Labor and employment roundup

  • “The employees ran away and refused to talk to us…Even if we’re there to help them.” [NYT cheers New York nail salon raids, earlier on paper’s crusade against the salons]
  • And now, the Times’s campaign to damn the Amazon: “The Liberty To Work Under Tough Bosses” [John McGinnis]
  • Rule by White House decree begins to rile its employer targets: “Defense Contractors to Obama: Enough With the Executive Orders” [Defense One]
  • “Lawsuit Reform Alliance Estimates $200m in Additional Costs for LaGuardia Airport Project Due to the ‘Scaffold Law'” [its press release, earlier on law]
  • “Mandated Paid Maternity Leave: A Bad Idea for Women” [Abigail Hall, Independent Institute via Alkon, related Peter Suderman on family leave mandates]
  • Describing most public assistance programs to working families as subsidy for low-wage employers is “flatly wrong.” [Gary Burtless, Brookings, earlier on such claims, more from Tim Worstall (“McDonald’s Profits Are Not Subsidized By Welfare Payments To McDonald’s Employees”)]
  • Wisconsin-style “Moral Monday” protests against North Carolina’s GOP administration have some familiar backing [News and Observer, more on phenomenon from John Locke Foundation]

4 Comments

  • And now, the Times’s campaign to damn the Washington Post, no I meant Amazon, yeah Amazon.

    Let’s see, two liberal rags often vying for the same eyeballss and pocket books. One owned by a guy who knows how to make billions on the internet, the other really good at losing millions anyway they can. No possible conflict of interest there.

  • I can safely say that one of the industries that I will cry the least for is government contractors. Sure, the new regulations are tough to comply with, but the government is paying all the bills (including those for paying benefits to workers).

    One of the theories for having contractors instead of the government performing chores is that the private sector is more efficient. But the contractors operate under a different set of rules, i.e., they can have lower labor costs.

    IMHO, the best policy is that both the contractors and government would have the same employee costs. To do this, we would either have to reduce government employee benefits or increase private sector benefits. Let’s even the field and see what happens.

    I think a good argument might be made that government benefits should be reduced. However, that argument has not won the day.

    Is there any cogent argument that allowing contractors to band together to lobby the government is any different (or better) than allowing government employees to do the same in unions?

    Finally, having government contractors instead of government employees performing jobs is hardly a conservative/libertarian principle. As I see it, the goal should be to reduce the size of government programs. Transferring functions paid by the taxpayers from the government to the private sector does nothing to achieve the goal.

  • “Jeong Lee, the leader of Team 6, and a Labor Department standards investigator who speaks Korean, said she gave workers her number if they wanted to talk away from their boss.

    “One of my stops in Brooklyn, the employees ran away and refused to talk to us,” Ms. Lee said. “Even if we’re there to help them.””

    No, you are not there to help them. “We’re from the government and we are here to help” is the biggest lie ever told.

  • ““The employees ran away and refused to talk to us…Even if we’re there to help them.”

    a/k/a

    “We’re from the Government and we’re here to help you.”