"Unions have been pushing companies to improve on-the-job conditions. After lobbying for it last year, major freight railroads have started offering short-term paid sick leave—in some cases for the first time—to union workers to ensure ample staffing and service levels."
Haha, surreal, wall street journal is now telling me that "unions are the institution by which people (in the richest country in the world) are beginning to secure basic human rights for themselves."
I'm not convinced that moral and good is the criteria by which something is deemed a human right. Especially considering that "moral" means wildly different things in different cultures and "human rights" span the totality of humanity.
I think that's a good question since pointing to references is a powerful way to make an argument. Although not legally binding, the UDHR contains this:
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
This isn’t a claim that everyone agrees this is literally a basic human right. It’s a colloquialism to emphasize the author’s view that this is something that should have been granted to the workers long ago and that it is appalling that it wasn’t.
Please don’t get hung up on semantics. Use a different phrasing if it pleases you to do so.
If you don’t get paid when you are sick, you are in essence being punished for being sick.
Not being punished for being sick is a basic human right.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights entered into force in 1976. The human rights that the Covenant seeks to promote and protect include:
the right to work in just and favourable conditions;
the right to social protection, to an adequate standard of living and to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental well-being;
the right to education and the enjoyment of benefits of cultural freedom and scientific progress.
Appreciate the distinction between representative democracy (a mechanism for choosing/changing the government), and the rule of law (a set of statutes and/or common law laying out how society should function). The covenant was agreed by (mostly) governments chosen through representative democracy, and signed into law (or at least given a nod in various legislation, policy etc).
Ideas like 'the will of the people' overriding established good and just law is the preserve of populists, and in extreme, of fascists. The Brexit referendum being a good case in point.
That’s the difference between voting and democracy. Unions are a form of democracy, as it’s the people who are determining their own rights. But yes, unfortunately rights often have to be hard fought for rather than simply voted into existence.
Threatening a person's livelihood if they want to take a couple days off to go to the doctor is denying them "a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being". Additionally, if you force your workers to come to work sick, you also threaten everyone else's standard of healthy living by unnecessarily exposing them to a contagious disease.
"Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay."
The with pay term feels oddly specific and overly prescriptive. (If your society had UBI is this implying the employer still must pay you for holidays?)
I'd feel the minimum requirement to not threaten livelihood when a potentially coercive relationship exists is unpaid leave should be allowed (things like the FMLA). Though even that seems nuanced with contracting/business owners.
The Declaration of Human Rights is not an abstract philosophical document, it is a practical framework meant to be applied to the world as it is today. It is intentionally prescriptive so that it can influence real-world governments and societies, and it has been somewhat successful in that regard.
It is not intended to be applicable to any society imaginable, that would be impossibly broad.
On a practical note, I disagree with you that reducing someone's income if they need to stay home to stay healthy is non-coercive, in the world as it exists today.
> On a practical note, I disagree with you that reducing someone's income if they need to stay home to stay healthy is non-coercive, in the world as it exists today.
If you are party to an agreement wherein you exchange labor for capital, how is it non-coercive to force someone to pay you for not holding up your end of the bargain?
You can't look at one agreement in a vacuum. Organizing a society such that most people are forced to make such an agreement is coercive and inhumane (given our abundance of resources and ability to guarantee these rights to everyone). If we lived in a society where nobody was forced to make that choice and all people were guaranteed all the rights in the declaration, then two individuals entering into the agreement you describe would not be a problem. In this scenario, neither individual would be putting their health or safety at risk, even if one of them went without pay or the agreement fell apart.
Shorter answer: an agreement itself cannot be coercive if you voluntarily agreed to it, but you can be coerced into making that agreement. That's often the situation in America today.
Under UBI, you would not be paid less no matter which days you do or don't work, including holidays. Also arguably if UBI weren't tied to a job, then any "job" would really just be volunteer work.
It's not about paying people to be sick, it's about how you shouldn't be denied income because you happen to get sick. The source of the income is less important.
In Australia discussion about workers rights as universal human rights began at Federation in 1901.
An early Harvester Agreement ( ~ 1901 ?? ) set the minimum wage as a livable wage - to cover food, clothing, rent for a family unit with 40 hours of work.
Sick leave was introduced into industrial awards in 1922. From 1935 to the 1970s, paid sick leave was gradually introduced into federal awards until 10 days sick leave per year became standard.
