by hilzoy
Yesterday, after several years of abuse, my hardy TiBook decided it was time to pack it in (more or less, it still sort of croaks along, but not in a way that fills me with confidence.) So today I went off and got a brand new one — the 15″, isn’t it pretty? — and while the transition has been mostly glitch-free, except for a rather short-lived scare in which I coldn’t figure out where my old email messages were (other than on my old computer, the backup disk, etc.), there’s one little problem:
I can’t comment here.
I regard this as one more sign that the universe does, in fact, have a sense of humor. Ha ha ha.
So part of the reason for this post is just to see whether the problem is just commenting, or whether it extends to posts as well.
Meanwhile: a backlit keyboard! Too cool.
hmm: will it work now?
OMG! I can comment again! Just when I’m about to go to sleep …
i wish there were some objective metric of sucking. i mean i just wish there were some sort of rectal device capable of being inserted into the administration’s current and formal cabinet members and coming out with an objective readout of how much the specimen sucks. you could then apply all sorts of advanced statistical analysis to the sucking: the mean, median, mode suckiness. more interesting would be the more exotic statistical analysis of suckiness. i would refuse to define sucking as a binary value. stochastic all the way. i would be really interested in a Chaid analysis how sucking, including the best predictors of people that fall into the 95th percentile of sucking, nicknamed the “you really fucking suck” category. of course i’d need a random sample of the population to establish some sort of baseline from which to measure the degree of sucking, and i’m becoming increasingly convinced that the random population sucks pretty severely itself, so the lack of an appropriate control group will probably hinder the reliability of conclusions i draw from my advanced statistical analysis of how much these people fucking suck.
im also really interested in knowing whether other people feel like the new HBO series John From Cincinatti feels like David Lynch’s Point Break.
Whew. I thought it was just me.
I watched JFC last night. I don’t think I’ll bother again.
Anybody watching this hearing today?
Anybody watching this hearing today?
if you’re wathcing it, shouldn’t it be called a “showing” ? i could listen to a hearing… but i won’t because i have meetings 4,5 and 6, of 14 for the week, today.
I can comment here, Mozilla 2.0.0.4 XP Pro.
Must resist… temptation… to initiate a Mac vs. PC war….
Must resist… temptation… to initiate a Mac vs. PC war….
Just go for a linux flavor
(yes, yes, I know OS X is FreeBSD with a pretty GUI on top, but I protest to mac’s daconian hardware methods.)
OCSteve: In retrospect, I’m not sure it was the computer. In any case, I didn’t actually do anything that enabled me to comment again: I had tried various things, to no avail, and then at some point I wrote my first comment here and it went right up.
Macs rule. The new one is awesome.
Cool new computer, Hilzoy.
which 15in model did you get, 2.2GHz or 2.4GHz? I ask because my girl friend’s 3 year old macbook pro g4 just ate it’s second hard drive and will cost some absurd amount to get replaced (one of my protests against macs, they actively discourage consumer meddling in both hardware and software…) so she is getting a new computer, likely the 15in 2.2GHz.
Just wondering on your thought process on picking between the 15in models.
Has anyone recently made a PC to Mac switch? If so, thoughts?
Macs rule.
Oh sure. Here I am resisting and you egg me on. 😉
Hard to believe there’s much of noticeable difference in performance between 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz. You do get a bigger hard drive, but the $500 price difference seems excessive.
My laptop has been going on the fritz, lately. It’s a Toshiba, and the power connection appears to be not quite so…connective as it used to be.
The wife is checking out whether we have extended warranty while I ferret out my soldering iron and the good solder.
Hard to believe there’s much of noticeable difference in performance between 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz
are they using the same model of processor ?
My fiancee picked up a 12″ Macbook Pro last summer at a steal. It quickly seduced her; she’s the editor of the local newspaper and has to do a lot of server side stuff. She found it amazingly easy to install and run all kinds of testing platforms on her little mac. (Plus 12″ is so much more portable than her old 17″ PC gaming machine that it encouraged her to take it everywhere.)
She picked it up to test how Macs see the paper’s website, and it won her over. She still uses a PC when she has to, but she’s impressed. [Pages and iLife also make it way too easy to impress people with video slide shows and people who are tired of the powerpoint defaults.]
I’ve become a second hand evangelist. That’s really slipping…
a c: the 2.2. The speed difference didn’t seem that compelling, and I never got close to filling up my old 60Gig HD in any case, so the hard drive difference didn’t seem crucial either.
Wow, it’s fast!
Hard to believe there’s much of noticeable difference in performance between 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz. You do get a bigger hard drive, but the $500 price difference seems excessive.
VRAM: 128mb vs. 256MB
I went through this same decision last December when I got my 2.16GHz version. Really wanted the 256MB VRAM but wasn’t going to pay $500 for it.
Frickin’ love this MacBook Pro
while I ferret out my soldering iron and the good solder.
Sheesh, it’s only a Toshiba, are you sure it’s worth using the good stuff on? 🙂
Thanks.
That is the same conclusion that was reached here as well. (2MHz + doubling vram isn’t worth $500-600)
I feel compelled to plug think pads running linux.
In other news: I always thought that in a sane world, the fact that Rudy Giuliani pushed Kerik for Sec. of Homeland Security after he knew he had mob connections should be enough to doom his attempt to run on 9/11 and his appearance of toughness on security, but just in case:
the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani’s lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.
but i heard Clinton charged for a speech somewhere. Edwards, too. so much for being on the side of the little guy!
Mac are for wealthy consumer fetishists, and Apple’s marketing strategy is based on cultism.
There, that’s my trolling for the month.
Mac are for wealthy consumer fetishists, and Apple’s marketing strategy is based on cultism.
Actually, Macs are for creative and intelligent people, who understand subject-verb agreement, for example. 🙂
Slart, my Toshiba had similar issues (A70), and there was a recall out to fix it (and a bunch of other problems as well).
In my case, Macs are for people who wanted a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. It was quite a while ago. Also, iirc, the price differences were not that big.
oh wow, this is funny: Hillary is Nixon in a pants suit.
GOP = Groovin On Paranoia
Also, iirc, the price differences were not that big.
I had to switch from Apple to the PC because of the price difference. And yes, that was a long time ago.
And thanks, Mo. I’ll check it out. The recall might apply to my model, too.
Always better to have the manufacturer do the work, IMO.
GUIs are for people who can’t handle UNIX.
thanks all for various mac commentary.
Would it be out of line to suggest that the Tacitus link be removed from the blogroll since Josh apparently thinks we’re all idiots and therefore unworthy to read his scribblings?
“Has anyone recently made a PC to Mac switch? If so, thoughts?”
We bought a mini as a photo editing/itunes base a couple of years ago and I love it. My next laptop will be a Mac, probably dual booted with some flavor of Windows (I am a programmer; about half of my work is windows based). The GUI is surprisingly intuitive, a pleasure to use; the fact that its guts are FreeBSD means I have a great deal of flexibility, power to control things, and stability.
Command Lines are for people who liked to brag that they walked barefoot in a foot fo snow, uphill, to school everyday of their lives. And they liked it.
Kevin – I hadn’t thought about a mini, thanks.
This page looks at Mac product cycles to give you an idea when the best time to buy is. Unfortunately, it says now is not a good time to buy a mini because it is reaching the end of the cycle
The price difference has since evaporated, DPU. You can buy a cheaper computer, but it won’t have comparable features/quality components.
I love my wife’s MacBook Pro (it’s the original Core Duo). The MagSafe power connector, the built-in iSight, the motion sensor (Hilzoy, download MacSaber for some good, clean, geeky fun), the auto-dimming screen; it’s a veritable toybox of geeky gadgetry. I wish I could justify buying one for myself, but I’m too reliant on desktop-class horsepower.
Gromit: I have bookmarked it for later use, “later” being defined as: whenever the idea of swinging my beautiful new computer around and possibly inadvertently having it fly into a wall stops making me physically ill 😉
By they wa, you know what else? They had a promotion for teachers and students whereby, if you got a Mac, you also got a $200 rebate on an iPod. As it happens I have an old iPod, 5Gig, which I long since filled up (and that’s annoying because it means I can’t just load up all the music I have on my computer and decide later wheat I want to listen to), but on the other hand I can’t begin to justify replacing it. Or I couldn’t until the effective price of a 30Gig iPod suddenly became $50.
Grin.
Sure is pretty! And lots smaller, too.
By. The. Way.
By. The. Way.
By. The. Way.
You missed one.
There should be a little winky smiley thing at the end of my 6:18pm.
I got my first mac (a mini) about a year ago. I haven’t touched windows in years since I’ve been doing all Linux all the time.
On the plus side, the included iLife apps are great and the whole thing just works in a way that most Linux systems don’t. Ubuntu comes closer with every release; I’m not sure I would have gone with the mini if I was purchasing now.
On the minus side, OS X really sucks if you’ve only got 512 MB of RAM. With firefox and anything else open, it becomes sluggish, sometimes extremely so. My laptop has 512 MB of RAM running on Ubuntu and the performance is significantly better. I suspect part of the reason is that Mach’s VM subsystem simply sucks; my company once made the mistake of ordering an XServe based mail server. A common refrain from operations was “8 GB of RAM, 2 GB free, and swapping like crazy”.
BTW, you can cut the price a bit if you show up at your local Apple store and ask them about returned and refurbished models. A friend of mine worked there and suggested it and it has worked out well for me. In this business, there’s enough buyers’ remorse that people will return new units in a few days. I believe Apple refurbishes them and warranties them as new, so the only real difference is $50-300. I got a core duo mini for the same prices as the singles were selling for.
One other downside to using Macs: some of the software is just less easy to use than the equivalents in Linux. Two examples:
* I like to read inverted displays; it is a lot easier on my eyes. On OS X, you can get that by typing Control-Alt-Apple-8. I’m not kidding. On Beryl, it is Super-N. I can’t find a way to change the OS X key combo, but changing the Beryl combo is trivial.
