= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Strange7 comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (510)
Useful illustration of the kind of mistakes thinking in terms of consequences can help you avoid.
EDIT: To elaborate - I think LessWrong could really benefit from accessible posts applying LessWrong-type ideas to topics that people who aren't already hardcore nerds about typical LessWrong topics might have heard about and care about.
I see. I guess I am having trouble following your conclusions from your premises.
Walmart is in a low-margin business and it employs unskilled labor, so naturally they put as much squeeze on the wages as they can get away with. I don't see anything immoral about it, it's just business. Corporations are well known to behave like psychopaths.
There is a 100 year-old solution to this issue, it is called organized labor. While unions are out of place in many other industries, Walmart is a perfect target for unionizing, since individual workers have zero leverage against the company, while a union can fight for reasonable wages and benefits. Same applies to Amazon warehouses, by the way. So, an alternative to increase in mandatory minimum wage (which ought to be increased, by the way, in the US it is currently lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was 30 years ago) and to a guaranteed basic income (which shifts the burden of paying the Walmart employees from the shareholders and the customers to everyone and adds some unnecessary overhead) is to enact policies making it easier to unionize unskilled labor.
A union makes sense when the workers have specialized interests, but for unskilled labor isn't it simpler just to work through the overarching government?
The government represents different and competing interests, and it's often biased towards those of large corporations. A trade union of unskilled workers, instead, only represents the interests of unskilled workers.