> The attorneys also argue that NLRB proceedings deny the company a trial by a jury and violate its due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
Is it really the case that NRLB rulings are not appealable to an article 3 court? If that’s so, the due process claim seems pretty reasonable —- why should an agency be able to just declare you in violation of the law without giving you a right to defend yourself at trial?
Edit: it seems that as you’d expect, NLRB decisions are appealable to a circuit appeals court like federal district rulings are, making this claim seem pretty weak. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/decide-cases
Well we could just change the law to make the CEO's and the board liable both financially and criminally for labor law violations. Like, CEO is convicted of violating labor laws, gets 32 months on prison and banned from serving as an officer of a corporation for 10 years. These guys are so used to never facing personal consequences they don't know a good situation from a bad one.
Corporations are just piles of contracts signed by people. Stripping due process rights from corporations is equivalent to stripping those rights from the people who signed those contracts.
The owners of the corporation are materially damaged when the corporation gets sued or fined. That happens because that pile of contracts is essentially the steward of their money. However, the corporation itself doesn't take actions. It's just a pile of contracts. Managers take actions.
I do agree that corporate managers have a weird form of liability shield for their bad actions, though. However, if you dig into why this happens, it's often because of things like plausible deniability and diffusion of responsibility, which you don't need a corporation to create (see the way the mob operates).
unfortunately, what these corpos have learned that the best way to avoid and minimize consequences is to ensure a long and drawn out process they can manipulate with lobbiests and sheer outlasting private interests.
No they are not, and no it is not. A corporation is a government granted liability shield intended to foster certain public policy goals. A bunch of people cooperating without adopting the liability shield of a corporation/LLC is eminently possible. It's likely that the massive scaling we've seen would be untenable if the cooperating individuals could be held responsible for the efforts of the group, but that we're suffering a lack of corporate responsibility indicates that wouldn't necessary be a bad thing and thus it's disingenuous to just equate the two.
If corporations continue taking rights away from citizens and giving them no way to solve grievances. Then I hope corporations are ready for an all out riot and physical fight against their assets and owners.
If it comes to armed conflict among the general population those fiat dollars vanish, past contracts are void.
I think you grossly overestimate the number of people who actually value the existence of Bezos and Musk types. Most among the right and left voters see them as lazy non-contributors, propped up by political corruption.
The right feels serving a king under a different name is wrong. The left finds it anti-scientific and conservative to preserve the rich given their wealth is heavily influenced by conservative politics. It’s a good thing for elites the right leaning voters are easily manipulated, since “both sides” voters polled actually want the same thing; the rich minority to be gutted and their power handed over to local communities.
This is what worries me. Once you can create your own army that doesn't sleep and doesn't question what you ask it to do. The ruling class will have no problem killing people in mass because who will stop them. In theory they wouldn't have to kill a lot of people to convince the majority of the population that its not worth fighting them. We're getting close to where we won't be able to turn back.
I have been working for over 30 years, never once have I considered the NLRB being for me the normal worker.... never once have I ever wanted to be part of a union, and never once have I ever seen personally unions provide any benefit to workers. I have worked in and around unionized manufacturing plants my entire life, including many times during the formation of a union. In all most all cases the workers lives, pay, and conditions were WORSE post union than before...
Considering how many business owners I know who complain about the amount of benefits they need to give/pay to their union workers, I can only assume they are gaining something.
Deadweight losses exist, and it is also possible for things that the union demands of the employer to cost the employer more than they provide in benefits to the worker.
Corporations are treated like people because they're made up of and owned by people. You don't lose your right not to be subject to arbitrary fines just because you incorporated. And a lot of corporations are owned by millions of different individuals, so instead of having millions of people take the government to court, it's easier to have the corporation's officers do it on their behalf. That's all "corporations are people" really is.
> You don't lose your right not to be subject to arbitrary fines just because you incorporated.
One: NLRB rulings are "arbitrary" only if you somehow believe that a regulatory body, whose rulings can be appealed to an Article III court for redress, are intrinsically "arbitrary". Which is a quiet little hide-the-ball attempt at rhetoric.
Two: your fictive person provides the real people who've bought into it limited liability, which actual humans cannot avail themselves of. This is a superpower of your fictive person exists at the literal beneficience of the society that granted its charter; its bad behavior should be more readily addressed than the due process afforded to actual humans.
> NLRB rulings are "arbitrary" only if you somehow believe that a regulatory body, whose rulings can be appealed to an Article III court for redress, are intrinsically "arbitrary". Which is a quiet little hide-the-ball attempt at rhetoric.
They're arbitrary not because of the ruling (although putting judicial functions in the executive is scarcely better than putting legislative functions there), they're arbitrary because the rule you're being fined for violating was created by the administrative agency fining you rather than Congress.
> your fictive person provides the real people who've bought into it limited liability, which actual humans cannot avail themselves of.
It's typically the actual humans who avail themselves of it. Limited liability means that if you own shares of Exxon (or the S&P 500, which has contained shares of Exxon) and then they get sued and go bankrupt, the plaintiffs don't get to take your house. It's about protecting the investors (commonly ordinary human individuals) rather than the corporation which can still be sued into bankruptcy.
It's also not obvious what one has to do with the other. So you can't sue the corporation for more than what it has, why does that mean you should be able to take their stuff under rules never passed by elected legislators?