* Quicktime as a media player is complete garbage. The Linux players I’m used to let you jump a few seconds forward or back using the left and right arrow keys; bigger jumps occur with page up and page down. This is an incredibly useful feature. I’ve ended up using Real Player which still doesn’t do what I want. Real Player does do one thing right that Quicktime totally fails at: full screen video. I’m not paying extra for the privilege of full screen video.
The wife is checking out whether we have extended warranty while I ferret out my soldering iron and the good solder.
Is it named “Švejk”?
BTW, you can cut the price a bit if you show up at your local Apple store and ask them about returned and refurbished models. A friend of mine worked there and suggested it and it has worked out well for me. In this business, there’s enough buyers’ remorse that people will return new units in a few days. I believe Apple refurbishes them and warranties them as new, so the only real difference is $50-300. I got a core duo mini for the same prices as the singles were selling for.
Or you can click here. Though keep in mind the “original price” is based on what that item sold for when it was new, not what the equivalent item sells for now.
The price difference has since evaporated, DPU. You can buy a cheaper computer, but it won’t have comparable features/quality components.
I’m not sure about that. I haven’t priced anything in a while, but for the (list) price of that MacBook I think I can buy a pretty decent Lintel server.
Or I couldn’t until the effective price of a 30Gig iPod suddenly became $50.
I’d like to request a new site feature: on the sidebar: What’s playing on Hilzoy’s iPod.
“I’m not sure about that. I haven’t priced anything in a while, but for the (list) price of that MacBook I think I can buy a pretty decent Lintel server.”
Try carrying that server to class.
OCSteve: I’m about to actually transfer music to the charming little object – so black! so sleek! — but before I did, I thought of a song I hadn’t heard in ages and ages, and one thing led to another, and gosh, the iTunes store has gotten more content since the last time I was there! Brenda Fassie’s Su Bulala, which is a great song, and Richard Thompson, and in a massive blast from the past, David Broza’s Bedouin Love Song, which I never would have imagined would be available outside Israel. Now, it is playing on my computer.
iTunes is a magical thing. i don’t care what the haters say.
bored, feel like buying Clapton’s 461 Ocean Blvd? click.click.click. ok, done. there it is. ahh. instant gratification.
btw, anyone posted Digby’s identity yet?
Quicktime as a media player is complete garbage. The Linux players I’m used to […]
CommonSense: You want VLC player for the Mac, you got VLC player for the Mac. I hate Quicktime nagging me to pay out for Quictime Pro, myself.
so black! so sleek!
Amazing huh?
I’m a tech head from way back. I built the Edmund’s kits, etc. I can honestly say that my very first program was submitted on punch cards. I’ve done time-shared computing and I remember when 300 baud was teh bomb. I had a Timex Sinclair, A VIC-20, and a C-64. My first mass storage device was a cassette deck and I have a stash of 8 inch floppies. My first real PC had a 10MB hard drive that was as large as a shoe-box and a CGA (4 colors) display. I had to take out a loan and it took me 3 years to pay it off. (I want to say it cost $4500 in the early 80s.)
Last summer I had to replace the hard drive on my work laptop. It was 80GB, the size of 4 credit cards stacked on top of one another, and cost $90.
OCSteve: I think I may actually count as being a tech head from way back, though I didn’t plan to be. I got out of college, and had not yet figured out that the fact that I was banging my head against my senior thesis while everyone else was figuring out what they were going to do post-graduation might possibly mean that I should consider being an academic. (Though I would have had to take time off in any case; I grew up in a university, and even after I started thinking I might go to grad school, I vowed not to think of it until I was well and truly happy doing something else.)
Anyways: there I was, in SF, unemployed, at sea, and one of my friends, who had been doing computers for ages, said: look, you’d be good at programming, I’ll teach you and you can get a job. So he did, and I did: programming for Bank of America in 1981.
I was doing the front end of an accounting program, and I had to debug it on the machines BofA provided for its customers, which had a ONE LINE interface, and made the world’s most annoying beep whenever you made an error. And since a large part of debugging was to enter every conceivable error and see whether the machine recognized it as such, it was days of beep, beep, beep. Ugh.
In an alternate life, I accept the jobs I got offered at Intel, and become wealthy. In real life, I thought: well, now I really have to decide whether I can see spending my life on this stuff, and decided the answer was: no.
I also remember my first hard drive. I got it in, oh, maybe ’88, and within a day all my files had gotten a virus from a disk of games my little brother, who worked at InfoCom, had given me. I thought: oh, like AIDS. All my little floppy disks were celibate until now, and suddenly Disease Runs Riot!
Digby
it was days of beep, beep, beep. Ugh.
Why bring Ugh into this?
Thanks for posting that link, hilzoy. I’d been dying to see or read coverage of digby’s great unveiling. Damn but she can write; that talk was really, really well put together.
Hilzoy: Cool story, and a side of you I never suspected.
Heh on the tech head stories. I can claim a similar history. I was even head of my high school’s computer club, and spent a summer working as a computer programmer for the VA’s actuaries who determine how to price their life insurance policies.
On the other hand, I have drifted so far away from tech competency that I am the only person in our Legal Department who has never attempted to work with the program that assembles our leases (which combines what we have agreed to with the tenant in the past with the unique language for each center).
Damn but she can write; that talk was really, really well put together.
yes indeed.
seeing her blows my mental image away, though. even when i started hearing Digby was actually a She, i still pictured Digby as the guy yelling into the sky in that picture on her site.
Why bring Ugh into this?
beep.
Yeah, but do you have a 12-inch floppy? My boss has one of those sitting in his office.
Yes, hilzoy, I have no doubt you’d be/have been good at programming, since all it takes is logic and patience (both of which you seem to have ample stores of).
Probably you were on an IBM mainframe, though, which is the fourth circle of hell.
Slarti: alas, no 12″ floppies. I think it probably was IBM. I was programming in Basic, and it as hard to tell whether I was an good, since working for a boring bank in San Francisco in 1981 pretty much guaranteed that most people would be really bad, since otherwise they’d have much better jobs in nearby silicon valley.
A mark of how bad: I knew Fortran going in (that was what my friend taught me), and they said it ould probably take me six weeks to learn Basic. This seemed unlikely from the outset — I learned Fortran in a weekend, which I was instructed not to tell anyone — but became downright ludicrous once I realized that Basic was not only really easy, but a really easy subset of Fortran, which they knew I knew.
I tried very hard to make learning Basic last a whole day. I did exercises to make sure I had gotten it. I wrote little programs to test myself. And yes, sure enough, I really did know what GOSUB meant.
Dantheman: My first paid programming job they started me on PDP-11s with the VA in not nice part of Philly.
Despite their best efforts, I stuck with it.
New topic:
Anyone agree with this?
Wow…PDP-11. You must be a bit older than I am, OCSteve. I wrote my first code on a CDC machine (can’t recall which model or OS) but next semester was sitting comfortably at a dumb terminal hooked to a network of VAX 11/780s (with a few homespun 11/785s in the mix), running a blazing 96 kbaud. Berkely UNIX, IIRC.
Hil, I learned them in the reverse order, so to me BASIC looked like FORTRAN’s idiot brother. And then I learned assembly language (Intel 8080 Assembly), which made all of that look good.
OCSteve – I instinctively don’t like unions, but I don’t think card-check workds the way Captain Ed says it does, but I could be wrong.
Employers don’t like card-check because, IIRC, they don’t know it’s going on and therefore don’t have a chance to campaign against it; which is why its more successful than secret ballots.
OCSteve,
“My first paid programming job they started me on PDP-11s with the VA in not nice part of Philly.”
Almost certainly the same place, which means we probably knew the same actuaries. I was there the summer that they were testing out using PC’s to replace the PDP’s. Since the budget did not contain money for a word processing program for the PC’s, we found in a magazine a set of commands to turn 1-2-3 spreadsheets into a (very) poor man’s word-processed documents.
Agreed that Nicetown is quite a misnomer for that neighborhood.
Steve,
On the union issue, it is funny how people like Ed get so worked up about union intimidation, but never ownership intimidation (firing union organizers, mandatory captive meeting with threats to move operations, etc.)
Is it brillig, yet?
SlatrI: well, yeah; that was what made the idea that having learned Fortran, it would take me six weeks to learn its idiot brother so odd.
OCSteve: me! me! I support card-check. As I understad it, our present choices are (1) the present system, in which there is a secret ballot, announced well in advance, before which companies often undertake large anti-union campaigns, including not just arguments against unionizing but also things like threats to fire the union organizers (and sometimes actual firings, see e.g. here), and in which the rules are not only very slanted towards industry, but also very badly enforced, so that there is almost no incentive to abide by them; and (2) card check.
Ezra Klein is very good on these issues:
Personally, I’d be fine with an option like Ezra Klein’s:
However, given the two options actually before us, I chooe card check. Captain Ed is concerned about intimidation. Luckily, there’s evidence (pdf) about how big a problem this is (note: NLRB elections are the present, secret-ballot ones):
“I instinctively don’t like unions, but I don’t think card-check workds the way Captain Ed says it does, but I could be wrong.”
Card check does work exactly as he said. It completely removes the protection of the secret ballot. The union will know exactly which workers voted for them and exactly which workers did not.
“Luckily, there’s evidence (pdf) about how big a problem this is (note: NLRB elections are the present, secret-ballot ones):”
This evidence isn’t particularly strong because current card-check situations are by permission of the employeer, and thus represent comparing high resistance situations to low resistance situations and finding that the higher resistance situations have higher resistance. That isn’t a particularly shocking finding.
I don’t see how complaints about inappropriate management pressure lead to a remedy of removing the workers’ ability to vote against the union or management without the union finding out which way the individual voter voted. That isn’t matching the remedy and problem at all.