Current workers rights are laid out in the National Employment Standards made Federal law by the Fair Work Act (2009)
The yearly entitlement of paid sick or carer’s leave is based on an employee’s ordinary hours of work. It is 10 days for full-time employees, and pro-rata for part-time employees. This can be calculated as 1/26 of an employee’s ordinary hours of work in a year.
Sure, these standards are by no means global rights but they are universal within Australia where the general ethos for a hundred years has been that everybody deserves a fair go .. hopefully that persists.
I would say that it comes from the basic right to Justice, in where you are penalized baseed on your actions, not on things out of your control. In this case being sick is out of folks control. The business should take into account and be able to handle a given percentage of its employees being sick at a given time.
As for the right to Justice, we have these rights to allow us to live together as independent sovereign entities. A society that does not acknowledge basic rights of individuals is one where those with more power or resources will dominate those with fewer. There may not be some intrinsic physical law that requires that we have these rights, but I for one would not want to live or participate in society that does not espouse them and strive to adhere to them.
Because rights have functionally become a prestige concept. If you want your position on something to be treated as "holy" or unassailable, you reframe it in the context of a right. You can see this across the political spectrum and on various issues that otherwise have no relation to the traditional political concept of a right.
Forget basic human right. Think basic public health.
If we incentive workers to come to work when sick, they are more likely to spread illness, worsen their conditions where they need more expensive care (which we will provide in most cases one way or another — letting sick people die in the streets leads to revolution and John Q Public type hostage taking), and of course can disrupt unemployment which has many wripple effects for something out of workers control.
All of society benefits from paid sick leave, not just the human rights of workers.
> Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Great that one journalist is self-aware but I'm not sure the opinion of a single journalist warrants a change in perspective here.
It's also David Brooks, Who has exemplified out-of-touch upper-class centrist conservatism for as long as I've known his name. Maybe he's having a moment of redeeming clarity, or maybe he's just being hypocritical.
For anyone who doesn't get the joke: The USA once had a strong and popular left wing that arose out of the brutal working conditions of the 19th century industrial revolution, sometimes going as far as open armed conflict against mercenary groups hired by their employers. The pendulum swung strongly the other way over the 20th century, undoing the literal blood sweat and tears that went into securing basic workers' rights. Now we have to do it all over again, and it's funny to see the news reporting on labor organization as if it's some new concept.
> Lynn Kelley, a business consultant who recently published a book, said she was worried about a possible UPS strike affecting the book’s distribution, including large bulk shipments for some upcoming events. “There might have been some delays,” said Kelley, adding that her book is on Amazon, which handles shipping. “My concern is even if Amazon does use an alternative to UPS, everything will be slow because there’s not a lot of extra capacity.”
Is this the reporter's friend, or something? Really bizarre thing to put in the middle of the article, completely irrelevant and just feels like a subtle ad for this person's book.
Once you start to recognize journalistic tropes you see them all the time. This sounds like the "person we were able to get ahold of that is tangentially related so we can have a quote" one.
Looking her up it looks like she is a consultant for the transportation industry, so I guess they interviewed her but she didn't actually say anything useful about the industry, so they just went with this quote about her book.
I wish you could "tip" shipments, something like a "I don't care when or how this arrives, just eventually get it here".
I partake a bit once in awhile where a package is "listed" as delivered and appears the next day, I suspect someone somewhere is scanning it in and then delivering later.
IRRC there used to be far slower domestic parcel shipping options but I think as things sped up it really didn’t make sense to keep it around. The whole pipeline was working faster regardless.
One thing I learned about code and logistics was that no matter what you say time wise if you do "best effort" and deliver early ... people get pissed when you don't deliver early later on. But then if you've got packages it means you end up intentionally holding them purely for customer service reasons.
My dad was an over-the-road trucker in the 80's. Since he had been a mechanic his whole life, he saved a LITTLE money by doing all the work on it himself (but a lot of truckers do).
Even then, the joke was:
"A trucker from <midwestern state> won the lottery. On the news he was asked, 'What are you going to do with all that money?', to which he replied, 'Ohh, I'll probably just keep trucking till it's gone'".
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadHaha, surreal, wall street journal is now telling me that "unions are the institution by which people (in the richest country in the world) are beginning to secure basic human rights for themselves."
I don't disagree that it's a good and moral thing to offer, I'm just curious about where these universally agreed upon "basic human rights" come from?
