An oldie but goodie that demonstrates the awesome durability of the New York Times‘ writer’s acumen. Uncovered by my wife.
Paul Krugman Struck Again
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Category Archives: jobs
Good for Workers, Good for Business
Recall the National Labor Relations Board’s case of a couple of years ago, Browning-Ferris Industries.
Browning-Ferris concerned a recycling center staffed by contractors. The original [NLRB] ruling found the contractors were jointly employed by a staffing firm and Browning-Ferris.
This ruling, if allowed to stand (the case also is in the Federal court system) would have allowed contractors like those at Browning-Ferris, McDonald’s, and any other franchise-centered corporation not only to form unions at individual franchises (which they’ve always been able to do), but also to form a grand union across the corporation.
President Donald Trump appointed a couple of folks to the NLRB to fill vacancies created when two ex-President Barack Obama (D) appointees quit in a snit over Trump’s election. Now the NLRB has voted to overturn that prior NLRB ruling.
This is good for both business and for employees. It’s good for business because modern unions have devolved into extortion rackets that threaten a business’ ability to exist through crippling strikes unless the unions get pay and benefits that they demand, even when those things cost more in their per-employee aggregate than the employee’s work is worth.
It’s good for the workers because it means, with labor costs allowed to match the value of the work done, labor won’t be replaced by automation that’s cheaper than the union-elevated labor costs. Jobs will be preserved, and more hiring will occur. It’s also good for workers because it frees them to negotiate their own wage and benefit package instead of being dragooned into whatever a union might impose on them.
Higher Education Improvement
The Wall Street Journal has a summary of the House’s The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act, to be proposed this week. It’s aimed at
filling that gap [in college graduates’ skills, with 6 million jobs left begging] by both deregulating parts of the sector and laying the conditions for shorter, faster pathways to the workforce. The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.
Highlights include these:
- revamp of the $1.34 trillion federal student loan program
- graduate students and parents of undergraduates would have overall caps on tuition and living expense loans, instead of borrowing whatever schools charge.
- end loan-forgiveness programs for public-service employees
- eliminate a program that ties monthly payments to income levels for private-sector workers.
- community colleges would get more funding to team with the private sector and create or expand apprenticeships and learn and earn programs
- for-profit college sector would be on equal footing with nonprofit schools regarding limits on federal aid and measurements of graduate success: overall, competency-based education
- functional repeal of the gainful employment regulation, which ties access to federal student aid to whether career programs lead to decent-paying jobs. Government will no longer be the decider of what jobs are suitable; the graduate and employer will.
- increased accountability of schools by improving the quality of information available to prospective students
- “historically black” and developing Hispanic schools would have to provably graduate or transfer at least 25% of their students in order to get funding from the pile otherwise earmarked for these schools
- require schools to pay back some portion of federal loans if the student didn’t rather than leaving the schools strictly as loan generators that get the proceeds from the loans without regard to suitability or outcome.
All in all, this could represent a major improvement to our higher community college/college/university education system, especially in its core: graduates’ employability and the costs incurred (and by whom) in achieving that employability.
Naturally, the colleges and universities, whose funding oxen are going to get gored, will squawk. Ignore them, and move past the dinosaurs and vested interests.
Colin Kaepernick’s Lawfare “Protest”
After being unable to get a job with any team in the NFL this season, Colin Kaepernick has filed a formal grievance against the NFL, each of the 32 team owners, and President Donald Trump—who supposedly “influenced” league management and team owners into not hiring him—alleging that they colluded to not sign him at quarterback, or end-of-bench monitor, this season.
Coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he routinely attacked our flag and national anthem and insulted our veterans by taking a knee during the pre-game playing of our national anthem. Also coincidentally, his filing comes after a year in which he led his last employer, the San Francisco 49ers, to a 1-10 record before the team tired of losing and benched him.
Let’s set aside Kaepernick’s beef against Trump. Aside from being utterly laughable, it casually insults the team owners as being cowards unable to run their businesses in the face of a Presidential tweet parade. That’s a minor point.
What illustrates the risible nature of Kaepernick’s grievance is its centering on his free speech rights and his claim that he’s been blackballed as a result of his so-called protests.
Carefully elided is everyone else’s free speech right to object to his behavior, just as vociferously, including with ticket dollars and TV viewing. This particularly includes team owners, who don’t give up their free speech rights to respond in the same forum to Kaepernick’s, et al., free speech “protests.”
Also: a private company employee’s free speech rights, within very broad limits, are matters of employment contract parameters. The 1st Amendment limits Government, not private entities.
Beyond all of that, neither a broad functional consensus—paralleling the fans’ broad consensus—of owners disliking this particular misbehavior, nor a separate broad functional consensus that employees publicly disparaging our national symbols and insulting those who fought to defend them is bad for business, even remotely approach collusion.
There is no case in this lawfare assault.
Another Bit of Foolishness
And another incentive for businesses to relocate.
San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do. They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish. Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply. Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:
He doesn’t complain. He’s quiet. No lunch break. He’s starting exactly at 10.
The robot also doesn’t take sick leave or parental leave or any of the other labor froo-froo that San Francisco has mandated, regardless of what an employer and employee might work out between themselves without Know Betters’ dubious help.
If a business is going to be prevented from lowering its cost of doing business, it has little incentive to stay put. And human consumers, facing artificially elevated prices, aren’t helped a whit.