The right to refuse to be abused

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Having listened to the Costa coffee team betraying themselves on Radio 4 (see my post: The Cost a Coffee or the cost a work) I can’t help wondering if society would not benefit if people were allowed to refuse to work for a company which so obviously abuses its staff.

The Costa coffee branch featured opened in a locality where due to closures of some large industry — maybe mining, but I’m not sure — had an extremely high unemployment rate. They had thousands of people vying for a very few jobs.

There are government regulations applying to Social Security that try to force people to take jobs — barring illness or disability, and possibly single-parenthood, I believe people are allowed to refuse maybe two job offers and then they MUST accept the next or lose benefits.

There are a few regulations governing employers, such as a minimum wage, but, apart from that, they are free to impose all sorts of hardships and abuses upon their staff. As I discussed in that previous post Costa Coffee have revealed that they (a common practice) want staff who they may have at their beck and call so that they will turn up for work any time when called upon, will work double shifts at a moment’s notice, can have their hours changed without notice etc, and all for a pittance of a wage. Then nobody, but NOBODY, is going to actually like slaving for Costa Coffee when it treats them so badly but, to add insult to injury, they are then required to talk glowingly of their employers in public, on radio. Talk about selling your soul!

No one with any self-respect would swallow the kind of shit Costa is dealing out — if they did not half to.

If people were allowed to refuse to work for abusive employers, I cannot help but feel it would make our world a better place. Abusive employers breed anger and resentment. We can do without more of those feelings in this society. Also, it’s a well known fact (Don’t ask. Evidence? Don’t be lazy. Google it. It’s easy to find out for yourself, though it speaks of an abysmal lack of awareness of what’s going on in the world if you don’t already know.) that people who get abused often end up abusing others — or to put it round the other way, most abusers are people who have themselves been abused.

So, should we not use Social Security as a means to allow people to refuse to work for abusive employers?

2

People pretty much everywhere but North Korea or whatever DO have the right to refuse work they consider abusive. Whether or not the State should then pay them a stipend is a completely other question. Also consider that a person can take an ‘abusive’ job, and work it just long enough to find some other job.

Also, it depends on your definition of abusive. You, for example, seem to consider rotating/changing hours to be a form of abuse. Given such a lax definition, and given that work by it’s very nature is something that sucks so much people have to pay you to do it, you’re basically saying people should be able to refuse any job they don’t care for and still get state benefits. IF that’s what you mean, just say so.

3

I think you underestimate the effects of the random changing of hours. People have other commitments. They may have children. The hours get changed by a phone call at a moment’s notice so the employee has to drop everything and go to work. But what about the children, what about finding a child minder or babysitter at the drop of a hat? Well, I could go on and on about all the knock-on effects that occur when an employer insists that their demands should take precedence over everything else in a person’s life, including children, possibly second jobs, fitting in with a spouse, shopping, taking the car to the garage, social activities and appointments, feeding the family etc, etc. And all this means that you have to do a hell of a lot of unpaid extra work in order to satisfy the boss’s demands — not to mention the effects that unpredictability have on a person’s health.

4

I have a job, right now, where my hours and days off change week to week, and I don’t know what my hours will be one week until the end of the week before. Pretty much anybody with a salary position also has to deal with coming in unexpectedly, having days off suddenly rescheduled, working unexpectedly long days, and doing work duties from home when it’s supposed to be their time off. In addition, any job that involves weather, crime, health care, animal care, or the financial markets will be this way necessarily. In fact, I would say there are more careers and vocations that ARE this way than those that aren’t.

 You are calling job practices abusive while giving the impression that you haven't actually had a job before.
5

Ucc, the problem isn’t that joe bob’s gas station is abusing workers in these ways and so they just need to go and work at wal mart instead. It’s that this approach to labor relations is systemic. People like to be thought of as people, and when a 50 cent raise could mean you might be able to afford insurance, and you ask for it, then they fire you and hire a kid who doesn’t want the raise or understand that he needs insurance, and this becomes the case more often than not in most places of business then you end up with people on welfare lined up outside of public hospitals while the store owners are buying yachts. Then they complain about having to pay taxes.