From here:
>it's a good and moral thing to offer,
What is the minimum quality of life you want for your children?
>What is the minimum quality of life you want for your children?
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
This isn’t a claim that everyone agrees this is literally a basic human right. It’s a colloquialism to emphasize the author’s view that this is something that should have been granted to the workers long ago and that it is appalling that it wasn’t.
Please don’t get hung up on semantics. Use a different phrasing if it pleases you to do so.
Not being punished for being sick is a basic human right.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights entered into force in 1976. The human rights that the Covenant seeks to promote and protect include:
the right to work in just and favourable conditions;
the right to social protection, to an adequate standard of living and to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental well-being;
the right to education and the enjoyment of benefits of cultural freedom and scientific progress.
Ideas like 'the will of the people' overriding established good and just law is the preserve of populists, and in extreme, of fascists. The Brexit referendum being a good case in point.
On counter side, you'll be punished for not being sick.
It’s funny how I absolutely never thought about it that way. I guess scarcity of free time change perspective.
Note that was never ratified by the United States
Threatening a person's livelihood if they want to take a couple days off to go to the doctor is denying them "a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being". Additionally, if you force your workers to come to work sick, you also threaten everyone else's standard of healthy living by unnecessarily exposing them to a contagious disease.
The with pay term feels oddly specific and overly prescriptive. (If your society had UBI is this implying the employer still must pay you for holidays?)
I'd feel the minimum requirement to not threaten livelihood when a potentially coercive relationship exists is unpaid leave should be allowed (things like the FMLA). Though even that seems nuanced with contracting/business owners.
It is not intended to be applicable to any society imaginable, that would be impossibly broad.
On a practical note, I disagree with you that reducing someone's income if they need to stay home to stay healthy is non-coercive, in the world as it exists today.
If you are party to an agreement wherein you exchange labor for capital, how is it non-coercive to force someone to pay you for not holding up your end of the bargain?
Shorter answer: an agreement itself cannot be coercive if you voluntarily agreed to it, but you can be coerced into making that agreement. That's often the situation in America today.
An early Harvester Agreement ( ~ 1901 ?? ) set the minimum wage as a livable wage - to cover food, clothing, rent for a family unit with 40 hours of work.
Sick leave was introduced into industrial awards in 1922. From 1935 to the 1970s, paid sick leave was gradually introduced into federal awards until 10 days sick leave per year became standard.
Current workers rights are laid out in the National Employment Standards made Federal law by the Fair Work Act (2009)
Sure, these standards are by no means global rights but they are universal within Australia where the general ethos for a hundred years has been that everybody deserves a fair go .. hopefully that persists.https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/national-e...
https://business.gov.au/people/employees/employees-pay-leave...
As for the right to Justice, we have these rights to allow us to live together as independent sovereign entities. A society that does not acknowledge basic rights of individuals is one where those with more power or resources will dominate those with fewer. There may not be some intrinsic physical law that requires that we have these rights, but I for one would not want to live or participate in society that does not espouse them and strive to adhere to them.
We have wildly disparite income in society - I don't place blame on people that say can't program computers for not knowing how.
If we incentive workers to come to work when sick, they are more likely to spread illness, worsen their conditions where they need more expensive care (which we will provide in most cases one way or another — letting sick people die in the streets leads to revolution and John Q Public type hostage taking), and of course can disrupt unemployment which has many wripple effects for something out of workers control.
All of society benefits from paid sick leave, not just the human rights of workers.
If you’re mainstream attractive, healthy, and above median income, the US is pretty nice. If any of those things are missing, it pretty much sucks.
Take your same thoughts but think about how you can say it in a way that reaches your intended target group. Communication is never easy.
Great that one journalist is self-aware but I'm not sure the opinion of a single journalist warrants a change in perspective here.
Is this the reporter's friend, or something? Really bizarre thing to put in the middle of the article, completely irrelevant and just feels like a subtle ad for this person's book.
I partake a bit once in awhile where a package is "listed" as delivered and appears the next day, I suspect someone somewhere is scanning it in and then delivering later.
I’m talking marking packages as voluntary “non priority” or something. I don’t need everything right away and prime is worthless now anyway.
Even then, the joke was:
"A trucker from <midwestern state> won the lottery. On the news he was asked, 'What are you going to do with all that money?', to which he replied, 'Ohh, I'll probably just keep trucking till it's gone'".