> They're arbitrary not because of the ruling (although putting judicial functions in the executive is scarcely better than putting legislative functions there), they're arbitrary because the rule you're being fined for violating was created by the administrative agency fining you rather than Congress.
Rule-making cannot be devolved at the legislature's discretion?
So the legislature can't write a law that says "within bounds X, org Y has the power to manage the rules around thing Z"?
(It would work in the UK, where these powers are most often delegated to the executive via Henry VIII clauses, so this is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).
This is basically the question at issue. Administrative agencies have been acting as though they can for a while now but there isn't really anything in the constitution that says that they can, and some pretty good logic for why they shouldn't. What's the point of electing legislators and setting up balance of powers if you're just going to put the lawmaking authority in the executive?
Suppose during a lame duck session that the government passed a law delegating rulemaking authority to the Senate, so they could pass new laws without them being voted on by the House or signed by the President, right before the House and Presidency switched parties. Does it make sense for that to be allowed? If not, how is it different when it's the executive the authority is being delegated to, which isn't a part of the legislature at all?
First item on the incoming legislature's agenda would be to knock that on the head and to walk back any harm that was done.
In theory the electorate should also punish a stunt like that, but you know what modern elections are like.
Where I am, it's simple: Parliament (the legislature) is sovereign, and everyone else's power flows from theirs. That puts a hell of a lot power in Parliament's hands (eg general elections were suspended between 1935 and 1945). This is a blessing (agility) and a curse (more vulnerable to bad actors). You've got some laws that are harder to change than others, which puts some brakes on bad actors.
> First item on the incoming legislature's agenda would be to knock that on the head and to walk back any harm that was done.
They can't. They control the House, not the Senate, and they'd need both in order to change it back. Or, under the new rule, at least the Senate by itself, which is the part they haven't got.
> This is a blessing (agility) and a curse (more vulnerable to bad actors).
Agility in central government is overrated. If it does nothing you can still take a crack at the problem at the state level or in the private sector, whereas if it does something bad, you're screwed.
> they're arbitrary because the rule you're being fined for violating was created by the administrative agency fining you rather than Congress.
This is a weird argument that seems to be being put about recently and it's one of the weirdest legal arguments I've ever seen. Of course rulemaking can be delegated. The rules and rulemaking body remains under oversight, the rules can be overridden by the elected body, etc.
Just a totally strange argument; delegation of authority by elected bodies to specialist subgroups is basically how government works without having 100,000 elected positions, and if your proposed solution is 'okay let's have 100,000 elected positions' you get the local government situation in which people run unopposed because nobody really gives a damn and the local coroner is the town drunk - or people just vote straight ticket.
Just weird. Seems more about destroying the system - which isn't perfect, but works - than about actually solving a problem.
> delegation of authority by elected bodies to specialist subgroups is basically how government works without having 100,000 elected positions
The way you do it is that the specialist subgroup proposes legislation and then the generalist legislature votes on it. And maybe they defer to their proposals 95% of the time, but it means that the unelected specialists can't push through a controversial change without having it approved by the elected legislators.
> And maybe they defer to their proposals 95% of the time
Have you looked at Congress lately? It would be more like less than 1% of the time. The rest of the time there will be some group that blocks action to try to get concessions on some unrelated issue of theirs.
They don't need this for that, they already do it with whatever is on the agenda and then get their concessions. Do tell if you know of a way to get them to stop, but just adding another bill to the roster doesn't seem likely to change it one way or the other.
Can people have limited liability like a certain forms of incorporation? Corporations are not just collections of people but they also enjoy certain privileges as well as having some obligations.
This isn't true. We already have a legal structure for a bunch of people working together, that's called a general partnership.
Corporations are shielded from the vast majority of criminal penalties and essentially make truly punitive damages non-existent. This is something no person has - I can't discharge fines in bankruptcy and I can't decide that the only punishment I'll ever have are fines.
I think a lot of people understand the legal justification, but the question is whether it's right. Blackstone and other legal ancient history is hardly relevant though, since modern corporations bear little resemblance to companies of the past.
The original purpose of the constitution was to protect the interests of the people from the tyranny of the government.
And, of course, there's no reason people can't band together and pursue their interests as a group.
Well, corporations are composed of people. So far, so good.
However, publicly traded corporations are specifically designed to allow only a profit motive to be shared by the group. By design, shareholders do not have other shared interests and anyway the board and executives have a legal duty to the financial interests of the shareholders, not other shared interests. The people working at the company below the executives are constrained by them, of course.
So a corporation specifically does not share the general interests of the individuals of which it is composed, except where it comes to money (also, that interest in money tends to be in the short term).
To the extent we treat corporations as people with the protections of the constitution, the constitution now works for the (short term) financial interests of corporations.
Not the original purpose. And probably not a very good idea for society at large.
(However, with the money spigot wide open, it's very unlikely to change.)
It seems like the problem here isn't corporate personhood, it's widely-held conglomerates whose owners are too diluted to express any coherent preferences outside of a desire to make more money.
What you want is for smaller companies to make up a larger proportion of the economy.
No, the problem is that corporate persons, having an intent which is specific, limited and legally divorced from the intent of its shareholders should not be able to inherit the individual rights of its shareholders, especially since it enjoys privileges individuals do not.
In fact, even in US law, corporations do not have all of the rights human persons have. They specially have the right to free speech as it pertains to political finance.