Think about this…you want a free market and you want things to be determined by it. Prices, consumer options, etc…via competition and a free market these things should be achievable.

So let’s say you want to fill up your gas tank and the place nearby charges 3.50 a gallon. So you think that’s too much and you go to the next place down the road and notice that they also charge 3,50 a gallon. So you try another gas company. You read the financial news, you know where this money is going when you buy this gas, and you know XOM has record breaking profits on the stock exchange. So you go to Chevron, because you’re going to give the competition a try and you realize that it’s still 3.50 a gallon, then jet pep, then petrol, then flying j, then hess, then 7-11 and in the end you realize that you’ve been price fixed by a socialist cooperative of oil companies and that they are all colluding to fuck us out of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

It’s the same thing with jobs. Bain Capital owns Dominos Pizza, Staples, Guitar Center, a couple of “for profit” universities that exploit the student loan system by letting underqualified students in and then qualifying them for govt loans, the vast majority of which are squandered by students who were never expected to graduate from their graphic design programs. All those places listed above look for any way they can to cut costs and you’d better believe that the strategy of all these big holding companies is to ensure that the employees cost as little as possible. And that they can steal as much as possible from the tax pool. Wal-Mart workers in CA take 1.5bn a year in welfare of one form or another. Not lazy people, not sorry people, not schmucks who wont do anything for themselves, but instead people with jobs who work in a fucking wal mart.

I understand that businesses have to profit, but when 99% of that goes to lazy, sitting around, doing nothing but mooching shareholders, (cause there isn’t really a lot of risk in any of those stocks), while the productive people who are actually assembling and selling the products, and moving them and organizing them and keeping track of the financials and the human resources at the store level get paid so little that it’s virtually impossible for any of them, even the managers to ever own homes or support families or live any of their dreams. Restaurants pay 2 bucks an hour plus tips. If you don’t get enough tips to make it to minimum wage then they’re supposed to pay you minimum wage. Let me tell you what really happens…you take a job at a restaurant and you’re the new guy, so all the veterans steal the good tables because they are so poor they need the money. Then for the first few weeks, you don’t even make minimum wage because you get all the shitty tables. You go in when you get your paycheck that says, “void” because all your hourly just goes to taxes anyway, and try and explain to your boss that you didn’t get enough tips and that you didn’t end up making 7.25 an hour so you need that extra money to make up the minimum wage. Probably 30 or 40 bucks.

Next thing you know…you’re fired. Not really though, cause then they’d have to pay unemployment. They just cut you to 2 days a week and say, “the company can’t afford the labor being so high”, then after 2 or 3 weeks of trying to get your hours back so you can have your job waiting tables for minimum wage, you don’t, then you get too hungry so you gotta quit and work someplace else, so now you can’t get unemployment because of your boss’s criminal act. There’s no enforcement on this shit either. This all happens as a matter of routine. Then you start the cycle again. I’ve managed a lot of restaurants, some of them in the hood where no one tips, and some of these people work all day and are just happy to have made 30 bucks.

Did you know, that in the state of Alabama, that the department of industrial relations, or the “labor board” does not do any enforcement on businesses that gross less than 1.5mil in sales a year? So this guy I know has 18 dominos pizzas under 12 LLC’s. Think about that. Besides that, these guy report their own gross income. You see what I’m saying about how there is a power structure that disadvantages productive, hard working people and that rewards exploiters just because of some money they inherited or borrowed from a bank? Because you and I both know that it’s not possible to work hard for your company and save up enough money to start your own company. Maybe 20 years ago, certainly 30-40 years ago, but not now. I mean, it’s like a half mil to get a single mcdonalds unit on the used market with shoddy wiring in the ghetto. You can’t earn that kind of money. It has to be given to you.

