Its About Ethics in Hiring Practices

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Its About Ethics in Hiring Practices

Indeterminacy: Sep 9, 2011; Excuse me, your Rabbit parts are undetached.

wateroverfire posted:

Ok. Those are sort of 3 very different questions so maybe one at a time, we could talk about.

1. What are acceptable methods of determining who is able bodied.

2. What are acceptable methods of determining what work people should do

and

3. What are acceptable methods to compel people to work?

There's something very interesting in question 2 here which you might not necessarily be conscious of. I don't think you're asking the question "What work needs to be done", but rather you're looking at the administrative question of "how does one assign a particular article of work to a particular person".

There is an economic argument that says that it is much better, given two people, for each of them to focus on maximising the utility of their labour by focusing mainly on what they are good at. However, things start to get tricky when everyone present is good at the same thing, and nobody is good at something necessary. In the standard desert island scenario, it's not good for social cohesion for the two people who are good at and enjoy fishing to have the one who is less good at fishing always being the one who goes foraging, which they both hate and neither is good at.

This is where it becomes worth introducing the distinction between work and chore. A chore is something that nobody wants to do, but that has to be done.

Chores shouldn't be what any one person has to spend their work energy doing - they should be assigned in such a way that the burden is fairly shared out, in such a way that the job is done with as little stress and effort as is needed to do it.

So I don't think you make somebody "the garbage person". You can put this on rotation, have everybody who can take their turn doing the garbage, and you appeal to a common sense of fairness and appropriate docking of someone's privileges if they don't do it when it's their turn and the have no excuse. And, if there's somebody who for reasons of health or ability just can't do the garbage, they do the dishes more often, or look after the bills; something else that means they're still doing their bit.

I don't see why national service couldn't be used in a similar way, as long as everyone in society is part of the system and you don't get to buy yourself out of it by virtue of your income or status.

# ? Jun 1, 2019 09:44

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# ? May 15, 2024 14:40

Ardennes: May 12, 2002

Admittedly, it is arguable that it is best to match the skills and potential of an individual to a task, and that specialization has its benefits. The question is if the livelihood of a person should depend on that criteria.

It also gets back to the issue of skills and wages. The Soviets, in all honesty, had a bit of an issue with this since many of their scientific and cultural workers had a reason to want to live the country for solely economic benefit (and much of the politics of this followed behind). If anything the big issue of emigration itself was simply that many of the most educated and talented people didn't have a reason to stay in the Soviet Union besides the government not allowing them to emigrate.

There is a point where you very well may have to accept some inequality for the sake of national interest, the question is how to control it so it doesn't become the Bay Area.

# ? Jun 1, 2019 11:29

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Alternatively this is a good argument against socialism in one country as if there are no imperialist pigdogs to move to, you have no reason to move :v:

# ? Jun 1, 2019 13:51

MixMastaTJ: Dec 14, 2017

Not being an anti-intelectual, fascist hellhole would also help.

# ? Jun 1, 2019 18:05

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

MixMastaTJ posted:

Do you actually think neoliberals are Machiavellian geniuses constantly scheming how to make the poor suffer? They're apathetic to the wellbeing of the poor and exist in a system that rewards them for causing suffering. They don't give a poo poo if UBI is good or bad for the poor, it will increase consumption, which is good for the economy, which they like.

There's a good chance it will increase inflation but it's not gonna be a one to one price hike. Include a provision to adjust the UBI annually for inflation and that aspect self corrects.

I think that this question is important enough to warrant answering at some length. Despite that length there are some necessary simplifications in what follows since I want to get a basic point across that might be helpful for how we understand each other.

Capitalists have predictable incentives that emerge naturally from the way our economy is structured and from their place within that structure. One of the key ones is a struggle over control of the workplace and the surplus that is produced in the workplace. Since policies that increase the social wage also increase both the bargaining power of workers and the tax obligation of capitalists, there is a strong incentive for capitalists to use their political power to try and reduce the overall security of working people. This observation does not depend upon any psychological theory about the mind of the capitalist (though plausible arguments for a psychological theory of reactionary politics have been proposed). It is simply the nature of a class society that there will be a continual tug of war over the distribution of the surplus between those who own and those who work. (Lest this be misunderstood as some kind of vulgar marxist analysis, let's pause to emphasize that this struggle is often submerged into or become an adjunct of other forms of social conflict, such as that between the sex, old and young, different ethnicities, religions or most significantly in North America, between different races etc.) For this reason, the classical liberals clearly and explicitly argued that, as Mandeville put it:

Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees posted:

It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor; for who would do the work?... As they [the poor] ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. lf here and there one of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he was brought up in nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get... Those that get their living by their daily labour... have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy... From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; for besides, that they are the never-failing nursery of fleets and armies, without them there could be no enjoyment, and no product of any country could be valuable."To make the society" [which of course consists of non-workers] "happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied.