Corporations in the US still don't have the right to vote, they do not have general freedom of speech, specifically they have much weaker protections against compelled speech than people, they do not have fifth amendment protection against self incrimination, they do not have rights under the comity clause, they do not have freedom of religion, etc...
Indeed, in no country in the world do corporations have the rights of their shareholders or individual rights in general, not even in the US. In the US, corporations only have very specific rights, and judicial fiat determines which ones it has and which ones it doesn't based purely on political expediency (and indeed the courts flip and flop on which rights they do have as the political reality changes).
> should not be able to inherit the individual rights of its shareholders
Why not? It seems like you should be making the argument the other way. Why is a company's owner exercising their freedom of religion through a corporation any different than their exercising it through a church building or an unincorporated gathering of people?
What's really going on here is that the government is violating these rights when it's politically expedient, using corporate personhood as a fig leaf to excuse their violations.
Notice that if you try and come up with arguments to excuse this, they'll tend to be something like "because it's a business" rather than "because it's a corporation" even though that would imply it should also apply to a sole proprietorship or general partnership where there is still a business but no limited liability. There is no apparent reason why having limited liability in particular should require the waiver of unrelated rights.
The issue with corporations is the corporate veil. The corporate veil separates the rights and responsibilities of the corporation from the rights and responsibilities of the owner.
If the owner tries to use a corporation in such a way that it is merely an extension of their own person, the corporation is then subject to losing the corporate veil.
So why then, if the rights and responsibilities of the corporation are legally distinct, and the law enforces a separation of intent and personalities, should the right of the individual get through to the corporation?
The answer is that it shouldn't. The entire point of the corporation is that the rights and responsibilities of the corporation are not the rights and responsibilities of their owners. There is no reason why any right at all of the owner should percolate to the corporation.
Sole proprietorships, partnerships, and general associations do not have this separation. The rights and responsibilities are the same. So of course the rights of the owners should be available to their entity.
There is nothing arbitrary here. It's perfectly sensible, it's how every other country in the world does it, and it's how it was intended in the US as well. On the contrary, the idea that there is no such separation for some rights but there is for others is bizarre.
> So why then, if the rights and responsibilities of the corporation are legally distinct, and the law enforces a separation of intent and personalities, should the right of the individual get through to the corporation?
Because the two things have separate purposes.
In one case the corporation will commonly have multiple owners or have employees other than the owner(s), and then an owner isn't fully in control of all of the corporation's actions and so shouldn't have personal responsibility for everything it does.
In the other case the corporation wants to do something, which may not be the will of all of its owners and employees, but is the will of some of its owners or employees, who each individually have the right to it, so why shouldn't the corporation?
> Sole proprietorships, partnerships, and general associations do not have this separation. The rights and responsibilities are the same. So of course the rights of the owners should be available to their entity.
So if a landlord who doesn't bother to incorporate because the building is their only asset of consequence, or temporarily transfers the building to a natural person in the event of a problematic tenant, then as a result they should be able to challenge landlord-tenant laws on the basis of freedom of religion or freedom of association? It seems like this is just an excuse and the reason you might want these laws has nothing to do with whether the business has incorporated or not.
> What you want is for smaller companies to make up a larger proportion of the economy.
Well… we could upend the foundations of capitalism to make it more likely corporations would be responsible for the well-being of society and therefore make it OK to grant them personhood.
Or we could simply not grant these things (that aren’t people) personhood.
I think it’s pretty obvious which one makes more sense.
Also, think carefully. The problem isn’t that the ownership of widely-held conglomerates is too diluted. It is that *by design* the only shared interest of the owners is the profitability of the company. This isn’t some unfortunate, unforeseen happenstance. It’s on purpose and enforced by law.
Our corporate system is designed for and the efficient allocation of capital, not the creation of good citizenal entities. Let’s recognize what it is and act accordingly.
Legal personhood is not at issue here. The question is whether legal persons are entitled to all individual rights. This isn't true anywhere, not even the US, except in a very limited fashion that is politically useful.
Does this mean that we the People of the USA cannot overcome lobbying of the Corporate world, and no longer make changes to our Constitution to allow such regulation of business?
Just think about it from an energy use standpoint. The average citizen has very little energy they dedicate to community and social system support. This includes education, voting, lobbying etc…
This is a basic requirement for an electorate to self govern, everyone has to give input and that input should align with their well considered interests. The amount of work that takes is relatively immense for the amount of impact that people feel they have as a result.
On the other hand you have in effect every for profit entity putting as much possible energy into rent seek and increase margins for the majority owners by offloading any possible externalities of inequitable ownership or resource hoarding.
Corporate lobbies have perfectly captured the political process to the extent that nobody even questions it anymore. Including legislators.
Unfortunately its hard enough that almost half of the nation doesn’t do it for even the biggest election and only a minority of voters actually vote in local elections
You don't need to change the constitution, all you'd have to do is pass the rules you want through Congress instead of having them created by an unelected administrative agency.
If Roe was an actual law, it wouldn't have been overturned. The current Supreme Court is simply remedying years of lazy legislating from executive agencies and the bench, instead of making laws the way we're supposed to. Everyone should support this.
Where is this state where you have the right to self defense? From what I can gather, the police can generally execute and otherwise harm commonfolk with impunity nation wide. Some states let you buy more equipment to go out in a blaze of glory with, but that's a pretty poor consolation prize.
