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by rayiner
1049 days ago
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If there was no minimum wage and no OSHA, would you look at the opinion of all workers or just the people who agreed to work for a low wage or in an unsafe condition? Obviously the former, because all workers are subject to coercion to agree to work for low wages and in unsafe conditions, and the point is to protect all workers from that pressure. Similarly, sex workers don’t start out that way. All women are subject to the coercion and social pressure that pushes some into sex work. The daughter of that middle class suburban woman could be pressured into sex work by an abusive boyfriend, for example. They all have a stake in the situation. |
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Obviously the latter, because the former includes a majority of people who aren't subject to such coercion, e.g. because they perform skilled labor and have negotiating power. But who may be in favor of such rules for perfidious and selfish reasons (e.g. because they're in a position to benefit from destroying smaller competitors) or because they're so separated from the lives of the people actually affected by the rules that they support them out of ignorance.
You can see this because people will answer polling questions like "do you support a rule that improves worker safety even if it increases production costs" without asking a single question about the details, like how much it improves safety and how much it increases costs. Even though it's obvious that rules with a poor cost/benefit ratio hurt everyone by making things cost more, and hurt the people nearest to the cost increase most because it comes out of the revenue the business uses to pay their wages.
Which is how we get "worker protections" that harm workers. Because prohibiting lead and asbestos are good rules, but there are also bad rules that people with cushy jobs nevertheless support because they sound good and the negative consequences don't affect them personally. Why should we put weight on their misaligned and uninformed views?