It doesn’t take innovation or genius or hard work to own a restaurant. Any competent person could be trained to do it in short order. So why the tremendous disparity between the people who actually do the work and the guy who just leverages his position to their demise?

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They guy w/ the 18 dominos pays “managers” a “salary” of 300-500 a week, most of the time 300, and that’s taxed, and they work about 50-70 hours for it. It’s illegal under federal law because their jobs consist primarily of “repetitious motion of the hands”, which means that they can’t be paid a salary that comes out to less than minimum wage by hour. So what he does is illegal, and it’s as clear as can be, but by forming all those LLC’s, he doesn’t have a company grossing more than 1.5mil a year, and so he’s under the threshold for enforcement of labor laws. How in the hell is that allowed?

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I mean I could care less if a boss berated me and called me an idiot and pretended like he thought I didn’t know how to mop a floor, but I mean…after all that’s said and done, I would at least like for there to be some option that I could exercise to get paid enough to actually have a fucking life.

Ucc, maybe you got lucky, maybe you got a sweet job with a fat paycheck and you just bought a home. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of people, and there are a great number of intelligent, capable, hard working people in the world who will never have a shot no matter what because some people don’t recognize the fine line between fair profit and exploitative greed.

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I once ran a business that only had 1 employee and grossed between 12 and 15k a week. It involved the organization of a number of clients and the logistics of supplying them with goods for resale. I acted as a wholesaler, a salesman, the warehouse crew, the production facility, the secretary, the manager, and the cfo. Without the aid of an employer there have been several years where I personally netted well over 100k in income. Now when I go to get a job and a guy tells me I can’t mop a floor, or he tells me I"m only worth 10 bucks, or 20 bucks and hour, I can only think to myself, “this person is either ignorant, or they are making a brazen attempt to exploit me”. I mean I dunno man I’m not a dummy. I know what I’m worth because I’ve put it on the table in front of me plenty of times. The question is why on Earth could I never make 50% of that and have any kind of security as an employee someplace? Is there nothing left for the people who make things happen after we pay the people who don’t?

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AND

I’ve worked at both ends of the restaurant business, manageress and most of the bottom jobs such as waitress, kitchen assistant etc. My first entry into the restaurant business was from the top. A local restaurant was looking for a temporary replacement manageress. They were also looking for wairesses etc. I applied for the latter but when I got to the interview, the manageress told me the situation and asked if I thought I could manage the restaurant while she was away fro a couple of months. I did warn her I had no experience, and since the job included doing the cooking for which I had also precious little experience, I seemed totally unsuited. However, she decided to take me on. I got a week’s training then I was on my own. I did have quite a lot of fun with the cooking, experimenting with this and that (and getting the restaurant taken off the Taste of Scotland register!) but the really hard part was managing the other staff. One in particular, a waitress, who claimed to be a re-incarnation of Chief Sitting Bull, and who had a tendency to alarm customers by opening the door and loudly inviting the Spirits to enter the restaurant, gave me a lot of trouble because she was extremely fond of pepper and was dedicated to converting all and sundry to her taste. She therefore lavishly peppered everything and I had to watch her like a hawk in order to ensure some customers could get their scones un-peppered!

Nevertheless, I did manage to manage the place “successfully”. I was scheduled to reduce to kitchen assistant when the manageress returned, and actually, even when I was manageress, I was paid a kitchen assistant’s wages. I suppose I accepted the situation as I saw it as experience. Not experience of the career kind but just “an experience” in its own right.

As a matter of interest, my own approach to being asked to work odd hours at the drop of a hat was to do it once and then thereafter to simply refuse. I just said no.

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Dragon I find the underling intent and motive of your threads to be abusive and derogatory, in my subjective, emotional opinion.

And I have the right to refuse to be abused. So you should remove yourself from my presence. I’m tired of being abused by you.