Has this happened with the converse as well? Police assault a residence, resident defends themselves, police escalate and "win", and the police are charged and convicted of second degree murder? A right to self defense implies that both outcomes should happen.
Do these verdicts also happen for the least sympathetic cases, like an actual criminal defending themselves against an unknowable no-knock "warrant" ? Because if you're the basic upstanding sympathetic right-looking type, it's actually most places you will not be charged for defending yourself in your home against non-police.
And has this all happened regularly enough to form a predictable pattern such that the police have actually curtailed such attacks? Affecting repeated interactions such that one doesn't need to continually dwell on the basic dynamic is the hallmark of an intact right.
Because I haven't heard of any states that are shining examples of police accountability, especially states that people tend to market as promoting the right to self defense. But I'd love to be wrong!
Try killing a cop who is threatening you at a traffic stop, and see how that works out for you.
You'll quickly discover that your state also has some hard limits on that right, they are just drawn at different points than the states that you mistakenly think don't have a right to 'self-defense'. You can defend yourself anywhere, you just can't always kill people in 'self-defense' when you have other options available to you.
(Related question: Does your state have a right to body autonomy, or is it in blatant violation of the fourth amendment?)
That's not really a good framing. If we allow that the police have a legitimate function to exercise justifiable violence on behalf of the state, then the right to self defense must obviously be limited against duly authorized and duly noticed state violence. And unfortunately in your example "threatening" isn't really litigable, making the details collapse into just a duly-authorized traffic stop.
There's probably an argument to be made from a natural rights framing that the right to self defense is still applicable to unjustifiable but duly authorized state violence, like say the war on drug users. Though I don't know how this could be applied practically. Perhaps limiting the number of cops that can carry out any arrest, such that there's an actual balance of power?
Cops do have authority to use violence, but they must not have a monopoly. If a cop encroaches on another person in an unjustified manner, they should face exactly the same consequences, up to and including death.
I've certainly said nothing supporting police having a monopoly on violence in general. However, it seems unavoidable that cops have a temporary situation-scoped monopoly on violence while carrying out duly authorized functions. What other possible alternative is there that wouldn't also lead to every traffic stop being a shoot out?
That sounds like a euphemism for the persecution of basic medical care based on backwards religious superstition that anything growing where a baby would is assumed to be a human baby. IMO the Democratic Party has totally screwed up with this extremist "pro choice" framing, when the reality is mainly one of non-viable fetuses and only one medically-prudent choice.
> IMO the Democratic Party has totally screwed up with this extremist "pro choice" framing
100% correct.
> backwards religious superstition that anything growing where a baby would is assumed to be a human baby
This is absolute bullshit. I'm an Orthodox Christian, extremely conservative, particularly on abortion, and a priest's wife I know had an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy, because it was non-viable and would have killed her. It's simply a matter of believing that the unborn are human and then acting rationally based on this belief. I wish more people could get this—rather reasonable—viewpoint through their thick skulls.
If this is the basis, why are the laws aimed at criminalizing abortion essentially blanket bans with narrow exceptions rather than based around medical judgement that's equitable between both parties? For example Texas's only viability test is the presence of a periodic electric signal, rather than any consideration of whether the fetus even has the right number of chromosomes.
Additionally, even a fetus that seemingly will be eventually viable isn't actually viable for the first few months. From a libertarian perspective, while arguments exist that the mother has consented to this responsibility for some cases, in other cases she has not (eg rape).
(Also FWIW your example of an ectopic pregnancy example doesn't actually meet the criteria of "growing where a baby would")
> why are the laws aimed at criminalizing abortion essentially blanket bans with narrow exceptions rather than based around medical judgement that's equitable between both parties
Because then would-be abortants would simply find a doctor who would sign the correct paperwork. Duh.
> whether the fetus even has the right number of chromosomes.
So you support eugenics?
> From a libertarian perspective, while arguments exist that the mother has consented to this responsibility for some cases, in other cases she has not (eg rape).
Abortion, if the fetus is human, violates the non-aggression principle. From a humanist perspective, it wasn't the kid's fault.
> Because then would-be abortants would simply find a doctor who would sign the correct paperwork
That hypothetical doctor would be breaking the law by falsifying paperwork, and could be prosecuted for that. It seems you're arguing that it's necessary for the law to overbearingly criminalize related just behavior (and in this case medically prudent behavior), because of the possibility that law breaking could be fraudulently hidden. I don't buy that sort of argument.
> So you support eugenics?
Do you have a larger point here, or is equating the acknowledgement of chromosomal abnormalities that are ultimately incompatible with life as "eugenics" just meant to be a rhetorical cheap shot?
> Abortion, if the fetus is human, violates the non-aggression principle
By the usual framing of the non-aggression principle, I don't see how. Would you say a landlord evicting a tenant violates the non-aggression principle?
Can I move over to your state, and just take a blood transfusion, or an organ from you? I will die without a kidney, and surely you can spare one... My body autonomy is more important than yours, after all, I should be able to make such an imposition on you. My life for a minor inconvenience for you.
I'm asking you to apply to the born the same rights you are willing to apply to a zygote (be it viable or unviable, differentiated or undifferentiated). I need a kidney. You have two. I should be able to violate your body autonomy to protect mine.
If a zygote can make this imposition on a woman, why should you have any right to refuse me on this?
This is a bad-faith argument. Say someone superglues an infant to you in public. Do you have the right to stab the infant? There's a proper equivalent.