Furthermore, I don’t see the advantage of having a secret campaign where one side doesn’t know there is going to be an election. The only way you get to Klien’s position is if you believe that there is no situation imaginable where the business could be hurt enough by a union to make it likely that a rational worker would vote against it. The proposed method suggests that either management has to maintain constant anti-union rhetoric to get its message across, or it has to risk not getting to put on its case at all because it will never know when an election is in the offing. Why does that seem wise?
“However, given the two options actually before us, I chooe card check.”
I don’t understand what this means in context. Democrats can choose to fashion their pro-union legislation any way they want to. The only reason we have to choose between the current method and the destruction of secret ballots in union elections is because Congressional Democrats chose to provide legislation which destroys secret ballot.
Furthermore, isn’t it possible that one of the reasons union haven’t as many intimidated as many people because they didn’t know who to try to intimidate?
Lastly, isn’t the whole card check thing inherently intimidating? There are all sorts of things people will sign just to get you out of their face that they would never vote for in secret ballot.
Seb: given the situation — massive employer intimidation with many more tools at their disposal and no effective means of redress (where ‘not effective’ means: it doesn’t help either an employee who gets fired or a union drive if organizers are fired and can only get any redress years after the fact, after an expensive adversarial proceeding), and not much evidence of any remotely comparable problems on the union side — in fact, that study shows that people feel less pressure during card check — I choose the one that addresses wht seems to be the most serious problem.
By “given the available options’, I mean: the ones I get to choose from. I can’t write the legislation. Moreover, I haven’t made much of an attempt to figure out whether Ezra’s proposed snap elections would have some downside I haven’t thought of.
Agreed that Nicetown is quite a misnomer for that neighborhood.
Philly’s got a number of those, like Strawberry Mansion, Point Breeze and Mount Airy. They all sound so idyllic, while being classic examples of urban decay. I guess the names were once appropriate, but not anymore.
Ah, the Republicans, staunch champion of working people and their rights. The same frame shop that gave us “right to work” laws has now decreed that the “secret ballot” must be protected above all.
There’s clearly opportunities for both employers and unions to engage in abusive practices with regard to organizing efforts. If you believe unions are run by a bunch of thugs who go around threatening physical violence if you don’t sign the card, then I guess you’d be against this bill. For my part, I think the employer has far greater opportunities for mischief, for the reasons identified by Ezra Klein.
Hilzoy points out that in current NLRB elections, a full 46% of workers report that they felt “coerced” by management, with 22% saying they felt coerced “a great deal.” This doesn’t just mean that management opposed the union, which of course is their right; Bush and Kerry opposed each other, but I doubt many of us felt “coerced” to vote for either one of them. Do these numbers represent an acceptable state of affairs? Much as we’d like the NLRB to shut this kind of coercion down and hand out effective penalties, clearly it’s just not going to happen.
If we pass card check, how much coercion will there be from the union side? Seb suggests that current card-check elections aren’t particularly revealing, because they tend to be less contested, but I’m not sure what alternative data set he would point to. Instead, we’re left with pure speculation that if we adopt card check, unions will surely be just as bad as management is now.
My expectation is that in a card-check system, there will surely be some amount of coercion from both sides; however, the evidence suggests that it will be more fair than the current system. If I’m wrong, and the empirical evidence demonstrates that card check has made things worse, we’re allowed to get rid of it.
I don’t understand how any election where one side doesn’t know it is happening and isn’t permitted to present its case is a good idea.
I’m also not thrilled about categorizing certain matter-of-fact statements as “intimidation”. It may be discouraging-to-the-votes-for-unions if an owner truthfully says that he will have to shut down a plant if the cost of labor goes up very much. But that doesn’t have to be “anti-union intimidation”, it could very easily be “the truth”.
it could very easily be “the truth”.
and it could very easily be scare tactics.
but that’s what negotiation is for.
I don’t understand how any election where one side doesn’t know it is happening and isn’t permitted to present its case is a good idea.
For some reason this just strikes as wrong, though I’m having a hard time articulating it. Couldn’t “one side” be the employees who don’t want to unionize and the “other side” be those who do? Or maybe there’s three sides? Part of me wants to say it’s none of the employer’s business whether its workers want to unionize, but that doesn’t seem quite right either.
The bill, already approved by the House but facing the threat of a veto by the Bush administration, would give employees at a workplace the right to unionize as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted to do so. Under current law, an employer can insist on a secret-ballot election, even after a majority sign.
The word ‘mulligan’ keeps popping up when I see this.
hairshirthedonist,
“like Strawberry Mansion, Point Breeze and Mount Airy. They all sound so idyllic, while being classic examples of urban decay. I guess the names were once appropriate, but not anymore.”
Mt. Airy is still fairly nice, like Chestnut Hill next door, but cheaper and more interracial. Point Breeze is as good as South Philly gets (for better or worse). No defense of Strawberry Mansion, though.
“If we pass card check, how much coercion will there be from the union side? Seb suggests that current card-check elections aren’t particularly revealing, because they tend to be less contested, but I’m not sure what alternative data set he would point to. Instead, we’re left with pure speculation that if we adopt card check, unions will surely be just as bad as management is now.”
But we have a rather established history in elections that the secret ballot gives a huge protection that isn’t duplicated by any other method.
I’m opposing this from a very classically conservative reason. If you can’t explain to me the following, it seems crazy to completely abandon the secret ballot protections:
A) Why do we bother having secret ballots?
B) Is that important?
C) Is that reason for having secret ballots important here?
D) What is the problem being addressed by removing secret ballots?
E) Is that problem so important as to overrule the reason why we have secret ballots?
F) If so, are there other methods of dealing with the problem that could address it sufficently without removing the secret ballot protection?
It seems to me that nothing in union elections makes them so dramatically different from other high stake elections such that removing secret ballot should be an obvious consideration.
If there are such enormous differences, they have not been well identified.
Even if identified, I’d be shocked to find that removing secret ballot protections is an effective way of addressing them. (For example it appears that companies could engage in constant anti-union information exchange and removing secret ballot wouldn’t do anything to stop it).
I’m also shocked that so many people who generally thing the electorate is underinformed also seem to believe that an instant election with no opportunity of one side to present its case is a good idea.
The only justification I can see for that is that you have pre-judged that all companies should have unions. But if you believe that, why bother with the pretense of democracy? Just mandate unions.
Sebastian,
“It seems to me that nothing in union elections makes them so dramatically different from other high stake elections such that removing secret ballot should be an obvious consideration.
If there are such enormous differences, they have not been well identified.”
Really? There are other elections where the voter is putting the future of his job in jeopardy for supporting one side? Please provide examples.
Seb: as I said, I don’t know whether having a snap election would be a good idea in practice; I don’t know enough to say. I do know that it’s an idea I only heard of at Ezra’s a few days ago. I think the rationale for card check is just that when there’s an election at a known date, there can be campaigns, and workers can be threatened and made to sit through misleading propaganda, etc., whereas when people just have to sign cards, that’s not nearly so easy.
Actually holding a snap election raises at least some questions that explain why I had an asterisk next to my support. Who runs the election? Are they available on short notice? Etc. If there isn’t a good answer to these questions, then I would think there is good argument for not having an election (which would be a prerequisite for having a secret ballot), especially given the way this stuff has worked out in practice.
I’d also be quite happy to couple card-check with some sort of reforms designed to ensure that unions are more responsive to their rank and file.
It seems to me that nothing in union elections makes them so dramatically different from other high stake elections such that removing secret ballot should be an obvious consideration.
If there are such enormous differences, they have not been well identified.
A difference is that anyone campaigning for the union can be and often is fired in the campaign leading up to the election.
“Really? There are other elections where the voter is putting the future of his job in jeopardy for supporting one side? Please provide examples.”
Are you kidding me? Are we so secure in our democracy that we have totally forgotten history? There are elections where a voter is putting the future of HIS LIFE in jeopardy for supporting one side.
It sounds like defenders of this concept are in a weird bind. Secret Ballots exist ESPECIALLY FOR CASES WHERE INTIMIDATION IS A FACTOR. The are MORE IMPORTANT then than they are when nothing important is happening. We could probably remove the secret ballot for unimportant jobs and trivial decisions because it wouldn’t be worth trying to intimidate or pressure people. So it sounds like you want to say that this a super-crucial issue that isn’t really very important.
“A difference is that anyone campaigning for the union can be and often is fired in the campaign leading up to the election.”
So removing secret ballot is the best remedy you can think of for that problem? Seriously? How about increasing the fines for that already illegal practice?
Seb: increasing the fines would be good, but not really enough. Once the case has been decided, the fines have been levied, etc., the election is long since over, and the company has profitted from its violation of law. Besides, that also takes enforcement, which is laking under any Republican administration.
Slartibartfast: Going back to school daze, I learned assembly on a Z80 CP/M machine. And when I moved from PDP-11 to VAX/VMS at work I thought I was in heaven.
Dantheman: I didn’t actually know any of the actuaries, just the IT staff. Still – small world.
On Card Check – I think that was a good back and forth between Hilzoy and Sebastian. I’m leaning towards Sebastian (shocker I know).
One question no one touched on – what is the overriding benefit to the employees? The benefit seems obvious to both the unions and the Democrats, but what is the benefit to your average employee? If the employee wants the union, they can vote for it now. There may be intimidation from both sides, but in the end no one knows how the individual employee voted. That may lead to group punishment, but it is next to impossible to single out an individual employee for harassment. If the employee does not want a union, then card check puts them into a possibly bad position.
Slartibartfast: Going back to school daze, I learned assembly on a Z80 CP/M machine. And when I moved from PDP-11 to VAX/VMS at work I thought I was in heaven.
Dantheman: I didn’t actually know any of the actuaries, just the IT staff. Still – small world.
On Card Check – I think that was a good back and forth between Hilzoy and Sebastian. I’m leaning towards Sebastian (shocker I know).
One question no one touched on – what is the overriding benefit to the employees? The benefit seems obvious to both the unions and the Democrats, but what is the benefit to your average employee? If the employee wants the union, they can vote for it now. There may be intimidation from both sides, but in the end no one knows how the individual employee voted. That may lead to group punishment, but it is next to impossible to single out an individual employee for harassment. If the employee does not want a union, then card check puts them into a possibly bad position.
