't need lots of people. And setting their own work conditions is exactly what is at stake - which also impacts workers, as it also limits their choice of companies to work for. I also doubt wanting to make a lot of money is as common as you think - you can do that more easily in some corporate jobs these days, without the risk.

I don't know the extent of socialism in the US, but it certainly isn't a socialist country yet. Yes, we have run the experiment in the past, and all socialist countries failed spectacularly.

There is no such thing as free health care. Whether companies pay directly or via taxes doesn't really make a difference. The system in the US seems weird in various ways. All the "free health care" systems in other countries seem to be struggling a lot, by the way. None of them is really a proven solution as of now.

> Most companies don't need lots of people. And setting their own work conditions is exactly what is at stake

Great, if they don't need lots of people the Equal Employment Act shouldn't be a problem for them. There's a minimum size on enforcement of the law.

I really think you're overestimating how difficult it is to avoid creating a hostile work environment. You just follow up on reports. That's what you do. There's a whole standardized process to it and every company does it. The fact that Tesla failed to follow it (and failed so hard a jury originally awarded over $100 million in punitive damages, a number speaking to their outrage and disgust at what was allowed to occur) makes Tesla an outlier here.

Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?

> You just follow up on reports. That's what you do.

And then you simply fire the non-liberals involved? Hostile work environment is usually people not getting along. I don't think that is usually easy to solve. You probably have some bias thinking about racists and what not. But even if you just choose to believe all liberal complaints, that enables people to exploit the system. An example would be female execs who seem to always file for "sexism" when they are fired, because why not.

> Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?

I think nobody should be forced to employ somebody they don't want to employ (with their own money - for tax payer money, different rules are necessary). And I don't trust governments to know better how to run companies than the people owning the companies.

> And then you simply fire the non-liberals involved?

This is an odd sentiment and I don't know what to make of it. I'm assuming you don't think only non-liberals can create a hostile work environment, so what do you mean?

> I think nobody should be forced to employ somebody they don't want to employ (with their own money - for tax payer money, different rules are necessary).

As you've mentioned you don't live in the United states, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don't know our terrible history with racism. The short version is that we had to pass laws after trying myriad other things because, as a principle of a nation where all men are created equal, it was unacceptable that there were entire regions of the country where one simply could not maintain employment if one had the wrong skin color.

It was an ugly fight. They shut down public education in some places during the fight. In some places blood was drawn during the fight.

But in the end, we the people said no.

And that declaration of "no" is tied to a privilege, not a right: the privilege to own a company, which is a legal construct licensed by the government. No one is owed the right to be a company owner, and if one wants to own a company, there are societal obligations they shoulder. Obeying the Equal Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act are such obligations (again, once the company is big enough!), right alongside "obey zoning laws" and "don't dump toxic waste in a river."

It is fundamentally naive to believe this is a problem the market will solve, because this country already tried solving it with the market.