The student debt case: perfectly clear law passed by Congress and overturned by SCOTUS in very tenuous grounds with a plaintiff that never even had proper standing.
There is a law. It authorized the education dept to “waive or modify” loan provisions. But somehow the court ruled that that means only minor changes are permitted. Obviously this isn’t what Congress intended - waiving entire provisions could of course result in major changes.
The entire “major questions” doctrine is a farce. It’s not in a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s an invention of the court.
And again: the case never should have been heard. The litigant had no standing.
The motivation here is SCOTUS striking down a policy they don’t like.
Conservatives don't really like the federal Department of Education, but there is no question that Congress passed a law creating it. Why do you think they would strike down this but not that?
> There is a law. It authorized the education dept to “waive or modify” loan provisions. But somehow the court ruled that that means only minor changes are permitted. Obviously this isn’t what Congress intended - waiving entire provisions could of course result in major changes.
Under that reading they could waive the entire law and forgive everybody's loans, making any other provisions moot. If that's what Congress wanted then why would they pass a law allowing them to "waive or modify" loan provisions, implying that they contemplated the continued existence of loans, rather than just passing a loan forgiveness bill to begin with?
> The entire “major questions” doctrine is a farce. It’s not in a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s an invention of the court.
The Court interprets the law. The "major questions" doctrine announces how they intend to interpret the laws Congress passes. It was already a thing when the bill in question was passed. Congress therefore knew that if they intended the law to grant the power to do something like that, they would have to spell it out explicitly, and then they didn't, implying that wasn't what they intended.
Also, just think about it. If that bill had the words "including the power to forgive all student loans" appended to the bottom, do you think it would have passed? If not, it's because those words would have changed the expected consequence of the law, right?
That's absolute nonsense. Biden abused a law that did not say what he said it said. If you can't get Congress to pass a law, you don't get to do the thing.
At the risk of a cliché, Biden's student debt forgiveness strategy was dangerous to democracy.
Sorry but this is just plain wrong. Congress authorized the secretary of education to waive or modify any loan provision.
If you are concerned about the rule of law you should be upset that the Supreme Court even heard a case so obviously lacking standing. Nobody was harmed by this policy so conservative groups had to invent a fictional harm just to get the case heard.
Partisan politics, mostly. It was a Biden campaign promise.
The party allegedly harmed, MOHELA, didn’t think they were harmed and didn’t want to participate in the case. The court let the state of Missouri stand in for them even though it’s even harder to see how they have standing.
You tell me: who is harmed by students owing less is student loans?
Whoever didn't get the money they were lent and never repaid (presumably taxpayers), and anyone holding or contracting in US dollars since forgiving the loans is equivalent to printing the money and causes inflation.
> If Roe was an actual law, it wouldn't have been overturned.
Nonsense and worse words. They aren't originalists, they don't care about the executive/legislative distinction. It's embarrassing farce to pretend that there is constitutional principle behind achieving their desired political goals. Roe would've been gutted were it law and the general incoherence of Alito and Thomas would have led the way.
Have you actually read Roe itself? It struggles to find any real basis for what it was doing in the constitution and the same logic should have rendered unconstitutional e.g. the Controlled Substances Act as well as any equivalent law at the state level, because the government is interfering with what people put into their own bodies in private. People liked it because they liked the outcome, not because it was ever coherent.
The real problem is that a lot of people want there to be a right to abortion in the constitution but they don't have enough votes to actually put it there, and they also don't want to read the constitution's general constraints on government power to be restrictive enough to limit this using coherent logic because that would also limit the government from doing many other things they want it to do.
Roe is simply a bad court decision. Congress has the right to codify Roe into law. The Supreme Court does not have the power to create law out of whole cloth. Overturning Roe was the Supreme Court taking presumptive power away from itself.
Also, the current court absolutely has an originalist majority, even if you happen to disagree with the originals. The Constitution is a very restrictive document for the Federal Government.
If it were congress's job to pass these rules and regulations instead of pawning off their authority to someone else, I would assume that congresspeople would have to generally take the job a lot more seriously.
That’s an interesting perspective. What’s problematic is the level of corporate lobbying which can interfere with peoples’ (not shareholders, but those who work there) interest. They cannot afford lobbyists. Not without a union.
> They cannot afford lobbyists. Not without a union.
All of the union's money comes from the workers. If they wanted to they could form a PAC regardless of whether they form a union. Which might even do them more good because then the PAC would be directly representing the workers instead of having an indirect layer of union leadership with potentially different incentives.
How do they communicate to form a PAC? Would a less educated blue collar worker ever fund a PAC? How do you convince them it’s for their own benefit? Will you do it again for a different agenda? There may be some merit in exploring a new approach that uses modern technology to organize workers.
Until we figure something out, the current structure is better than zero protections for workers.
I don't quite understand Amazon's argument, isn't the NLRB operating on the delegated authority of Congress? Congress has the ability to create bodies to regulate things and basically delegate its lawmaking power to them. It seems Amazon is arguing that Congress doesn't actually have that authority?
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
By vesting Congress with [a]ll legislative Powers, the Supreme Court has viewed the Legislative Vesting Clause as limiting the authority Congress can delegate to other branches of government or private entities. In general, the Court has held that the legislative power of Congress cannot be delegated.1 In 1935, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, on behalf of the Court, declared that Congress is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested.2 This principle is the basis of the nondelegation doctrine that serves as an important, though seldom used, limit on who may exercise legislative power and the extent to which legislative power may be delegated. In its 2022 decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court provided further clarity on the nondelegation doctrine, emphasizing that a decision of magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.3
There are powers that Congress does not have the power to designate.
