Latin America: the fires immediately died down, because they needed socialism to burn

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Latin America: the fires immediately died down, because they needed socialism to burn

tsa: Feb 3, 2014

LemonDrizzle posted:

So unions are complaining about getting a real-terms pay rise (however small) during times of economic difficulty? Oookaaay.

Yea, and there are some interesting issues in how public unions should be treated vs. private company unions. At least in the vast majority of countries nurses and doctors can't go on strike just because, and even strikes among transportation workers is limited. It seems perfectly reasonable to have restrictions on what public unions can do when they are performing tasks vital to the infrastructure of the state.

wateroverfire posted:

Chilean labor law is pretty dumb in a lot of ways. Below are just a few:

1) It is very expensive to lay an employee off. Employees on a fixed term contract have to be paid out to the end of their terms whether they're performing or not. Employees on an indefinite contract accrue a month of severence plus one month per year worked. If an employee challenges their lay off as "unjust" (which they will) and wins (which they will) they can get another 50% in penalties and might even get their job back so that the whole process starts again. This creates some really perverse incentives compared to, for instance, an American style unemployment insurance system or even a more generous european system. But it's rooted in the cultural animosity between workers and management and so is untouchable.

2) Medical leaves of absence may be taken at any time, with doctors' permission, for anything from injury to stress, for an indefinite sequence of 1 week periods. While on leave an employee can't be replaced and they're entitled to return to their old job at their old pay plus whatever seniority they accrued while on leave. In theory this would be sort of ok but FONASA (the state insurance plan) gives no shits about fraud and the system is rampantly abused at great cost to the state and employers. When an employee decides they're outie it's not uncommon for them to take a year's worth of paid leave to pad out their eventual mandatory severence payment.

3) Chileans have to work a fixed schedule set by contract, and deviation from that without a bunch of paperwork is a violation for the employer if the employee complains (whether it was to the employee's benefit or not). Flex time is legally dubious. Allowing people to work from home is legally dubious. Allowing alternate schedules is illegal. Basically, we can't be modern about how people work. It frustrates everyone and yet it's untouchable because ARE WORKER PROTECTIONS.

1 and 2 are expensive for employers and actually contribute to lower wages because those things get factored into offers. They protect lovely employees, somewhat, but everyone gets payed less as a result. Awesome. 3 is a pain in the rear end for everyone.

More worker rights = automatically better seems to be the axiom around here, but that really does seem ripe for abuse. I'm really not sure why I should cheer on rights that could very well hurt the majority of people for the benefit of people who abuse the system.

Like number 3 is just nonsense in the global economy, I have no idea why people are mindlessly nodding along to that one. It's completely antiquated, like it presumes everyone is still on a factory assembly line or something. 1 and 2 have generally good ideas that probably just need to be reworked a bit.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2014 23:39

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 11:50

tsa: Feb 3, 2014

Calling it the end of the middle class sounds incredibly hyperbolic. A lot of the time the company tries it and realizes it adds way too many problems for little gain, which is what happened with a lot of US outsourcing in skilled areas.

Honestly a lot of these labor laws seem incredibly archaic and antiquated in the modern global economy. Worker protections are great but there's lots of ways to make that happen besides having silly laws like 'you can outsource this but not this. Particularly when often times core business functions are difficult to define. Basically the way we work has changed, we need to stop pretending that the same labor laws that worked when you had everyone on assembly lines in the industrial revolution will work today. This is also why unions have largely died, because modern jobs are simply a lot harder to unionize for a variety of reasons. It's silly just to blame the right for it when unions flourished under much harsher opposition to their existence (including straight up murder) in the past. In reality it's considerably easier to unionize something like a factory, where you had lots of people working the same job with little difference in output levels. It's much harder to unionize an office where everyone has different roles and one employees worth can objectively be much more than another coworker. Millenials are incredibly individualistic and this is well-reflected in their attitudes toward unions even if they support worker-protections in general.

tsa fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Apr 10, 2015

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 21:26

tsa: Feb 3, 2014

No one is actually posting any evidence why it is bad though, just waving their hands and saying it is bad.

As it is right now the courts are piled with cases pertaining to the law because "core functions" is an arbitrary term. Anyway unless I'm reading it wrong article 8 has provisions for the persons working outsourced jobs to be covered by the union of the outsourcer, so that should ease some concerns.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 21:35

tsa: Feb 3, 2014

Badger of Basra posted:

People at NYT/WSJ/etc. are loving the poo poo out of Brazil's recession.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/world/americas/brazils-economic-crisis-intensifies-raising-pressure-on-president.html?ref=americas&_r=0

I dunno, just looks like accurate reporting to me, half the article is the party saying they hosed up- hard to spin it any other way. If there's anything the far left and right can agree upon, it's that 'this time is different', and it never is.

quote:

The scandal, in which contractors paid an estimated $3 billion in bribes to officials, could wipe out the equivalent of 2.5 percent from Brazil�s gross domestic product in 2015, according to GO Associados, a consulting firm in S�o Paulo that measured job losses at contractors and the scaling back of aggressive expansion plans at Petrobras.

Jesus.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2015 00:19

tsa: Feb 3, 2014

Symbolic Butt posted:

punk rebel ecks, Pinochet was really bad. Discussing the hypothetical bright side of Chile's military dictatorship is a deeply uncomfortable exercise. I hope this gives you some food for thought about why some people take offense and can't just be beep boop robots on this subject.

Lol grow up.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 17:09

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