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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@Trivialis: "Who employers vote for should be left to themselves and not forced upon by other workers."
Huh? I think you got your language confused; employers coercing themselves makes no sense. However, if I as an employee send an email to my boss "suggesting" who he should vote for, my boss would be well within his rights to tell me to quit it or be fired.
Employees can't "fire" their employers. The balance of power is not even.
edited 18th Oct '12 12:39:54 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Fighteer
But the topic isn't about employee vs employer; it's about separation of politics and business. An employee, too, is part of the business and representative of the company. The employee should not threaten the business or its owners by bringing politics into it.
If it is about employee vs employer, there's nothing wrong with even saying bluntly, "If Obama isn't elected then I quit." Because, after all, the employee can simply resign without even making any threats or remarks. It's in the rights of workers to simply quit their jobs.
I'm mostly agreeing with you that business and politics should be kept separate. But I just don't see how there can be a difference between a threat to quit and an indirect coercion in this case either.
edited 18th Oct '12 12:44:56 PM by Trivialis
Yeah, I mean, it would be possible for UNIONS to make political demands against employers, or to imply "If Romney is elected, we're going to have to demand higher rates as cost of living will be higher. Consider that when it comes time to vote" for instance.
But that should be illegal.
It's not wrong to quit if Obama isn't re-elected. It is wrong to use it as a cudgel to get your way. The right to quit doesn't extend that right to using it as a means of getting your way politically. It doesn't work that way.
edited 18th Oct '12 12:44:48 PM by TheyCallMeTomu
Using a Union to fight for your personal rights in politics is trying to keep the politics off the actual shop-floor (until things go south and striking enters the field: but that is withholding your work for rights... not "strike for votes"
).
I don't get the equivalence, particularly when you're in a country which is notoriously bad at standing up for workers' rights. Both employers and employees have rights. Employers, if unchecked, have greater opportunity to abuse those rights in many, many ways.
Hence... all this brouhaha.
Unions don't usually ask employers to vote various ways... and if they start strong-arming their members into voting for various parties/ people, they are in abuse of their powers as a Union and should be just as culpable as an employer who tries to pull that shit. 'Scuse my French.
edited 18th Oct '12 12:59:28 PM by Euodiachloris
But I'm talking about cases where they are strong-arming. There's nothing wrong with going on strikes and mobilizing unions for actual business matters, such as business policies on equal pay and whatnot.
Why wouldn't employees pressuring employers to vote a certain way by saying, "Our future depends on this specific candidate. If this person is not elected then it's bad for the workers, who are contributing to their businesses", count as coercion? When one can connect the dots by going from "bad for the workers" to "they're going to have to quit"?
I mean, substitute workers in that very line with upper-level managers and have the employers say that to employees instead. What's the difference? It's not a direct threat as stated; the employee is the one connecting "bad for business managers" to "they're going to have to lay off people".
edited 18th Oct '12 1:07:08 PM by Trivialis
The difference is, as always, the balance of power. However, you're going to have to find an actual example of such a threat happening for me to take it seriously. Given that a union typically contains a vastly larger number of voters than the management of a company (else they're doing something very wrong in the org chart department), a union trying to influence the votes of its employers would seem to be an exercise in stupidity. It would be far more productive to influence the votes of its members.
"Yeah, boss, it would be a shame if Romney wins this election. We'd just have to all stop working." Right... present a credible example please.
edited 18th Oct '12 1:08:46 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Grizzly: the places you highlighted are actually proving my point. They're making completely spurious claims that are false, and rely on Obama winning to even apply. They are pretty directly saying, in threatening language, that their jobs are on the line, so they better vote the way the employer wants them or else. These guys are good at couching their threats in legally dubious language.
Regarding unions: I tend to think that they are inherently political, given that business regulations and the rights unions fight for need to be governmentally enforced. But by and large, unions only have as much power as the number of people they can get to join, and these days simply don't have as much power as the rich CE Os. In any case, union leaders currently have less of a reputation of bullying its members than employers have of kicking employees around. Still, I've never heard of a union leader sending some CEO or whatever a letter trying to bully people into voting a particular way. They're not usually about voting for presidents, they're about making sure things like worker's compensation, vacation time, and equal pay are enforced. The prosaic, everyday things. Unions simply don't have the power to enforce a threat these days, so they don't go around making them.
Threats are never a good thing, but they're generally made by people who have the power to enact it to begin with, so it's a false equivalency to think that the average employee or union member can and will do the same thing. Any event in which the employee has the upper hand is going to be unusual.
@Fighteer
Like I said before, the power of balance extends greater than that. The employee should have a right to say bluntly, "X is elected or I quit." Or, simply, quit.
But as Tomu said: you're allowed to quit or lay off people as necessary. You're not allowed to use that as a political weapon.
And as many people in this thread said: coercion is more than just direct threats. Trying to get your way by leaving "remarks" that X is bad for Y also counts as coercion.
So, given that, there's no reason why this
is coercion while this
is not.
It's not about examples. You brought up the reasoning and I expect you to stick with it. I'm just asking if it does happen, does it count? You said that mere opinionated statement that possibly gets interpreted as a coercion counts. That's Grizzly's whole point; he's saying it doesn't.
edited 18th Oct '12 1:14:54 PM by Trivialis
It's only coercion if the person doing it has power over the person being coerced. An employee threatening to quit if someone gets elected is not a credible threat, therefore it carries no coercive weight. Even if the person carries it out, he can be replaced. Or just fired on the spot for making the threat.
edited 18th Oct '12 1:15:52 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Tomu: True, but that could indeed be construed as a form of blackmail and people can and have been prosecuted for shenanigans like that.
@Trivialis: If they have credible power over the business then yes. For example, if my company's LAN team were to issue an ultimatum for double pay or they'll set fire to the servers, they would quite properly be arrested and prosecuted for that. And I am, in fact, saying that my example in 33447 is a form of blackmail.
edited 18th Oct '12 1:19:51 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"One employee willingly leaving a job is not that great a threat to the employer. There's a lot of desperate people out there to take that now empty job, and the employee quitting doesn't prevent the employer from collecting his own paycheck. The employer threatening all of the workers with being fired (and quite likely without a reference, or a bad one) is far more a threat because that's a lot of people who are going to be jobless and unable to feed their families and themselves.
Do you see the difference now in what is and is not a credible threat? (Hell, if the employee wants to be taken seriously he better have something damn good on the employer to get him to do what he wants, and we call that blackmail for good reason. But that hardly applies to a simple "I'm going to quit if so and so wins.")
I do see the difference between a credible threat and an expendable one.
However, I do not see the difference between "threaten a resignation" and "merely foreshadow bad news and leave the listeners (employers and the rest of the members) to interpret it for themselves". It's either the employee can outright quit or not coerce at all.
Why are we even talking about employees threatening their employer (other than through organized labor)? That's not even on anyone's radar and is a ludicrous idea besides. Hypotheticals need some basis in reality. You're trying to derail this thread into an argument about the false equivalence of two scenarios, one of which is absurd.
edited 18th Oct '12 1:24:52 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Again, whether or not it happens is not the point here, because I'm still finding your reasoning inconsistent.
- "Vote for X or I fire you." Yes.
- "If X isn't elected, business owners may be in a tough shape." Still yes.
- "Vote for X or I quit." Yes.
- "If X isn't elected, business employees may be in a tough shape". No?
Why? Why are 3 and 4 different when 1 and 2 are not? It's either both yes or both no. Even if it's a "false equivalence" it would still be both no.
edited 18th Oct '12 1:27:40 PM by Trivialis

All of this coercion and posting lists just seems eerily like the communists to me.