“We’re seeing just more and more industries using business models that attempt to change the employment relationship or obscure the employment relationship,” said Mary Beth Maxwell, a top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division....So they were paid badly and worked in bad conditions. Now they have worse conditions and worse pay, but the corporations themselves can claim to be good employers because they're obeying all your laws.
The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage.
Oh, and you've got that health-care thing licked now, right?
Many economists predict the growth of temp work will continue beyond the recession, in part because of health-care reform, which some economists say will lead employers to hire temps to avoid the costs of covering full-time workers.No doubt. So, how about a few more laws?
We may agree that the intrusive employment laws actually makes things worse, but I think you're coming at it from a direction that will equally fail to help. You seem to be disparaging employers for calling themselves "good" merely because they've obeyed all the labor laws, the implication being that to be truly "good" they should be doing something else -- perhaps a better job of meeting their employees' needs?
ReplyDeleteI'd guess that the employers aren't trying to be "good employers" at all. They're trying to sell goods and services at a price that will enable them to pay expenses (including wages) and stay in business, without breaking laws that will cause the government to put them out of business.
It's a slippery way to use the word "good." Does a "good employee" take half the going rate for his wage, so the employer can afford to hire more people and drive down the unemployment rate? If not, then why does a "good employer" pay more than the going rate? The goodness, if there is any, is in the ability of the employer and the employee to strike (and keep) a bargain that makes both of them happy enough not to walk away from the job. Neither has an inalienable right to the "good help" or "good benefits" of his dreams.
It's kind of like arguing that car manufacturers should offer cars at a "good" price. It doesn't make any sense to me.
Indeed, your ideology is set on the point. I've heard the argument many times. It is quite wrong, however.
ReplyDeleteIn the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that everyone seems to agree that happiness is the good towards which we strive in life, but people disagree about what it means. He considers several definitions carefully, but one that he says we can safely set aside is the good of making money. The reason we can be sure about this, he says, is that everyone who pursues money -- everyone at all, really -- does so for some other good beyond it. There's something else they want, that the money is intended as a tool to pursue.
For this reason, money-making is rightly subordinate to the greater goods that money-making is meant to enable. It's the true goods we should be interested in safeguarding, and money-making should be kept in its place. It enables, and insofar as it enables it is good. But when it ceases to enable and begins to harm the true good, it is out of order and needs to be controlled.
The best argument for capitalism is that it enables people to pursue their own goods, what they take to be the true good, better than any other system. But when we see that this ceases to be true -- as here -- we ought to revisit it.
Here the case is that government intervention in the market is at fault, and that is what must be corrected. But sometimes it is that the market itself has trespassed. In those cases, we may act, if we can, to restore the proper order.
Aristotle knew absolutely nothing about the economy, so I confess that I don't care what he thought, any more than I would consult him about physics or medicine.
ReplyDeleteThat's too bad, because you'd learn a lot about either by reading him. The Physics in particular is a book that is extremely enlightening.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say that he's always right. He has an argument about why the life of contemplation and study is superior to the life of action that is suspicious: it's based on an argument that the life of contemplation is more divine than the life of action. But that's not nearly as obviously true as he suggests it is, not only not to us, but not to Homer. When he speaks of a man being 'godlike' or 'like a supernatural force,' he's talking always about a man in action.
So the reason to read him is for the arguments, not to take him as an authority. I think he's totally right about this particular argument. Nobody engages in the life of moneymaking for the sake of moneymaking: rather, all of us do it for other goods. The nice thing about the economy is that it doesn't try to tell us that one good is better than another, so that we are free to choose which good we want.
But when we see some facet of the economy destroying the ability of a whole class to pursue its own goods as well as they used to, we have every right to ask why. The economy is not above morality, it's below it. It exists only to enable us to pursue the true goods. If we take it as a good in itself, we are making a severe error.
I'm not quite being fair to Aristotle on the action/contemplation issue, because he has other arguments besides that suspicious one. Still, it's a good example of an argument we have reason to contest.
ReplyDeleteHis arguments in the Physics probably seem too basic to be of interest to many readers, at first. But if you follow physics far enough, you realize that what you took for basic was really fundamental. He's after the questions that are at the very root. It's a highly worthwhile project. As Heidegger wrote, "This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence. Without Aristotle's Physics there would have been no Galileo."
How about this- I know an architect who has a small office, about 2-4 employees at a time. He's had some of those employees on staff for decades, and I'm not sure how marketable they'd be if he had to let them go. He's managed to keep the jobs coming in, though when some employees left, their positions have remained unfilled. He'd hire a temp now to cover the increasing workload as the market picks up a bit, or maybe a full time employee, but perhaps he can't afford a full time employee, because as soon as you do that, their pay is going to have a floor that's too high for him to pay and keep things going well, and if things don't go well, he'd personally be fine, bit what about the other two employees that really rely on working for him in particular? If hiring a part-timer keeps the other two working full time, isn't that better than not hiring anyone, much less a full time employee? The government regulation forces that kind of decision making, where the government should leave the establishment of morals to the churches and social groups. When government gets into those arenas, it mucks it all up.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is my idea of a "good" employer, which is to say a good man: he thinks carefully about the obligations he incurs to people and how to be sure he can fulfill them before he leads anyone to depend on them. In other words, the same standards that apply to employees or anyone else.
ReplyDeleteThat's similar to what I mean, in terms of putting moneymaking below rather than above (or outside of) morality. An employer should consider the morality of his actions.
ReplyDeleteAnd as you say, the government is at fault for a lot of the things driving business decisions right now. If we find that temp work is highly undesirable, and harmful to people who used to be able to do preferable part-time work, and we discover that the reason is that government regulations have made it uneconomic to hire anything except temps, we know where to place the blame. The business might even prefer part or full-time employees, but there's no choice given the way the regulatory picture is set up, and the reality of competition.
Obviously an employer should consider the morality of his actions, as should anyone in any situation, always. The issue is what is moral. To my way of thinking, the employer's moral duty does not extend to creating a permanent comfortable life for workers on the workers' terms. It's up to workers to find a way to match income to expenses, taking into account what they can do and what needs to be done for people in a position to pay for it. The employer has done enough if he's careful not to undertake obligations he can't fulfill, or create expectations he can't meet.
ReplyDeleteI'm about to post about what happens when society decides that the purpose of a plant (and the duty of an employer) is to ensure jobs forever.
Well, that's different from the original idea you floated, which was that employers didn't need to think about being 'good employers.' Now it sounds like you do think they are thinking about being moral employers, and that this is praiseworthy. I agree with this latter position.
ReplyDeleteWe can assign blame for worsening conditions to people other than the employer, if the employer is not at fault. Morality rarely requires suicide, for businesses as for people. Where the government is at fault for creating a regulatory climate that harms workers, that's not the business' fault. Natural disasters may cause you to close a plant because it's too expensive to fix, and it's cheaper to build a new one elsewhere. That's not the business' fault either.
But these are significant human relationships. Of course they must carry moral weight. You should think about what it means to be a good employer, or to treat the people you employ justly according to your power. They should think about what it means to be good employees, too. (A point of reflection: your Vietnamese refugee's recent advice that you should never give 100% until you were working for yourself. Is that really a good principle? Or is the principle more properly that you should only give 100% if you are working for yourself, or if you are working for someone who also does their best for you?)