cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) (06/14/85)
> Re;: your point about it not being necessary for govt to intervene between > employer and employee > > True if there are exactly as many jobs as job applicant. Since that is > an obviously flase situation, the employee loses. The employer can > just say "sorry, no job" because of racism or sexism and find 10 (or 20 or > 2000) others to apply for the job. That is perhaps why, over > 100 years after the 14th and 15th Amendments and 20 years after the > Civil Rights Act, we are not anywhere near a discrimination free society. > Consider, however, the changes that have happened in the ~15 years of > active Affirmative Action programs. > > Voluntary EEO is a nice idea, but it fails against entrenched racism. > Only if it is *significantly* unprofitable to be racist or sexist > will bigots stop screwing people. And only government or the fear > of government can apply the necessary pressure. > > Marcel Simon Under normal circumstances (that is, when the economy is healthy) there are roughly equivalent numbers of jobs and employees. Employers lower wages if there are people desparate for jobs, firing highly paid workers if necessary to exploit people that are out of work. This may seem brutual and vicious, but it does reduce wages to a level that insures that wages are at a level adequate to clear the market of available labor. (It also makes it unlikely that a few people will be continuously unemployed. Sharing the misery of unemployment, so to speak.) However, we don't work under normal circumstances. The government's laws concerning minimum wages and licensing of small businesses make it likely that there will be a substantial surplus of unskilled labor; this reduces the cost to the employer of discriminating. If one were cynical, one could conclude that the enthusiasm that labor unions have historically shown for minimum wage laws is because labor unions (until very recently) have been hotbeds of racism --- frequently written into the labor union bylaws. When the government allows wages and prices to move freely, without the aforementioned interventions, and without the near-monopoly power the government has granted to labor unions, the supply of labor and jobs *is* roughly equivalent. Government has created the circumstances that make bigotry relatively cost-free --- and considering the long history of governmentally required racism, that is not surprising.