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People demand “flexibility” of their staff always, but ALWAYS, manage to give an apparnetly cast-iron reason for why it is “necessary”. All nonsense. All bad management. All bad prioritising. But, in addition, if you have , say, a doctor’s salary then you might forgive your boss from making certain demands on you whereas on a minimum wage your boss has no right to expect anything other than the minimum work. But even doctors (in the UK at least) are doing their damnedest to reduce emergency calls etc. Of course, as always, it’ll be those at the top who manage to secure themselves better working conditions while those at the bottom continue to have to endure the very conditions which those at the top have escaped.

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I was talking about whether or not rotating/flexible/unpredictable shifts are a form of abuse…but if I don’t go off on this wild tangent with you you’ll accuse me of avoiding serious discussion, so ok.

Pretty much everything that's heavily regulated works this way.  Gas companies (electric companies, and others) aren't allowed to charge whatever they want for their product, so they charge as much as the law allows them to get away with. Heavy regulation plus corporate greed is indistinguishable from a socialist coop, I think, because with enough regulation you force all the corporations to be on the same page.  Which is not to say that I'm in favor of deregulation, I have no idea how that would affect prices, I haven't studied it. 

I'm sure there's some lazy schmucks in there., but sure. Again, they can steal as much from the tax pool as they do because Government regulation of business opens the door for it- the regulations are simply manipulated to their benefit, and against the benefits of their competitors. 
 And I can't say much about the CA welfare system- but just because CA, which has been a liberal state with Democrats making all the major decisions [i]for ever[/i] is paying huge amounts of welfare out, it certainly doesn't follow that big business is to blame for that.  Nobody who works at a Wal-Mart can afford to pay rent in the great liberal state of California- where rent controls are stricter than anywhere save New York City (another place where Wal-Mart employees can't afford to live, because rent prices are sky high).

OK, why are we assuming that people who spent their entire lives in an unskilled labor position like Wal-Mart are definitely not lazy schmucks, but shareholders are universally lazy good for nothings? This is particularly problematic when you consider that Wal-Mart employees get stocks in Wal-Mart.

Provided they spent their entire life working at Wal-Mart, sure. What SHOULD a person who spends their whole life working unskilled labor be able to afford? How do we answer that question?

Can you explain to me where or why a waiter/waitress making less than minimum wage would be paying their entire check in taxes? Are we still talking about California?

Yes. All power structures do that- every law, every board, all of that.  When you create a bureaucracy, you generate two effects: your intended effect (if you are lucky) and an opportunity for the mechanism of the bureaucracy itself to be exploited. 

Because the people who do the work are doing work that doesn't require any skill or training or competence.
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Manageress? Is that actually a thing people say?

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I don’t think that my description of a common practice constitutes a “wild tangent”. I mean more often than not lower level employees are subject to verbal abuse and the threat of losing just enough hours to not make rent.

I know that you know regulations allow for price fixing. My problem is that most of these regulations are lobbied for by the greedy who can stand to lose a few points on the balance sheet so long as it kills the smaller guy, the competition…the people that we need for the market to properly discover prices in a natural way.

What is a “huge amount of welfare”? I don’t know many people on welfare who are rich, or even well off, or comfortable. Most of them are stuck there because the profit from the hard work they do it kept by someone else and in turn they’re forced to look for another way to survive, after working all week. Bush made sure that was the case with his means testing. The fact is that I think a person who does 40 hours of work ought to have a shot at getting enough resources such that with responsible financial planning he can live a life with some dignity and independence. This isn’t how it is for people who work at wal mart, or most other places for that matter. It’s getting worse and worse every year. You can find an honest day’s work anywhere…but finding that honest day’s pay to go along with it is almost impossible for most people.

I also don’t think that in a humane society we should simply accept that those of lower aptitude must suffer. Especially when they’re the ones unloading the trucks and stocking the shelves and mining the coal and what have you.