Sorry for the double post. No idea how I did that.
Sebastian,
“Are you kidding me? Are we so secure in our democracy that we have totally forgotten history? There are elections where a voter is putting the future of HIS LIFE in jeopardy for supporting one side.”
Again, examples, please. Are you seriously saying that if I vote for the Democrats or the Republicans in any federal, state, or local election, I am putting my life in jeopardy?
“It sounds like defenders of this concept are in a weird bind. Secret Ballots exist ESPECIALLY FOR CASES WHERE INTIMIDATION IS A FACTOR. The are MORE IMPORTANT then than they are when nothing important is happening. We could probably remove the secret ballot for unimportant jobs and trivial decisions because it wouldn’t be worth trying to intimidate or pressure people. So it sounds like you want to say that this a super-crucial issue that isn’t really very important.”
Hardly. Secret ballots exist so there is no coercion while voting. What we have is a situation where one side is performing coercion prior to voting. You seem to be saying that because no one sees how each individual worker votes, the threats beforehand to the entire group of voters don’t matter, which is simply absurd.
“So removing secret ballot is the best remedy you can think of for that problem? Seriously? How about increasing the fines for that already illegal practice?”
And fines (or reinstating a person to his job) several years later make a person whole for not having a job for all that time because…?
Mt. Airy is still fairly nice, like Chestnut Hill next door, but cheaper and more interracial. Point Breeze is as good as South Philly gets (for better or worse). No defense of Strawberry Mansion, though.
Maybe my impression of Mt. Airy is outdated. I associate Mt. Airy with regular local news stories involving violent crimes, particularly shootings. The name always stuck out as being ironic, given the nature of the stories. I don’t pay as much attention to local news now as I used to, so I may have heard most of those stories 10 years ago. It may also be worse closer to Germantown and further from Chestnut Hill.
It sounds like defenders of this concept are in a weird bind. Secret Ballots exist ESPECIALLY FOR CASES WHERE INTIMIDATION IS A FACTOR. The are MORE IMPORTANT then than they are when nothing important is happening. We could probably remove the secret ballot for unimportant jobs and trivial decisions because it wouldn’t be worth trying to intimidate or pressure people. So it sounds like you want to say that this a super-crucial issue that isn’t really very important.
Okay. First, can we agree that generally, people who support unions want card-check, and people who dislike them oppose it? (Like, there’s no constituency of union-haters pushing card check because in the absence of a secret ballot, companies will be more able to effectively punish union voters; nor is there a constituency of labor advocates who treasure the protection from intimidation that the secret ballot grants.)
I’m going to assume that the difference in positions here isn’t simply that labor advocates are nasty cheats and labor opponents are upstanding and honest supporters of fair elections, but that instead there’s a practical difference in how card check versus NLRB elections affect outcomes of organizing drives. You can disagree with this, but then there’s no real point in taking the discussion further.
Now, the question is which party is better placed to engage in intimidation of workers — other workers, who have to perform criminal acts to injure them in any way, or their employers, who can fire them at will without incurring more than a lightly punished civil violation? Again, it’s pretty clear that, regardless of who are better, nicer, kinder people, that the employers here have more power to intimidate.
It looks fairly obvious to me, then, that the form of election which provides more protection from the employer, the party with more actual power to intimidate, will result in less actual intimidation.
Can we trade card-check for subjecting unions to the anti-trust laws?
Just throwing that out there.
subjecting unions to the anti-trust laws?
As in, prohibiting them entirely? Why, no, that wouldn’t be a sensible trade at all.
And fines (or reinstating a person to his job) several years later make a person whole for not having a job for all that time because…?
Allow me to share a must-read story along these lines.
OCSteve: “One question no one touched on – what is the overriding benefit to the employees?”
That depends, I think, on the benefits of its being easier to organize and join a union. Pretend, for the moment, that you accept this basic view of things: that our present laws make it very easy for companies to discourage union organizing, both by making some things legal that probably shouldn’t be and by making the penalties even for egregious violations of the laws minimal and way too late. Pretend further that you think that card-check would ameliorate these problems, and make it more likely that people would be able to join a union if they wanted to, without having to fight something like a war against management.
Under those circumstances, the benefit to an individual worker would be: first, having it be much more likely that his or her desires about whether or not to join a union would affect whether or not s/he got to join one, and second, in those cases in which workers do join unions, whatever benefits come from joining one. (Salary, improved ability to insist on safe working conditions, etc.)
If you don’t accept the factual premisses, then it probably looks different.
As in, prohibiting them entirely? Why, no, that wouldn’t be a sensible trade at all.
No I was thinking something more like that they wouldn’t be able organize across multiple employers (e.g., there’s the GM union, the Ford union, the Chrysler union, etc., and they wouldn’t be allowed to coordinate).
Like I said, just throwing that out there.
By the way, getting back to first principles, what other sort of organization in our society doesn’t simply get to decide amongst itself whether to form? If I want to create a Democratic interest group and sign people up, the government doesn’t mandate that the Republicans be given equal access to my prospective members to talk them out of joining.
The right of collective bargaining belongs to the workers, period. If they decide to form a union, or not to form a union, it’s up to them – we call that freedom. Contra Seb, there is no reason the employer should have an inalienable right to make the case against unionization prior to an actual decision.
Anti-union workers, naturally, should have a full and fair chance to persuade their colleagues not to join a union, without unfair tactics being deployed against them. That’s a given. But there’s no reason the company should have a say as to what the workers should decide, any more than the workers should have a say in the company’s management decisions beyond what the company voluntarily agrees to give them.
If one of the objections to card check is that the company may not get a chance to publicly make its case prior to the decision, then I dismiss that concern out of hand. They simply have no right to a government-mandated role in the workers’ decisionmaking process.
Hilzoy: A good argument, but let me suggest this…
Union membership has been in steady decline for many years now. Some of that may be due to such factors as moving manufacturing/textile jobs overseas etc, but in general it seems that fewer workers want to be in a union. Even workplaces with well established unions have seen a membership decline, and it is not just the US but worldwide I believe.
Government workers have a long established union and certainly face no difficulties of any kind in joining their union, yet they choose not to join by almost two to one. Are you aware of any public sector workers such as police, fire fighters, teachers, etc. who do not have the opportunity to join a union? Fewer than half do. Only 12% of wage and salaried workers belong to a union. (PDF)
Certainly some of the other 88% may want to have a union and may be blocked by McScrooge, but it certainly seems like there is also a large percentage who are just not interested.
So if you accept the premise that fewer people want to be union members to begin with, that there is no significant percentage of workers who really want to be in a union but are being blocked by management, then the only benefit in this bill is to the unions themselves and to Democrats.
Now it is fair to say that it is one thing for people who have the opportunity to join but decline and people who have no opportunity at all. But there still seems to be less interest, and possibly less need, in this day and age.
Lizardbreath, “Hardly. Secret ballots exist so there is no coercion while voting. What we have is a situation where one side is performing coercion prior to voting. You seem to be saying that because no one sees how each individual worker votes, the threats beforehand to the entire group of voters don’t matter, which is simply absurd.”
No, secret ballots don’t exist so there is NO COERCION while voting. They exist so you can’t coerce someone based on your knowledge of how they voted. It is one of the most basic protections, because knowing for sure how people voted takes all the guesswork out of which people you should try to intimidate. Card check destroys that. Furthermore, secret ballot elections take place at a specific time or very narrow window of time. This increases the protection because not only do you not know who voted how, but you can’t coerce them to change their vote after they have already made it. Card check destroys that too, because you know exactly who said no to you, and you aren’t barred from ‘asking’ them again (and since you aren’t telling the employer, there isn’t someone who knows the laws such that even if you made it illegal, it would obviously come to light). It takes away two of the most basic democratic protections–protections that are so ingrained that we don’t even think about why they exist very often. Further they take away the ability of the company to make their case. It seems obvious to me that you don’t have to attack the most typcial democratic protections to democratically ratify a union.
“I’m going to assume that the difference in positions here isn’t simply that labor advocates are nasty cheats and labor opponents are upstanding and honest supporters of fair elections, but that instead there’s a practical difference in how card check versus NLRB elections affect outcomes of organizing drives. You can disagree with this, but then there’s no real point in taking the discussion further.”
There being a practical difference in outcomes isn’t the point. You could dictate the outcome if you want, or you could almost dictate it by fining workers who won’t sign. If you think that there are tilts in the democratic voting process, we can talk about finding a remedy for that. If you just want unions, and are willing to violate most of the normal democratic safeguards to try to get it, just go all the way and mandate unions. But make clear which you want.
Hilzoy, your premise doesn’t lead to card check, it leads to making violations non-trivial. For example you could make a very big fine, and now that bad faith had been established, you could have that no additional information snap election.
Which leads me to another point. The pro-card check side seems to work under the assumption that secret ballot and limited time voting should be abolished for 100% of companies as if all or nearly all of them were very seriously abusing the process. That hasn’t been established at all. If you want to punish specific bad actors with relaxed rules, that would be one thing. But you are arguing for the end to some of the most basic democratic protections for an entire class of people, for very little established reason and without much interest in less dramatic methods of dealing with the problems.
“The right of collective bargaining belongs to the workers, period. If they decide to form a union, or not to form a union, it’s up to them – we call that freedom. Contra Seb, there is no reason the employer should have an inalienable right to make the case against unionization prior to an actual decision.”
You can get that right this very instant if you don’t want to have extra-special government-granted protections under the law. This is about voting to get the extra-special legal status.
Sebastian,
I wrote the first comment you responded to, not Liz. That aside, you still seem to be saying that increasing penalties for the violation undoes the damage caused by a wrongful firing of the union organizer, who may have been unable to find work in the interim, even when it is years later. Again, there is no reason to believe that to be true, and common sense on the side of the opposite.
