German businesses better add women to their governances.  Or else Germany’s Großer Bruder will do it for them.  Regardless of qualification.

Big German companies need to put more women on their executive boards, said Germany’s Women’s Affairs Minister Katarina Barley. The official threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year.

Bad idea.

Quotas just stigmatize those who got in via quota, whether they were truly qualified for the position or not.  And those who are not, and so fail, only strengthen the stigma.  Quotas are especially damaging to black women.  My GP was contemptuously treated as a twofer in med school because she allegedly filled two squares: she’s a woman, and she’s black.  It stinks.

The way to get more favored group into organization is to train those folks up for those positions in the first place so they can compete effectively.  That means the educational system needs to do a better job of training women to lead businesses (to take the present example) and to convince them they want to compete for those positions—which the German educational system already does, it seems, for boys and men.

That, though, would take time—years, a generation or two or three—and politicians (Germany’s are not unique here) don’t care about tomorrow, only about today.  And today’s virtue signaling.

Congressmen don’t pay their interns.  Who knew?

At least 174 of the 184 lawmakers who support legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour do not pay their interns, according to a recent Employment Policies Institute analysis.

It’s a bogus beef, though.  Folks employed in minimum wage jobs are low-skill workers doing low-value work, and they’re doing it to build general work experience and ethic, to earn summer spending money, to earn money for college, to build a resume, to supplement an existing family income.

Interns do very little of that.  They’re in the position in order to gain specific experience in the particular job, to build a resume, for college/graduate school course credit, and in many cases with an expectation of being hired by the company for which they interned after graduation.  The “compensation” of expectation for an intern isn’t a dollar income; it’s that particularized experience.

Stuart Varney, a Fox News contributor and host of Fox Business News‘ Varney & Co, added this:

If you don’t pay them anything, then you’re simply giving jobs to the sons and daughters of the rich.  You’re giving opportunity to the rich so that they can get in on the ground floor.

That may be true, but it’s not inherent to the concept of internships; it’s specific to the employers—in this case, the politicians.

Recall the 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that said, via Browning-Ferris Industries v NLRB, that a joint employer was not an employer that shared direct control over a temp agency’s employees with that temp agency, as the long-established 1984 standard held, but that such a joint employer is one that exercises merely tenuous control.

The case is before the DC Circuit on appeal from the ruling.  The Wall Street Journal is properly skeptical of the permanence of a favorable court outcome, as it is with the possibility of a reversing ruling by an NLRB populated with President Donald Trump appointees.

The WSJ is hopeful regarding another path, the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would codify that earlier standard.

That certainly would be a step in the right direction, but there’s no reason to believe a later NLRB wouldn’t simply ignore that or find a way to work around the standard—by creatively reinterpreting it to match it to then supposed social imperatives, as judges do too often with their own rulings.

No, the longer term and more effective solution is for Congress simply to abolish the NLRB altogether and not replace it.

Rather, a labor reform bill making its way (too slowly, IMHO) in the House.  The bill has some interesting items in it:

• require unions to obtain permission from workers to spend their dues on purposes other than collective bargaining
• mandate a recertification election upon the expiration of a collective-bargaining agreement if a workforce has turned over by more than 50%
• take card-check off the menu of options for holding a union election
• allow employees to withhold their personal contact information from unions

What’s not to like?

What’s holding up the bill?