What Mandeville wrote in the 18th century - a sentiment echoed by numerous other liberals in the intervening centuries - remains true today. Capitalism requires a large class of labourers who are kept above the bare minimum of subsistence but prevented from accumulating sufficient savings to become genuinely economically independent. This dynamic helps to explain why Keynesian demand management and the expansion of the welfare state tend to be opposed by capitalists even in circumstances where such policies have been shown to prevent economic depressions and to stabilize or even raise the rate of profit.

Under conditions where a rapid increase in the wealth of society or the successful struggles of workers and their organizations leads to a rise in labour's share of the social surplus you tend to start to see increasing demands for even higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure time, etc. This occurred in the latter half of the capitalist 'golden age' that followed World War II, contributing to the economic crisis of the 1970s and the implementation of what we now tend to call "neoliberal" policy solutions, most of which involved destroying worker organizations, taming inflation by halting and reversing wage increases through high interest rates, and lowering the social wage to choke off further bouts of worker militancy.

As that analysis should imply, any advances by workers remain vulnerable as long as capitalists hold the majority of the political power within the system. That's why any abstract theoretical policy, whether it be a basic income or socialized healthcare or rent control - is only as good as the movement of people and organizations that is pushing for it. Because as soon as these policies become genuinely effective they'll generate resistance, since anything that significantly raises the living standards of workers has implications for their capitalist employers. In circumstances where it becomes important for a given fragment of the working class to have its living standards elevated (as was the case for some manufacturing workers in the past, or some tech workers now) this increase is paid for by a lowering of living standards among the rest of the population.

This adds an additional calculation that we need to make: what specific reform proposals best enhance the fighting spirit and power of the working class. What policies are most defensible once enacted? And for reasons already outlined in this thread I think basic income is actually pretty weak on those fronts. It would certainly have potential uses, especially if we are imaging a purely technocratic world in which policies can be enacted outside the realm of petty class politics. Given the real world constraints we have to operate under, however, I think a basic income actually turns out to be a weak policy. The reason it gets so much support from parts of the capitalist class is precisely because it's so nonthreatening. It's a policy that can be carefully calibrated to adjust the social wage just enough to keep workers alive and consuming, and in the event it actually starts to enhance their bargaining power its very easy to reduce it. While something like socialized healthcare involves creating huge groups of (typically unionized) government employees and provides benefits that everyone in society uses, literally every realistic proposal for a basic income turns it into a means tested welfare program.

I'm not as categorically opposed to the idea of a basic income as I might seem in the context of this thread but I find that it tends to be accompanied by dangerous levels of wishful or even delusional thinking. People seem to cling to it as a substitute for developing an actual critique of capitalism. It gets turned into a magical catch all solution that somehow won't be subject to the kind of opposition that any other increase to the social wage would generate. But as I've tried to argue, the reason it might generate less opposition is exactly because the people advocating it doesn't threaten their power in the way that policies like socialized medicine or even a jobs guarantee.

Bundy posted:

It absolutely is the solution to our predicament. If we don't start producing and consuming less and soon, the planet is going to brush us off like the infestation we've become. The one percent can either choose to share, or be made to share when enough people realise what's at stake.

No, the solution to our predicament involves lowering the levels of consumption in the first world but we're still going to be massively reliant on a global system of production to keep people alive and to respond to the already irreversible consequences of climate change.

# ? Jun 1, 2019 20:04

MixMastaTJ: Dec 14, 2017

Helsing posted:

Absolutely there are a thousand ways to do UBI terribly. A bill that says "Give everyone 1000 bucks" is trash. The amount needs to be a livable wage, needs to automatically adjust for inflation and needs to be trivially easy to receive.

And as I said starting this- UBI AND chipping away at private markets. But a good UBI bill should be a single fight. Each markets going to have to be attacked individually- look at the massive fight we've been going through in the U.S. to decommoditize healthcare. The fight to decommoditize housing isn't about to get easier. And try winning a single vote in the rust belt with the platform "get rid of the agriculture industry!"

I wouldn't consider UBI even remotely a death knell of capitalism- it's one of many steps and one I think is relatively easy to attain and will help a lot of people.

# ? Jun 1, 2019 20:59

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

UBI will not be a step towards abolishing capitalism; on the contrary, it is going to strengthen capitalist power and systemic entrenchment through weakening the organisational impetus of the workers, contributing to the atomisation of society and channeling welfare policy through commercial markets

all this in addition to the hundred practical difficulties previously listed. for a socialist, UBI is a *bad policy* under capitalism and certainly not a main policy target

# ? Jun 2, 2019 11:36

Somfin: Oct 25, 2010; In my🦚 experience🛠️ the big things🌑 don't teach you anything🤷‍♀️.; Nap Ghost