They’re not able to steal from the tax pool because some big bad government that wants to hurt us is in on it with them. They do it because they pay bribes and contribute enough money to sway elections such that they can lobby and manipulate and chance the outcome of the politics away from something that was supposed to be the will of the people. Most Americans don’t like working at shitty dead end jobs while their bosses get rich off their backs. Most people want it to be different. The reason politicians go against their constituents will is because they have some reason to. In many cases, as we’ve all seen, the benefits of corruption and criminal activity are those reasons.

If the government tells you it’s ok to starve your neighbor, would you do it? That’s an ethical question that I think people need to think about more. Is it the government’s fault when you starve your neighbor because they let you do it?

A guy could work at walmart for 10 years and I could buy all his stock in one day. Saying that they’re paid in stock is kinda like saying, “hey look, we threw the dog our old chicken bones, this is good chicken, we’ve now spoiled that lazy dog with chicken that he didn’t deserve, he’s better appreciate it.”

You work 40 hours at 2 bucks an hour so your check is 80 bucks. New laws make all credit card tips reported, so you can only hide the cash tips. So they add up your tip income, determine that you owe more than 80 bucks in taxes, and when they deduct them from your check, it’s all the money, and then you owe more at the end of the year because your 2 bucks an hour wasn’t enough to cover the taxes on the tips you made. Ask anyone who works in a restaurant. This is common knowledge.

Do you think that it’s ethical for the restaurant owner to form multiple LLCs for the sole purpose of avoiding labor laws and paying people less than minimum wage?

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The problem with why often prices do not immediately drop after deregulation is because regulation is often not a reduction in prices, but a refusal to pay costs. So the costs get shifted to another place, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”
Example: In Canada, they voted to regulate the prices of medicine, they put a limit based on a politicians opinion of what it should cost to make the pills in their various forms. Because the politician has no reason to care what the actual cost of the production of this pills, and a lot of votes telling them to put the cost at cheep, the result is that much of the costs are moved elsewhere. In this case, The USA pays more for our medicine, because Canada refuses to pay it. And the companies, who only act within their selfishness, will sell to Canada, because it makes them a dollar more… So, in this case, chances are, deregulation in Canada of medicine prices would increase the costs for Canada and decrease the costs in the USA… Understandably, they haven’t done it yet.
Second Example: Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, instead of paying costs they collapsed, the infrastructure required to keep up the population had been largely ignored for years because that is not where the politicians inventiveness lay. The costs shot up as all of the repair/creation was forced to actually be done/over come. (I could actually go on with more examples there are a lot throughout history. India is a great positive example.)

Interestingly, that is what wages are, an answer to that question. Money is not an end of itself, it is not wealth, else the government could just print up more money and we would all be wealthy. Wages are the cost for what the employee is worth, based largely on how much money they bring to a company. If the company does not make more for each employee, than they pay out to that employee, they go out of business. To employ as many people as possible, that provide as much skill as possible, the companies well pay the lowest rate they can, while still attracting people to the job and not paying more than the job brings in. Economics has much to say on how to answer that question. :slight_smile:

Less than minimum wage is questionable, but lets go with it. I know, as a very poor (American) person, that most poor people don’t pay taxes, in a permanent way. I get most of what I pay back at the end of the year, usually a lot more. With our progressive tax system the poor pay less of the limited money they have… But, most maths point to April (the 18th last year) as the time when the average person stops paying taxes and starts working for themselves, and that is for federal taxes.

It’s more that the skills/training/competence required is not specialized to a small group of people, ask anyone that eats out, a good server is worth 10-25% of the bill. Lots of people can do the work, so the price to find someone to do the job is low. A great example of this in action is programming. Before Bill Gates, C was the easiest language on the planet to learn and use, the average person could pick it up and learn it. Bill Gates came along and “created” C++ which was just increased enough in difficulty that the wages for the average programmer went up.

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I agree with all of the above. However, the greedy can only manipulate the regulations because the Government has taken it upon itself to regulate such minutia in the first place. Absolutely nothing is beyond the U.S. reach to pass a law about now, and so, absolutely nothing is beyond the control of people with the leverage to get a law passed. This is natural aristocracy in a nutshell, but people get radically wrong impressions when I use that term.