Steve: By the way, getting back to first principles, what other sort of organization in our society doesn’t simply get to decide amongst itself whether to form?
What other organization has government backing to go onto private property to recruit members (off the clock)? For what other organization does the government declare that those opposed to the organization must furnish a full list of prospective members including home addresses?
Anti-union workers, naturally, should have a full and fair chance to persuade their colleagues not to join a union, without unfair tactics being deployed against them.
To my earlier point – who is looking out for those workers, especially in the case of card checks? Forget intimidation, peer pressure is probably good for a fair percentage of yes votes that would have been no if the ballot were secret.
8080, Z80…we could probably understand each others’ code.
I actually liked VMS quite a lot, but UNIX was handier for some things; more flexible.
Remember your first full screen editor? Life was good, after that.
“That aside, you still seem to be saying that increasing penalties for the violation undoes the damage caused by a wrongful firing of the union organizer, who may have been unable to find work in the interim, even when it is years later. Again, there is no reason to believe that to be true, and common sense on the side of the opposite.”
And so we should remove the right of secret ballot to every possible worker in the United States if they want to vote on the issue of a union at their workplace? The remedy doesn’t match the harm. Unlawful termination damages could certainly include wages which couldn’t be collected in the interim….and I’m pretty sure that they do in most jurisdictions.
Also, I find the turn in the conversation regarding the rights of the anti-union workers very useful. Remember it is THEIR right to secret ballot which is being removed, not the company’s. You are asking THEM to sacrifice THEIR most basic democratic protections in order to punish what you see as wrong-doing on the part of the company. What is the logic in removing the rights of those workers when you think it is the company that is engaging in wrongdoing?
There being a practical difference in outcomes isn’t the point.
No, the point is the reason for the practical difference in outcomes. We’ve got good evidence (I’m convinced by it. You may not be, but then we’re arguing about facts, not principles) that employer intimidation, including unlawful employer intimidation, is a major factor in the outcome of organizing campaigns. Structurally, it is apparent to me that employers are in a stronger position to intimidate than other workers (employers can intimidate through threatening or committing civil violations, while other workers have to threaten or commit crimes in order to intimidate. So I’m willing to take the evidence based position that in the US, today, employer intimidation is a larger cause of interference with the free choice of each worker whether or not to organize than intimidation by other workers.
Practically, it is clear from looking at which side favors what, that NLRB elections allow a greater scope for employers to intimidate workers than card check elections. I don’t see actual evidence that intimidation of workers by other workers is a significant problem in the card-check stage that now precedes NLRB elections, and don’t see good reason to think that it would be a significant problem, not handleable by criminal law enforcement, in card check elections generally.
For those reasons, I think the evidence shows that card check elections would be likely to be characterized by less intimidation of workers than NLRB elections are now. Given that the ‘secret ballot’ isn’t worthwhile as a matter of principle in itself, but only as a tool for arriving at elections free of intimidation, card check elections appear preferable.
You are asking THEM to sacrifice THEIR most basic democratic protections in order to punish what you see as wrong-doing on the part of the company. What is the logic in removing the rights of those workers when you think it is the company that is engaging in wrongdoing?
They don’t have a right to a secret ballot — they have a right to an election free of intimidation and unfair influence. The criminal law can protect them from possible crimes committed by their fellow workers, if such are a problem, but card-check elections are the best plan we’ve got (Ezra’s snap elections might work if they could be made practical) for protecting them from the most significant source of intimidation, their employer.
“So I’m willing to take the evidence based position that in the US, today, employer intimidation is a larger cause of interference with the free choice of each worker whether or not to organize than intimidation by other workers.”
Larger is not the same as significant. As noted above, at least 50% of employers in the public sector who have access to unions choose not to join. These are employees who have no particular reason whatsoever to believe that unions might make it difficult for their businesses to survive.
You appeal to the lack of current problems, but don’t look at the idea that perhaps that is related to the current rules. If I said that Social Security isn’t needed because old people have some of the lowest poverty rates around, you would correctly note that a major reason they have low rates is because of Social Security. Secret Ballot is one of the key methods of making coercion difficult. You are asking all anti-union employees to give up that protection because you believe that businesses are too strong in the negotiation. You are damaging a third party who is unrelated to the wrong you see.
“The criminal law can protect them from possible crimes committed by their fellow workers, if such are a problem, but card-check elections are the best plan we’ve got (Ezra’s snap elections might work if they could be made practical) for protecting them from the most significant source of intimidation, their employer.”
This is non-sensical. If you are going to trust criminal law, you can do that for company action too. And you aren’t additionally protecting employees from employer intimidation at all, you are introducing new intimidation opportunities from the other side in the hope that it will counter-balance what you have judged to be an unfair opportunity for intimidation on the employer side.
Forget intimidation, peer pressure is probably good for a fair percentage of yes votes that would have been no if the ballot were secret.
All you’re saying is that the fact that card check is less than perfect is a reason to oppose it.
I’ll put your “fair percentage of yes votes” – a notion based on pure speculation – up against the 46% of workers who felt coerced by their employer to oppose a union in the context of an NLRB election.
Half the workers report coercion by management. Not just some sort of informational campaign, but coercion, with half of that number saying management coerced them “a great deal.”
And given a status quo where fully half of all workers are reporting coercion by management, your response is that well, if we had card check there’d be some amount of peer pressure, so that’s a good enough reason to stick with the status quo. I’m just not swayed by that.
“so that’s a good enough reason to stick with the status quo. I’m just not swayed by that.”
No, that isn’t a good enough reason to abandon the most routine and expected normal part of democratic processes–secret ballot. Opposing an extremely drastic measure is not the same as supporting the status quo.
Next up, Sebastian argues for eliminating Roll Call and voice votes in Congress because they are not TEH SECRET BALLOT and therefore not democratic.
Oh, the sanctimony. Yes, even if we know for a fact that half of all voters feel coerced by management, we surely can’t get rid of the sacred secret ballot. Why not? Because it protects against coercion!
Have you even addressed the point that the law will continue to guarantee a secret ballot if 30% of the workers petition for it?
Sebastian,
This is just an observation and has nothing to do with the question of secret elections, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but when you resort to all capital letters to emphasize something, it seems to have the effect of raising the temp. I think if you could adopt a different way of stating emphasis, such as highlighting with a _underline_ or an *asterisk*, things might not get so sarcastic. I started to make my observation as a wry aside, but then thought that it might be taken the wrong way, so please realize that this not a prescriptive rant or an attack, just a simple observation.
If you are going to trust criminal law, you can do that for company action too.
Sebastian, firing an employee for joining a union isn’t a crime. It’s a civil violation. That’s the point — people do it because no one goes to jail for it. For a union to intimidate people into joining, they need actual leg-breakers who are willing to risk jail time.
You appeal to the lack of current problems, but don’t look at the idea that perhaps that is related to the current rules.
Under the current rules, there is a card check stage which the union has to get by before they get to an NLRB election. A union that couldn’t get past card check without intimidation would never reach the secret ballot stage. So we should be seeing union intimidation now, if it were going to be a significant problem in card check only elections.
“Yes, even if we know for a fact that half of all voters feel coerced by management, we surely can’t get rid of the sacred secret ballot. Why not? Because it protects against coercion!”
Look, that survey didn’t define ‘coercion’. So when 46% of people report “management pressure”, I’m not convinced that the a *good* way to remedy that is to abandon secret ballot for all the people who might oppose the union.
If the company truthfully said that they would have to shut down the plant, that would have counted as “management pressure”, even though it was in fact merely direct information sharing. Introducing *more* opportunities for coercion is not a fantastic way to fight coercion.
Lizardbreath, it isn’t the same at all, because the card check you are talking about is only about taking a vote–something which I wouldn’t object to as an employee (even if I would vote against the union).
And I don’t at all understand the complaints about inadequate remedies against a company being an argument for removing secret ballot from a totally different group–employees. Aren’t we talking about changing the law anyway? If we are talking about changing the law, the current inadequacy of the law doesn’t argue for any particular change of the law. If we are changing the law, why not address the inadequacy directly rather than leaving it in place and introducing entirely new areas for coercion against entirely different groups of people? If the problem is that the current laws don’t punish corporations enough for violations, why not change those laws instead of attacking secret ballots for employees?
And what about the employees of the 56% of companies that are apparently offering no “management pressure” whatsoever? Why should their employees be stripped of secret ballot and subjected to entirely new possibilities of coercion?
And hey, “secret ballot” isn’t a Constitutional right, it is just a habit we’ve gotten into since the early 1800s. Maybe it really doesn’t have a point at all. We could get rid of it for presidential elections. I’m sure that wouldn’t introduce very many new problems….
Sebastian, you seem pretty full of it to me. For one, in order to effectively prevent management from firing employees w/ union ties I think you might have to eliminate employment at will & create a legal aid society for trying those cases. For another thing, we DO have laws that would work better against intimidation in card check elections than: (1) the status quo, or (2) any proposal I have ever seen, let alone one you’d support.
What I don’t understand is how the local union is supposed to have all this power to intimidate, hire squads of goons, coerce etc. before it exists.
Slartibartfast: I actually liked VMS quite a lot, but UNIX was handier for some things; more flexible.
I have still never seen a better scripting language than DCL. I could do anything with that. UNIX shell comes close, but I could absolutely rock with DCL. My first UNIX experience was with the Alpha. Man that was a sweet ride. I miss DEC quite a bit. I’ll never buy Compaq anything as long as I live.
Remember your first full screen editor? Life was good, after that.
Oh yeah. I would rather have a root canal than have to use a line editor ever again in my life.
Lizardbreath, it isn’t the same at all, because the card check you are talking about is only about taking a vote–something which I wouldn’t object to as an employee (even if I would vote against the union).