For example, Congress cannot create a branch of government that can simply declare people to be guilty of crimes at-will without a fair trial.
But if corporations are people… and a fine isn’t that distinguishable from a crime…
(Edit: For the down voters, I don’t get it. This is an actual legal case and argument the SCOTUS is hearing, right now, called Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy. This doesn’t mean I agree with it.)
So can government create a branch that decides it can exempt people from liability? Isn't incorporation also regulated by a branch of the government. And I would argue bestowing limited liability on corporations is taking away a right from others (to recover damages). Is the consequence of this argument not that we need to go back to that Congress needs to decide on every incorporation and put it into law?
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know - however, most commentators do agree that Congress would likely be forced to do a lot of boring work soon.
Also see Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America, Limited, another case with potential to massively injure administrative offices by possibly overturning the Chevron decision. It also, well, threatens the CFPB’s existence.
This would imply that congress has unlimited authorirty to regulate anything it chooses, that would be a complete inversion of constitutional purposes which is to limit the power of congress to just a few things.
now over the centuries bad judges making terrible rulings (see Wickard) , and a few poor amendments (17th being one of them) have allowed the federal government to expand well beyond its original limited powers.
Thankfully and mercifully the current Supreme Court seems very willing to put the federal government back into its proper constitutional box... Amazon I am sure is looking to leverage that... As outside the terrible expansion of the Commerce Clause in Wickard does the federal government have any authority to regulate employment in any state... No where other than a massive liberal reading of the commerce clause is that power found in Article 1 Section 8 from which all congressional and federal authority is derived.
The Wickard ruling is by far one of the most far reaching bad decisions ever made. The mental gymnastics required to justify it are inexcusable, as it boldly spits in the face of the 10th Amendment.
I think it's horribly bad application of law but a good ruling in practice. The federal government is the last desk in situations where coordinated action between or restrictions on states is needed to avoid bad outcomes and prisoner's dilemmas for everyone. If the federal government had only one power I think it should be that.
I wish they would apply it to ban the sweetheart deals states give companies so that we can end the race to the bottom where states have to suck ceos off to get them to set up shop.
> The federal government is the last desk in situations where coordinated action between or restrictions on states is needed to avoid bad outcomes and prisoner's dilemmas for everyone.
That kind of regulation is the core of the central planning fallacy. If people know how much demand for wheat there would be next year or what crop yields would be then farmers would know how much to plant before it would become unprofitable and you wouldn't need anyone to order them to. If that information isn't available then it isn't available to the government either and they're not going to make any better a decision, and in most cases it will be worse because they'll have less information than the people actually doing it or less reason not to be careless or hidebound because it's not their livelihood on the line.
The purpose of the interstate commerce clause is that sometimes the victims of a misdeed are in a different state than the perpetrators and then the victims have to be able to go somewhere for redress that has jurisdiction over the perpetrators. But that only applies when the commerce is actually inter-state.
> I wish they would apply it to ban the sweetheart deals states give companies so that we can end the race to the bottom where states have to suck ceos off to get them to set up shop.
The sweetheart deals aren't a race to the bottom, they're corruption. If the state wanted to attract business generally then it would create a generally favorable environment with low administrative overhead or quality infrastructure etc., not create weird exceptions for one specific corporation. Those one-company deals never actually work out because their true purpose is to steal from the taxpayer.
Look, in this particular instance you might be right but the idea is more general. The FCC is a good example of coordination that benefits everyone but isn't really interstate commerce in rules-as-written.
> The sweetheart deals aren't a race to the bottom, they're corruption.
Call it what you want but large businesses planning to do large buildouts collect bids from states for favorable tax breaks and other incentives. In my state there are two
whole departments at the statehouse dedicated to just this. Having the federal government step in and tell every state all at once that the practice is now outlawed eliminates this source of legal corruption and levels the playing field so states that want to attract business must do exactly what you lay out.
> Look, in this particular instance you might be right but the idea is more general.
The problem is more general too.
> The FCC is a good example of coordination that benefits everyone but isn't really interstate commerce in rules-as-written.
Most of what the FCC does actually is inter-state commerce. They're regulating communications networks that cross state lines and radio products that are sold not just inter-state but internationally.
In principle they shouldn't be able to stop you from building a radio within your own state and then using it there at power levels that don't cross state lines, but why would they need to? Your state could do that if they wanted to.
> Call it what you want but large businesses planning to do large buildouts collect bids from states for favorable tax breaks and other incentives.
The bids are a competition between corrupt government officials in different states to see who is willing to offer the most taxpayer money in exchange for having their pockets lined. The problem here is that taxpayers fail to vote out anyone who does this.
> Having the federal government step in and tell every state all at once that the practice is now outlawed eliminates this source of legal corruption and levels the playing field so states that want to attract business must do exactly what you lay out.
The fact that they haven't done this rather illustrates the point. If the population doesn't want it then they'll vote for politicians who don't do it at the state level. If they don't care enough to, as seems to be the case at present, then no federal rules exist either.
Even putting aside Wickard where the Supreme Court dubiously decided that a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own personal use was "interstate commerce", I'd say that companies that sell products outside of their home state or hire employees or contractors across state lines would be considered "interstate commerce" by any reasonable definition.