It depends on the State to a degree. If welfare is paying for your food, housing, childcare, and health insurance benefits, the dollar value of all that stuff makes you effectively middle class- not counting whatever your Wal-Mart income adds to that.

The problem is this statement just barely has meaning. I mean, it’s not that I don’t feel where you’re coming from, but Fen Fen was here a bit ago implying it was a crisis that people earning minimum wage can’t all have 2 bedroom apartments. In New York. Now, on the one hand, you’re right- if you are spending 40 hours working, that’s more of your waking life, so you should be able to support yourself because you don’t have time to support yourself some other way. BUT.
How many people are actually in a crisis situation that we’re talking about? So many people earning a non-living wage are being supported by somebody, or have another source of money, or are in an obvious transition period like their first year before/after college.
Who owns this ‘should’? Even if it seems like people spending all their time working ‘should’ be able to support themselves, if they can’t, that translates to an obligation on somebody else’s part, and I can’t see who. I see no reason why an employer is morally obligated to pay a living wage for a stranger’s labor. I see no reason why the State is morally obligated to take up any slack the job market doesn’t cover. It seems like an “It would be nice” case, not a case of moral obligation.
The existence of jobs that clearly aren’t intended to support a financially independent adult plus maybe a kid don’t seem inherently immoral to me, is another way to put it.

First of all, coal miners do pretty well for themselves.  But that aside, I make 9.50 an hour right now, and all my coworkers have nice personal computers and are constantly talking abotu playing the latest video games and eating at the chinese place down the road and so on and so forth. There's obviously things we don't have, but we're a long way from suffering, and we're making the wage of a manual laborer,  or in many cases less. 
  Now, the people here who got themselves a kid, or two, or three, or a drug habit, or some other huge expense in their lives, they are feeling it a little more. But then that's not exactly society doing it to them, either.

My point was that stockholders aren’t all lazy, by showing they included the same group as the people you were defending a paragraph previously.

Why would they determine that? Your federal tax would be zero at that income bracket, and your state would only be taking social security. The only situation I could see where this would happen is if you didn’t pay a student loan for several years and the Gov’t was confiscating your income, or if you owed back taxes from the past when you were earning much more.

No.

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This great story, and the lack of medical research in other parts of the world are why I roll my eyes when people say the USA should have single-payer Gov’t healthcare because ‘other countries do it’. Here’s the pushback though- if the pharm companies weren’t turning a profit selling medicine even at Canada’s super low prices, wouldn’t they just not sell their product there? If I had to guess at an answer to my own question, it’s because all the cost of medicine is in the R&D, and selling a pill (which is cheap to manufacture once you’ve invented the darn thing) at next to nothing is still better than not selling it. Something like that?

That’s my understanding as well, and why I was confused. The U.S. bends over backwards to make sure that anybody even remotely poor doesn’t pay income tax.

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Society ofc… you, me, the president, carrot top… everyone!

Presumably this man’s work is benefiting society in some way… maybe he’s delivering meals… maybe he’s cleaning toilets… maybe he’s walking our dogs… and we want people to do those things!
Since we don’t believe in slavery… we decide to reward the people who do them!

If it is the case that no-one could make a “comfortable” living doing such jobs, then we are clearly not “rewarding” them anything… we’re merely allowing them to survive in exchange for their labor… hmm… not much different than slavery really, since you DO have to pay for the slaves meals and health-care in order to have them actually stay alive and work for you (you ofc don’t give them the good stuff, you buy them the cheap shit)… and they will need a place to sleep (nothing fancy, just a simple room).

I think it very much boils down to the question of “what kind of society would we like to live in?”

Personally I’d like one that’s somewhat fair…

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…doesn’t hurt to ask the Devil to be fair.
… although… :confused:

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Yes, the costs for R&D are what are shifted to the US. Israel is another place that does a lot of medical research.