Because a union that couldn’t survive card check in a card check election couldn’t survive the card check stage of an NLRB election now. Either way, it needs to make it through a card check, so if there’s going to be intimidation, we should see it now. To put it another way, the same union opponents who won’t sign cards without intimidation in a card check election, won’t sign cards without intimidation in the card check stage of an NLRB election — the union’s motivation for intimidating them is the same now as it would be without the following secret ballot. (Yes, logically it is possible that there may be someone who would sign a card because they wanted there to be a secret ballot, despite the fact that they opposed the union. If you plan to hang your hat on such perverse voters being a significant enough portion of the workforce to make the incentives in pre-ballot cardchecks different from cardcheck only elections, that’s desperately unconvincing.)
And I don’t at all understand the complaints about inadequate remedies against a company being an argument for removing secret ballot from a totally different group–employees.
Because card check elections aren’t a punishment, they’re a structural means of avoiding intimidation of workers by their employers.
entirely new areas for coercion
They’re not entirely new. As I said above, every single NLRB election is preceded by a card check campaign, and if the card check campaign fails, the union never makes it to a secret ballot. If the workers wouldn’t sign cards without intimidation, either we’d be seeing intimidation, or we wouldn’t be seeing successful card check campaigns. But we do see successful card check campaigns, and we don’t see evidence in the news of labor violence or threats of violence being used to compel the signing of cards.
If we are changing the law, why not address the inadequacy directly rather than leaving it in place
Regulatory capture. With an NLRB that I trusted to run quick fair elections and reliably punish transgressions of law in a manner calculated to deter, I’d consider other means of changing the law. Card check elections don’t require much from the NLRB (a tool of the executive) in terms of energetic and evenhanded law enforcement.
Steve: I’m just not swayed by that.
Can’t say I am surprised. My viewpoint is this:
My first (and last) experience with a union shop set my mind. Not GOP talking points. While I was interviewing for the position I was harassed by the union. On my very first interview, while I was waiting, the receptionist said something about it and I replied pretty much “not interested”. In my interviews, the HR person, the manager, no one mentioned it at all. I was called back for a second interview. Looking good. About 5 minutes after I got there a union rep came in and set down beside me. It was very obvious that a) the receptionist called him and b) she did not tell the manager I was there until he was done with me. He tried to sell me like a time-share salesman. He was pretty pissed when I was not interested: he as much as told me that it would not work out for me there if I did not join the union. He gave up and left, then the receptionist buzzed the manager and I got my second interview. I got the offer, I turned it down. I never ever took another interview at a union shop.
I am not swayed by your arguments that the anti-union worker will be looked out for.
Katherine: What I don’t understand is how the local union is supposed to have all this power to intimidate, hire squads of goons, coerce etc. before it exists.
Per above, my concern is letting it exist to begin with. You can’t really get rid of it once it is born, can you?
BTW – my second experience with unions (from afar): Philly convention center. You could not assemble your trade booth and run an extension cord. A union electrician had to do that. You could not wield a screwdriver; a union carpenter had to do that. You couldn’t move a box…
They did have a handful of workers on duty, but there were 5 times more off duty, hanging around, looking for any infraction of “union work rules”.
For some reason trade shows and conventions started avoiding Philly.
Unions are on the verge of destroying our airlines and our auto manufacturers. That should be an interesting economy. Hope they enjoy their pension.
Unions are on the verge of destroying our airlines and our auto manufacturers. That should be an interesting economy. Hope they enjoy their pension.
Don’t worry, it’s been stolen. At least my mother’s — forty years a flight attendant until TWA went under, and then a few years after with American. She made less in 2000 then she did in 1980, and lost 90% of her pension in a series of bankruptcies that management came out of very nicely, thank you.
But I’ll tell her she killed the airlines for you if you like.
OCSteve, I appreciate your story, although I confess the most interesting part to me is that you got a job offer in spite of it all. Rest assured that I don’t believe in some fantasyland where there’s no such thing as union coercion.
In response to your other post, what truly baffles me is that conservatives who staunchly believe in the validity of free-market outcomes have such a big problem with the results of union negotiations. I mean, if a company goes out of business because they couldn’t deal with competitive pressure, or with the prices set by suppliers, that’s just fine, but if they go out of business because the union made unrealistic demands the solution is to get rid of unions. There’s just this odd sort of antipathy towards unions that doesn’t exist towards any other sort of market actor. In fact, people who complain about other market actors are dismissed as anti-business liberals.
workers organizing for themselves=bad
giant insurance corporations that distort the health care system so that we end up paying too much for what we get? they’re untouchable.
companies like KBR and endless list of defense contractors that bilk the taxpayers out of billions? shrug.
Other market actors don’t tend to break the windshields of those who are looking for a market for their product.
I guess I could be wrong about that, though.
Nah, they just maim their employees.
Seriously, isn’t it as silly of you to blame every union for an unspecified violent crime as it is for me to blame every corporation for stolen pensions, defrauded investors, and maimed or cheated employees?
“isn’t it as silly of you to blame every union for an unspecified violent crime as it is for me to blame every corporation for stolen pensions, defrauded investors, and maimed or cheated employees?”
The one is directly relevant to the discussion, the other not so much.
Sorry, the record of corporate lawlessness isn’t relevant either to the need for organization or to the methods necessary to make organization possible? How do you figure that?
Other market actors don’t tend to break the windshields of those who are looking for a market for their product.
So that’s your answer? Because some union people break the law, folks shouldn’t have the right to collectively bargain? I wasn’t expecting to hear a serious justification for anti-union animus among conservatives, but still, sheesh.
Are you familiar with the history of the American labor movement, by the way? Do you understand that the historical reason why unions became entangled with organized crime was because they needed protection from extralegal violence and thuggery by employers? There’s not a lot of high ground to be claimed in this debate.
“Sebastian, you seem pretty full of it to me. For one, in order to effectively prevent management from firing employees w/ union ties I think you might have to eliminate employment at will & create a legal aid society for trying those cases. For another thing, we DO have laws that would work better against intimidation in card check elections than: (1) the status quo, or (2) any proposal I have ever seen, let alone one you’d support.”
I don’t understand your criticism here. “At will employment” is still limited by certain not-permissible reasons for firing someone. For example you can’t fire someone for being black. You can’t fire someone for refusing to sleep with the boss. And while I’ve never worked on any union cases, I’m pretty sure you can’t fire someone for legally trying to organize a union. Now if you don’t think the penalties for breaking the law are harsh enough, so be it. But that argues for stronger penalties, not removing secret ballots from third parties.
Also, surely you are aware that unions have lots of high-powered lawyers? What is this ‘legal-aid society’ thing?
“What I don’t understand is how the local union is supposed to have all this power to intimidate, hire squads of goons, coerce etc. before it exists.”
That is rather easy. They get support from a national group. It isn’t as if that has never happened–see the Teamsters. Furthermore it isn’t as if very serious violence is something from a generation or two ago in union action: 1995 Lance Young attacked–Teamsters; or the 1993 United Mine Workers strike–Eddie York murdered where the local prosecutor didn’t even try the shooters for homicide, merely using a gun in the commission of a crime; or the 1990 NY Daily News strike where drivers were beaten with baseball bats and 50 trucks were set on fire, some with the drivers in them.
Sounds like not-so-fun intimidation is alive and well in union action. It really doesn’t make me want to ensure that unions know exactly who votes against them.
“Yes, logically it is possible that there may be someone who would sign a card because they wanted there to be a secret ballot, despite the fact that they opposed the union. If you plan to hang your hat on such perverse voters being a significant enough portion of the workforce to make the incentives in pre-ballot cardchecks different from cardcheck only elections, that’s desperately unconvincing.”
This isn’t just a ‘logical possibility’ it is hugely likely. What better way to avoid serious union harassment than to sign their annoying card and then vote against them in the secret ballot? Why in the world do you write about that as if it was almost inconceivable?
“Because some union people break the law, folks shouldn’t have the right to collectively bargain?”
This is getting annoying. None of the conservatives here have said anything like that. So far, the most any of us have said is that union people shouldn’t get to have elections that abandon one of the very most basic protections–secret ballot.
It is really amazing, I can’t imagine that you would be so hot to destroy secret ballot in any other imaginable context. Secret ballot exists because it makes coercing the right/wrong people really difficult. You can say whatever you want outside the ballot box, but you can do what you want inside it. Mayors have a lot of coercive power, but I can’t imagine that anyone would argue that we should let mayoral opposition candidates break through secret ballot. It is just asking for trouble.
“the record of corporate lawlessness”
You weren’t citing any corporate lawlessness relevant to this issue, were you? I thought Slart was referring to union efforts to intimidate non-union workers into joining, which is apposite. I’ve no idea about the substance of the claim, just its logical weight.
“So far, the most any of us have said is that union people shouldn’t get to have elections that abandon one of the very most basic protections–secret ballot.”
The right of people to organize as they want seems primary here, and the evidence cited above appears to show that the card check way is best for securing that. If there’s a way to put in various other protections (likely-to-be-politically-stable ones, that is) such that a real-world comparison doesn’t show that, that’s fine by me too. I’m sure the others arguing for card check are doing so simply as a tested way for achieving the fairest result, so the right-to-secret-ballot argument isn’t convincing – everybody would like to live in a world where that was the best solution, but.
“I’m sure the others arguing for card check are doing so simply as a tested way for achieving the fairest result, so the right-to-secret-ballot argument isn’t convincing – everybody would like to live in a world where that was the best solution, but.”
How is this a tested way for the ‘fairest’ result? No one has made a particularly strong argument about why secret ballot is so damaging. The closest thing I’ve seen supports the idea the election should be held fairly quickly so that there can’t be a sustained (allegedly) misinformation campaign.
The idea that management should be completely barred from making a case is rather unconvincing to me. I don’t see why we should bother with the pretense of a democratic system where secret ballot is violated such that only one side knows who voted in what way, and where one side is prevented from making a case. (This second part is true whether you count the other side as the management or the anti-union employees. Card check is designed to make management getting its case across impossible, but it also is structured against anti-union employees. They are not well positioned to make their case to all the other employees because card check is all about face to face pressure with a pen in hand).