If a business only sells products within Pennsylvania and only hires residents of Pennsylvania then I'd say that they're not engaged in interstate commerce. That also means no mailing or shipping orders to customers outside of Pennsylvania. In such cases, I'd say that only Pennsylvania labor law should apply to the company not federal labor law. For approximately 99.9% of companies, this would make no difference whatsoever as businesses in a modern economy are virtually always engaged in interstate commerce. It also wouldn't matter that much because most states have state labor laws that are at least as worker friendly as federal law.
So, I'd agree that Wickard is too broad and should be overturned but I don't see any reason to overturn federal labor law. I think the Roberts Court will likely take a similar position if it ever takes up such cases. Chief Justice Roberts tends to be against extremely disruptive rulings and can usually persuade one of the other conservatives.
Also, getting rid of federal labor law would probably make the "union problem" worse not better for corporations. Many of the more radical union actions that were common in the early 20th century such as wildcat strikes and general strikes were outlawed by the Wagner Act. The labor movement is currently the most popular it has been in decades and a radically anti-union Supreme Court ruling would likely lead to a massive backlash.
there problem here is that the intent from an originalist standpoint of the commerce clause was to prevent New York from regulated commerce coming from Delaware, or vice versa.
Was to regulate, as in to make regular...
It was not to expand to allow regulations to apply to any commerce that happened to cross state lines... like your example of shipping a package.
The movement of the package may then trigger federal regulations but those regulations should not move up stream to the Person that packed the box, as that activity was wholly intrastate. The employer and the employee was both in the same state, and the transaction for the labor was enclosed into a single state.
The transaction from the consumer to the company may be interstate and that may be regulated by the Commerce clause.
Whether or not that have a legitimate case here, one has to question the wisdom of waging total war on workers. The balance of power between capital and labor in this country is already skewed massively against workers by comparable international standards. Do they really think tearing down the current pro-employer status quo will result in a new world where their power is even more unchecked? If so, I suggest they focus group some millennials.
"Amazon describes itself as a company that "strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company, Earth's best employer and Earth's safest place to work." This doc makes it clear that their efforts are clearly not working. Do you think Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will come after this doc or have anything to say about it?
Story: I don't know if he will ever find out [about it]. There will probably be a strategic response that [Amazon] will give if they do acknowledge the film."
Amazon "acknowledged" it by using it as evidence against the union organisers. :)
As a meta comment, I was really surprised by the rapidity at which this story is falling off the front page. Yesterday there were three different submissions about this which reached the front page only to speedily fall beyond the third page.
I'd have thought that this would appeal to a large section of the HN crowd!
It’s also ripe for “flame wars”. Not that this is that. More that HN’s algorithm lowers stories where there’s nearly as many comments as there are points to avoid flame wars, or so I’ve read. Make sense.
He'll be paying $1.7B on the sale in taxes federally. It looks like by moving from Washington State he's not paying those $0.6B to the state, though. If I'm understanding that article correctly.
As long as equity returns are higher than interest rates buy borrow die is effective. When youre a billionaire its not an effective way to not pay taxes ever, but its still extremely effective for delaying them. You get $26 million stepped up on death completely untaxed so buy borrow dying that much always makes sense.
Next someone is going to read the 9A & 10A and conclude that most of the federal government is scope creep.
While true, that doesn't afford much guidance for what to do regarding the last century+ of Leviathan's growth.
We (and I mean literally the HN readership) need to show how we can preserve the ideals informing the U.S. Constitution (as amended) while de-centralizing and offloading the cruft that has let DC run amok these decades.
> The attorneys also argue that NLRB proceedings deny the company a trial by a jury and violate its due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
Corporations aren’t people. Amazon, which has trampled competition, trying to launch an “equal rights” campaign (my personal take) is disgusting when actual individual citizens are suffering from anti-LGBTQ laws, etc.
Last time I checked, we got here from colonial oppression and anarchy.
Here’s the reality: this isn’t about corporations. It’s about the people that work there and protecting their rights.
The small person vs. a trillion dollar corporation. How do you even begin to tip the balance right?
What is keeping the workers from being oppressed by the desires of those running the corporation? (aka executives earning fat paycheques and the shareholders)
The blue collar/working class suffers from a double whammy - lack of education and resources (time/money). The ability to collectively bargain/negotiate with the corporations is a very small way towards that.
I think it’s fair. Especially when you consider the execs have access to $2000/hr lawyers on company retainer and any other resource they need for negotiations.
If unfettered free markets and a society unburdened by the constraints of government oversight are what you crave why not book a one way ticket to Somalia...
Surely you're creative enough to imagine a system of government less imposing than an unaccountable executive bureaucracy but more functional than gangs of warlords.
Well, those warlords are getting paid by someone, and its not profitable to use warlords to extract resources and labor from a country with a functional government.
The nation of Somalia is not effectively governing since the 1990s or before and is often described as a failed state. Naval piracy, kidnapping, terrorism, and other violence are constant problems. The US travel advisory for Somalia is currently: don't, and then lists precautions like drafting a will and other steps to prepare for your potential kidnapping or murder.
Due to its ineffective governance, the country is used as a counterpoint to arguments that government is evil -- i.e., something will fill the void, and without a centralized government with policing capabilities and some sort of effective government services, you're likely to get extreme poverty and violence.
