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Originally Posted by loquitur
as I said, where workers are fungible that might be true. Most workers aren't fungible.
And what I wrote about my firm is also true for the unskilled people, the ones in the mail room and file room.
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Most american workers aren't fungible, perhaps. But i imagine that many of the people who harvest our fields and price check our merchandise and sell us crap over the phone are pretty fungible.
Law firms have pretty good margins, i would presume. I would be interested to see how your firm would treat its least skilled employees if staying competetive depended on paying them and treating them like cogs.
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Ever been an employer, Filtherton? If you haven't, then you really are just making assumptions. Taking care of your employees makes very good business sense. I commend to you an interview with Richard Branson, who claims to have built his Virgin empire on taking care of his employees.
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I command you to the history of the labor movement, the mining industry, maquiladoras, sweatshops abd offshoring.
[quote]One other thing: from saying that employers should provide safe work environments it doesn't follow that OSHA is necessary. I'm with you that there have to be sanctions for injuring your workers, but we have them already. It's called workers comp laws. Companies that don't take care of the safety of workers can get socked, and I mean
socked. Is that the "forcing" you're talking about?[quote]
Worker's comp laws are a completely decentralized means of making employees safer. Have you ever thought that osha might actually save businesses money by providing standards as opposed to letting each individual business go it alone? How much do you think a safety consultant would charge to disseminate all the information that osha provides for free?
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What's apparent to me is that you're making generalizations and advocating government action based on the generalization. That might be the only way policy gets made, but surely you see that that underscores what a blunt instrument government is: you make policy for everyone based on what a subset does. That's how regulatory burdens got started and why there are squadrons of my fellow lawyers getting rich by helping people and companies navigate regulatory minefields (which is not, by any stretch, an economically productive activity).
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Well, if you're saying that business is more responsive to change than goverment, i agree with you. Unfortunately, businesses tends to only respond to makes them the most money.
I'm not saying that regulatory agencies are fun to deal with, just that the quality of life of the people in our coutry is better because of regulatory agencies.
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I'll be damned if I'll ever advocated putting all sorts of obstacles in front of the GEs and Amgens of the world merely because Scott Sullivan and Andy Fastow are crooks. That's lunacy, and a recipe for killing the economy.
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Apparently the recipe is wrong, because the economy seems to be doing all right.