This all seems very results oriented. I can’t imagine anyone here suggesting abandoning secret ballot and outlawing debate for a side they didn’t support. That fact alone makes it procedurally suspect.
If you are going to make debate impossible and let only one side know how individuals vote, why pretend to be democratic at all? You clearly think that having unions is important enough to abandon all the normal democratic protections. Why not just mandate them and be done with it?
“the pretense of a democratic system”
Economic life isn’t democratic. No card check advocate here wants to get rid of secret ballots – they want a system that allows people to freely associate and use their economic leverage in legal ways. If you can propose or point to a secret ballot system which will deliver better results than card check by same fairness criteria [e.g. *] given in the data hilzoy quotes above, we’ll all say fine, that’s the best policy, the govt should institute it if it’s practical.
* [Fewer workers in card check campaigns than in elections felt pressure from coworkers to support the union (17% vs. 22%).
Workers in card check campaigns were almost twice as likely as those in elections (62% vs. 33%) to report that management took a neutral position and left the decision to form a union up to workers]
“Fewer workers in card check campaigns than in elections felt pressure from coworkers to support the union (17% vs. 22%).
Workers in card check campaigns were almost twice as likely as those in elections (62% vs. 33%) to report that management took a neutral position and left the decision to form a union up to workers”
As I’ve already said (I think twice): “This evidence isn’t particularly strong because current card-check situations are by permission of the employeer, and thus represent comparing high resistance situations to low resistance situations and finding that the higher resistance situations have higher resistance. That isn’t a particularly shocking finding.”
And again, what is this ‘neutral position’? If the management accurately reports the competitive difficulties, that certainly might not be neutral, but the information is fair to report.
Further it has not been established that the incredibly drastic measure of abolishing the secret ballot for one side of the election is necessary to ameliorate the problem.
“No card check advocate here wants to get rid of secret ballots – they want a system that allows people to freely associate and use their economic leverage in legal ways.”
The first phrase is logically incorrect. Card check as formulated is in fact getting rid of secret ballots for an election. Advocating it is expressing a desire to get rid of secret ballots for this type of election. Worse, it is getting rid of secret ballots in such a way that only one side has the information.
Again, I can’t imagine people advocating ending secret ballots and giving the voting information to only one side if they weren’t 100% certain the information would be going to their side and excluded from the other side. That at least seriously raises the idea that you don’t really desire a procedural change, you desire a substantive change. If that is the case, we should be arguing the substantive change, not the procedural smokescreen.
I’ve offered a number of other changes that can deal with the alleged problems raised. The responses appear to be “the law as currently situated isn’t good enough” and “I don’t like separation of powers”. The first is no response at all since we are already talking about Congress passing new laws to change the situation, and the second is just an attempt to avoid the Constitutional structure of the United States. It also proves too much because there isn’t much point in having a union if you can’t enforce the laws that make a union special.
1. Sebastian appears to be fetishizing secret ballots — and in the bargain attempting to cast all other voting methods as illegitimate and undemocratic — in a way that would be comical if it didn’t appear to be argued in support of a seriously imbalanced power structure.
2. This: The idea that management should be completely barred from making a case is rather unconvincing to me. If you really believe that — and considering Steve’s comment concerning the rights of workers to organize — I’d like to seriously see you defend, in that case, the idea that labor shouldn’t get a voice in board composition and executive compensation.
This isn’t just a ‘logical possibility’ it is hugely likely. What better way to avoid serious union harassment than to sign their annoying card and then vote against them in the secret ballot? Why in the world do you write about that as if it was almost inconceivable?
Because you don’t have evidence of union harassment to show. You’re assuming that union harassment and intimidation is such a problem that it creates this class of people who act against their wishes by signing a card in public but vote against the union in private, but you don’t have, e.g., news reports of union violence during card check campaigns, or testimony from people who felt impelled to sign cards despite their opposition to the union, to point to. It’s an evidence-free claim.
Secret ballot exists because it makes coercing the right/wrong people really difficult.
Except that all the evidence in this area shows that it makes coercing the people campaigning for the union very easy. You’re simply ignoring the facts here.
Declining union membership absent employer coercion can be partially explained (at least over here) by people deciding that they can reap the benefits of unions existing without having to pay union fees. With long strikes becoming rare because of the unions’ strong bargaining position, the risk of non-membership is low. Experience shows that only a (relatively) low percentage of workers have to be organized to achieve the positive effects. Unions can get pretty nasty when too powerful but they are rarely worse than the opposition (too strong unions begin to behave like corporations themselves).
All this of course is under the condition of a governemnt in charge that is not actively hostile towards workers and willing to ignore existing laws in favor of employers (as was the case in Bavaria in the past).
It’s all a question of a balance that’s not going too strongly towards one side.
Concerning unionization in the States. If noone is actually forced to become a member in a forming union, why should the voting process matter or the employer have a say in it? If I understand it correctly, the whole process consists of two steps: 1.Do I want a union in this company? 2.Will I join it, if one is formed?
Everything we discuss here seems to pertain to the first, not to the second.
This is interesting. Americans work a lot more than Europeans but we are a lot happier.
By almost every measure, Europeans do work less and relax more than Americans. According to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Americans work 25% more hours each year than the Norwegians or the Dutch. The average retirement age for European men is 60.5, and it’s even lower for European women. Our vacations are pathetically short by comparison: The average U.S. worker takes 16 days of vacation each year, less than half that typically taken by the Germans (35 days), the French (37 days) or the Italians (42 days).
However:
Obviously, there is a point beyond which work is excessive and lowers life quality. But within reasonable bounds, if happiness is our goal, the American formula of hard work appears to function pretty well.
This may be one reason why Americans tend to score better than Europeans on most happiness surveys. For example, according to the 2002 International Social Survey Programme across 35 countries, 56% of Americans are “completely happy” or “very happy” with their lives, versus 44% of Danes (often cited in surveys as the happiest Europeans), 35% of the French and 31% of Germans. Those sweet five-week vacations and 35-hour workweeks don’t seem to be stimulating all that much félicité. A good old-fashioned 50-hour week might be a better option.
I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this by Jes, Dutch, Hartmut, and any others across the pond. Hartmut – 31%?!? What’s up with that?
I’m kind of dubious about using happiness surveys that way. People in poorer countries with shorter life expetancy & even some pretty war torn countries tend to rate themselves as happier than modern, rich, western countries. Does that mean we need to emulate those countries policies? Given the same level of actual happiness, some personality types will answer to a survey that they are “completely happy” & others will say “pretty happy.”
Perhaps I’m biased because our American work ethic is f***ing insane and the main source of unhappiness in my life.
Oh, I see it’s an AEI publication. Wow, now I’m angry. Leaving this thread.
“Because you don’t have evidence of union harassment to show. You’re assuming that union harassment and intimidation is such a problem that it creates this class of people who act against their wishes by signing a card in public but vote against the union in private, but you don’t have, e.g., news reports of union violence during card check campaigns, or testimony from people who felt impelled to sign cards despite their opposition to the union, to point to. It’s an evidence-free claim.”
Except it isn’t. First there are reports of union violence in other campaigns, and it would be silly to believe that the violence is carefully maintained in a super-narrow fashion such that threats of it are perfectly excluded from check card. Second there is evidence that people change their mind after signing the card, unions often don’t get voted in after that point. You will attribute that wholly to ‘management pressure’, but considering how secret ballots actually work, that seems deeply unlikely.
And frankly it is deeply insulting to say that I ‘fetishize’ secret ballot. It is a hugely important protection that is so much a part of our regular understanding of society, that attempts to abolish it for a particular class of people in a super important vote for their life, while giving the information on their vote to only one side, is really suspect. It is like saying that katherine ‘fetishizes’ the habeas corpus protection. It isn’t as if she thinks it is the only important protection in the world. Just important enough that you had better have an overwhelmingly great case about why you want to abridge it. And that case shouldn’t be “I don’t like the outcome when we are forced to use it”. Secret ballot may make it harder for unions to organize. But from the conversation, secret ballot isn’t the problem at all, it just looks like a convenient way to try to get the results you want. Well, it isn’t just a convenient protection, so I’m pretty sure it would be better to go about it from another direction.
Habeas doesn’t exist so that the government can efficiently prosecute criminals. It exists so that non-criminals get heard. Secret ballot doesn’t owe its existance to whether or not unions can get elected. It exists so that people can vote what they actually want to vote and in this case so that anti-union votes don’t have to directly say “I’m not voting for you”. Management doesn’t have the power to know how you are voting. And it shouldn’t.
Management doesn’t have the power to know how you are voting. And it shouldn’t.
Actually, it does have a list, going into the secret ballot, of people who’ve signed cards for the union, so it can focus pressure on/selectively fire them.
Sorry about the italics, there.
italics off.
Moreover, the frequency of firings of union organizers speaks volumes to the success with which management does know who is leading the organizing campaigns, Sebastian’s confidence notwithstanding.
Did it work this time?
I would not completely exclude the possibility that it takes less to make an American happy.
That is not meant condescending but could be part of “culture/environment”. Usually ethnological surveys come up with maximum happiness for people living under conditions neither Europeans nor US citizens would consider desirable.
It would be interesting to find out how the situation would look like, if the conditions in the US and Europe were swapped. With Europe going towards the US model as a result of globalization, we will see the result for one side sooner or later.
A lot of people turn workaholic as a result of unhappiness (diverting their attention from it).
The German case may not be representative at the moment because the former GDR population is going to distort the picture significantly (as a result of disillusionment, unemployment*) for years to come.
*there was a systematic destruction of the working parts of the Eastern economy by Western companies (supported by the Kohl administration) that wanted to kill potential rivals. That was not through free market mechanisms but more by “going Bremer”.
Katherine: Oh, I see it’s an AEI publication. Wow, now I’m angry. Leaving this thread.