Somalia has a patchwork of petty warlords exerting arbitrary and unlimited authority within their fiefdoms. This is a far cry from a debate about the limits of the proper authority of congress to intervene in employment contracts. You’re engaging in a lazy rhetorical argument that’s basically a straw man.
No, I'm engaging in reductio ad absurdum and while I'd cheerfully agree it's lazy rhetoric this forum doesn't lend itself well to long-form arguments which unfortunately the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle indicates is required for a complete deconstruction of the standard anti-government babble that gets traded here and elsewhere.
Surely there’s a distinction to be made between a discussion of the proper role of the state and devolution into stateless warlordism. I’m not sure that making a reductive argument against the worst possible interpretation of what small government types advocate really adds to the discourse.
Maybe not but then the next best thing is an exhaustive examination of what happened to Kansas when the libertarians took over, which takes several paragraphs and you're still left with a hazy picture because federal programs kept the state from collapsing completely. Anyway the entire ethos can be summarized in a single sentence: "I got mine, everyone else can go fuck themselves" which as an ideology ignores our species only strength: cooperation.
In particular, is it caused by a constitutional form of government that requires lawmaking authority to rest in elected rather than unelected officials?
Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to simply emigrate. And on the whole, I do prefer the US, and it's not because the Federal govt has laws preventing Starbucks from "union busting" tactics.
For the most part, I don't care if Starbucks, etc. workers are unionized. They should have that 'right', but I see no benefit in having entire federal agencies devoted to making up the rules that dictate how unionization works, who can do it, or anything similar. It's mostly farcical bullshit given the government itself prevented railworkers from striking. I don't think they should have any such power, at all.
If they should have the right to unionize, then someone needs to enforce that right. Or the company with far more power (Starbucks) will retaliate so hard that the right, in practice, does not exist.
I thought this country was about protecting rights. I’m not interested in living in a society where companies with vast amounts of power can do whatever they want to make money. The incentives are nearly completely unaligned with human flourishing, and you don’t need to look far to see that.
> If they should have the right to unionize, then someone needs to enforce that right.
The government isn't prohibiting them from forming a union and there are existing laws against companies retaliating through violence. If the company isn't retaliating with violence, isn't the union supposed to be the thing that protects them? Why don't they just get together and go on strike?
And if the answer is that the union has no power because they're unskilled labor and can be easily replaced, it seems like that's your real problem. What good is forming a union which is just going to go on strike and get permanently replaced by other workers?
>The government isn't prohibiting them from forming a union and there are existing laws against companies retaliating through violence. If the company isn't retaliating with violence, isn't the union supposed to be the thing that protects them? Why don't they just get together and go on strike?
For that to happen the union has to already exist and be powerful.
Because they can't form a union in the first place due to union busting tactics like compulsory meetings that talk about how unions are bad, hiring consultants that spread fear and misinformation, or just threatening your livelihood by firing you for even attempting to form one.
There's a power imbalance—enforcement exists to help balance the scales so that an efficient negotiation between workers and the company can happen.
> Because they can't form a union in the first place due to union busting tactics like compulsory meetings that talk about how unions are bad, hiring consultants that spread fear and misinformation
This doesn't actually prevent you from forming a union unless you believe what they tell you. Which you might, if some of it is true, but that's a poor reason to prohibit them from telling you.
If employees can't even be bothered to hear what the union has to say then chances are working conditions aren't all that bad. If they are, and then they have to hear from the boss as well as the union before making their decision, what's the problem?
> or just threatening your livelihood by firing you for even attempting to form one.
It's very difficult for the law to prohibit this in practice because there are always a dozen other reasons why someone might lose their job, and "you can never terminate someone if they're trying to form a union" doesn't work because sociopaths would abuse it by making some noise about a union so they can misbehave with impunity or if they suspect they're about to lose their job.
> There's a power imbalance—enforcement exists to help balance the scales so that an efficient negotiation between workers and the company can happen.
People always say this but it's not obvious how it's true. The company can terminate you and you can quit. This is an inconvenience for either of you but you can both actually do it in a practical sense and it happens all the time. If you don't like working there then having them terminate you can even be to your advantage because you get unemployment while looking for a new job.
Employers only have any kind of real leverage if there are a limited number of employers who hire someone with your skill set. But that's almost never true for unskilled labor and the better answer for it in specialized industries is antitrust enforcement rather than unionization, the latter of which just forces you to deal with two monopolists and then you're stuck with no way out of a potentially bad company and no way out of a potentially bad union.
If the power imbalance between employers and employees isn't obvious to you try the following: park all of your liquid assets in a CD and then try to make rent for six months on whatever job(s) you can get without presenting a resume or any higher education credential. For extra credit pull this off while raising kids.
Who do I talk to when more fundamental rights are violated? If my 1a or 2A rights are violated, my recourse is suing in court. And those are individual rights that were the literal first two rights they came up with for this country. What is so special about unions that they get their own bureaucracy white glove service to help people ruin private businesses? Seems absurd, especially considering the collective nature of a union, the complainants should be able to pool resources for lawsuits, but they get their own agency to act on their behalf.
The NLRB helps make sure you can form a union in the first place. Their job happens before a union even exists. Someone needs to facilitate the union elections, make sure the business doesn't interfere
Edit: it seems that as you’d expect, NLRB decisions are appealable to a circuit appeals court like federal district rulings are, making this claim seem pretty weak. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/what-we-do/decide-cases