Wow. It’s actually in the WSJ today but it requires registration ($$) there so I searched to see if the full article was anywhere else online. That is where I found it.
Given that reaction, I’m certainly glad I did not link to Michael Medved’s article at TownHall discussing it.
I’ll have to try to remember that the site an article is hosted on is more important than the article itself. Next time I’ll wait until something is being discussed at Atrios or dKos or somewhere appropriate to link to before bringing it up.
What’s insane about only 30% of the population being “very happy” or “completely happy”? Say you’re 30% very happy, 50% pretty happy, 10% neutral, 10% depressed–is that really so crazy?
It wasn’t the site, it was the combo of the site & the TEXT.
Arthur C. Brooks is a visiting scholar at AEI.
You’re right, though, Medved is worse.
I can’t believe you fall for this crap. It is so, so, so, so clearly results driven & an excuse for not having remotely decent leave & family policies compared to the rest of the developed world.
There are parts of my job I love, and in some ways I’m amazingly lucky to have the opportunity. I would not consider retiring given the opportunity. Nevertheless, the hours make me crazy, are bad for me, and are bad for my marriage. Why don’t you ask a given American if European vacation policies would make them more or less happy… You really think they’ll all say, “no, please, don’t give me twice as much vacation, or cut my hours back to 40/week, I’m just TOO DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY?” Right. Right. What crap.
Regarding European versus American standards for work, I remember either hearing or reading about a study that showed that Americans actually have more truly free time than Europeans. I’m sorry for not having something to link, but it was something from a year or so ago, and I don’t even remember if it was something I read on a blog or hear on the radio or whatever. Anyway, the main thrust was that Europeans spend more time doing things like cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, maintaining homes and cars, etc. than Americans to the point that it overtakes the difference in hours spent “at work.” So some portion of the aggregate American employment-related work hours are in service industries that reduce the amount of work other Americans have to do outside of employment-related work. For example, instead of cooking dinner at home, an American is more likely than a European to go to a restaurant. The person cooking at the restaurant is at work, so his cooking counts toward American work-hours. Same with the busboy, dishwasher, waiter/waitress, etc. The European eating at home does the cooking, table setting/clearing, dishwasing on his or her “free time.”
World Happiness survey. Nigeria wins! We really need to look at those in-country results, though–if the Northern provinces that implemented sharia scored highest, that’s scientific support that it’s good policy. And Mexico crushes the United States, incidentally–so clearly this immigration thing will fix itself; people clearly prefer the opportunities in Mexico. El Salvador also outranks us; maybe horrific gang violence is an overblown problem.
I also see that previous winners include Bangladesh. Maybe what we need are some disastrous typhoons and floods to keep our day-to-day problems in perspective. I look forward to AEI’s rigorous examinations of the subject.
Katherine: I can’t believe you fall for this crap. It is so, so, so, so clearly results driven & an excuse for not having remotely decent leave & family policies compared to the rest of the developed world.
What did I fall for? I thought it was interesting, and given the European regulars here I was interested in their perspective on it. End of story. I did not endorse it, or use it to promote an agenda of any kind. I noted it, said it was interesting, and that I would be interested in the thoughts of Jes, Dutch, Hartmut, etc. I don’t think I fell for anything and I certainly didn’t post it to ruin your day.
I think it’s very weak. Obviously, I’m taking it personally & being snippier than is really called for.
I’ll never understand why this isn’t a bigger political issue.
That Medved piece is quite literally ridiculous.
Anyway, I work with colleagues at my company’s offices in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Tokyo and Sydney, many of whom I share great friendships with, and never heard one of them — literally, never — express that they would like American-style work hours, vacation policies and family leave policies. Nor do they ever seem unhappy with their work/life balances. Quite the opposite.
When I lived in Germany in 2002 for work, I never found myself without a lot of free time. First of all, people actually took lunches. Like, everyone in the office all went to lunch for an hour. Second, stores weren’t open as late, nor were they open Sundays, so you did your shopping right after work, then had your entire evening and most of your weekend free. And, contra hairshirthedonist, a LOT of people went to restaurants all the time. There were a dozen or so restaurants within a couple blocks of the apartment I was staying in, and they were always packed.
Sebastian: First there are reports of union violence in other campaigns
Organizing (card check or election) campaigns, or strikes? If the former, please cite specific examples.
(the counter argument, of course, is that we choose these hours for higher incomes. Based on personal experience I don’t think we are actually given that choice on an individual level–not in a simple way. You can’t negotiate your own European-style benefits package in return for a lower salary, in practice, & jobs that offer reliably better benefits & lower salaries in the same field are noticeably harder to find.)
On another note, this article is a textbook case of how our immigration laws are under-enforced & unnecessarily ruin people’s lives at the same time. The whole idea of prosecutorial discretion just doesn’t seem to exist at DHS.
I’ll never understand why this isn’t a bigger political issue.
In general I don’t disagree with your sentiments on this, just the way they were presented.
I average 60 hours per week and there is never a good time to take vacation. I haven’t had more than a few days off at a time in many years. Nearly all lunches (and far too many dinners) occur in front of the computer working (I really need to clean the crumbs out of this keyboard before it begins attracting wildlife). Work does interfere with family life, with any life at all. So I’m with you there.
OTOH, if asked if I was happy with my job I would say yes. If asked if I was happy with my life overall I would say yes. I would not take a pay cut in exchange for fewer hours or more vacation. If I won the lottery tomorrow I would not quit my job (I’d scale the hours way back and blow any day off at the drop of a hat).
“You can’t negotiate your own European-style benefits package in return for a lower salary, in practice, & jobs that offer reliably better benefits & lower salaries in the same field are noticeably harder to find.”
As someone who made a lifestyle choice to take less money for less work, they are ‘harder’ to find, but not ridiculous. Just look while at your high pressure job, and within a couple of months, you have it. And I did in fact negotiate for extra vacation for slightly less pay, I think lots of people (especially professionals) are just afraid to try.
I would cut my salary in half in a heartbeat for European style vacation & benefits. It’s not an option w/o switching fields entirely.
On that immigration story, DHS is actually not actively trying to deport the soldier’s wife right now. So prosecutorial discretion apparently does exist to at least a small degree–it’s not often exercised in lower profile cases, however.
Seb, the problem is that if you’re a salaried employee, it’s very hard to know whether the lifestyle benefits will stick, whereas the pay cut definitely will.
Cheney is, apparently, some sort of Class Five Full Roaming Vapor:
The Office of the Vice President has asserted that it is not an “entity within the executive branch” and hence is not subject to presidential executive orders.
Yeah, Ugh, isn’t that great? “Unitary executive” indeed.
If they’re not in the executive branch, I’m not sure where their classification/declassification power comes from. But this is their entire legal strategy in a nutshell: the war on terror is just like any other war when saying so increases their power, and nothing like any other war when saying so increases they’re power. The Vice President is in the executive branch when that increases his power, and not in the executive branch when that increases his power. The NSA is apparently part of the armed forces when it comes to the President’s Commander in Chief Power, but not when it comes to the Congressional power to write laws governing the armed forces. etc.
I said that? I wish I could remember where.
I announce a one hour period of sweetness and light, in which everyone continues to make their best possible argumentswhile channelling their inner Mister Rogers. If somene doesn’t have an inner Mister Rogers, I’d be glad to lend you mine. Purely voluntary, of course.
I try and try to be Mr. Rogers, and I’d succeed, too, if it weren’t for those other viciously argumentative bastards.
All of whom are welcome to be my neighbor, I might add.
…and I’ll even try not to run my mower over their puppies, very often.
What’s that, Trolley?
(ding ding ding, jingle jingle, ding)
OCSteve and Sebastians are trying to opress the proletariat? Oh no, how could they?
I think Katherine hasn’t quite got into the spirit of things, either.
“I announce a one hour period of sweetness and light, in which everyone continues to make their best possible argumentswhile channelling their inner Mister Rogers.”
Do we need to change into cardigans and sneakers? Are we going to get a Picture Picture tour of a union organizing drive? And … What about Naomi? (oops, sorry wrong PBS Kids show for that last).
Maybe the best we can shoot for is Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood.
More effectively than any Marxist theoretician or crusading labor leader, Mister Rogers was a genius at casting the demons of worker alienation out of America’s neighborhood.
Katherine – what just appalls me is that the whole “Vice President is special” argument is that it’s not some sort of national scandal. Here Cheney’s claiming that he’s not part of the executive branch, and IIRC has claimed he’s really not some part of the legislative branch either – so he’s some mysterious Schrödinger branch that is neither apart from, nor a part of, the gov’t, answerable, apparently, to no one – not even Bush (and how this doesn’t piss Bush off is a mystery to me as well – though I’m guessing he’s totally clueless about it, or thinks it works to his advantage).
I hated Mr. Rogers.
channelling their inner Mister Rogers
I think I like Mister Robinson’s Hood better…
Bad link. Mr. Robinson.
Is there an echo in here?
great minds and all 😉
Seeing as how I am doing so well riling things up in this thread I was going to post a comment on how journalists contribute to Democrats by a ratio of 9-1 (shocker!) and how Congress’s approval rating is in the crapper, lower than Bush, the lowest it has ever been since Gallop started tracking it in the 70s…
Then I said to heck with it. It ain’t worth the time I’d spend arguing the points, not on the first day of summer. Instead I’m off to a cool martini bar that has a good view of sunset.
I need a few days off. It seems all I have been doing lately is making people angry, or getting angry at people, and not just here. Time to get off these inter-tubes for a few days. I ban myself for at least 3-4 days. See you all next week.
OCSteve: take a break if you want, but don’t do it because you think anyone else would be happier that way 😉
Well, I’m not angry at you, OCSteve, even if you’re denying the proletariat their right to oppress the bourgeoisie. Not a neighborly thing to do, I say.
I’m generally dubious of congressional polls, especially the high approval rating generally given when people are asked about their own congressman – as if it’s the fools all you other people elect that is the problem.