While I am suspect of his claims here and will have to decide how deep I dive, I think pay discrimination due to race is far easier to highlight than pay discrimination based on type of job. Plus...
While I am suspect of his claims here and will have to decide how deep I dive, I think pay discrimination due to race is far easier to highlight than pay discrimination based on type of job. Plus while he highlights one case gone on particularly long (and why has it actually done so) have there been others that have been resolved quickly? Is it possible that, say, Tesco is dragging its feet here? He frames it as if this is the only case and the tribunal has never done anything. At least one of the other cases linked was from 14 years before the law directing the case he complains about. (Some are just straight paywalled).
I also think that the fundamental comparison he makes doesn't make sense. Apples and oranges are static objects whose availability varies year to year. A sudden demand for more of a certain job means more people can work in that role rather than another comparable one. A sudden demand for oranges won't turn any apples into oranges. (And the assumption that an orange should cost more in a vitamin C rush is treated as a given.)
He presumes his assumptions are true and never presents them. That's fine for folks that agree with him, but not compelling at all to me.
I fundamentally disagree with his worldview also but he didn't really sway me here.
(And this is the blog where the other half of it is that creep who think the AI actress is his favorite actress and your best bet for finding a virgin on screen. Mega ick.)
I’m passingly familiar with this one, and there are a few things going on; first and foremost, it’s being brought as a gender inequality case due to the overall gender skew between warehouse...
I’m passingly familiar with this one, and there are a few things going on; first and foremost, it’s being brought as a gender inequality case due to the overall gender skew between warehouse workers and store workers. That’s what then raises the legal question “are these jobs of equivalent value?”, because if they are it’s possible to put the difference down to discrimination against the store workers - and in turn to suggest the gender split as a reason for that discrimination - whereas if they aren’t it’s simply a case of different pay for different work.
As I understand it, Tesco have been revealed in many ways throughout the case to be your fairly standard megacorp with all of the broad structures to put profit above workers wherever possible. I don’t think they’re the worst of the worst, but they’re by no means the good guys here.
That said, I don’t really think the premise of the case appears to be particularly fair either. I’ve seen pretty broad agreement from staff not involved in the case that warehouse work is, in fact, some combination of harder and more unpleasant than store work.
If there’s a discrimination claim to be brought, it seems to my non-lawyer eye that questioning the gender split of the two job types would be appropriate (but that could perhaps be defended by Tesco if the applicant split matched the employee split, which presumably is why that wasn’t the legal approach taken). Questioning the pay itself between the two jobs just seems to be reaching a bit; it looks like the store workers trying to enrich themselves. Which I don’t entirely blame them for, corporations are screwing basically everyone and this is their attempt to fight back, but in a bigger picture sense it doesn’t look like a just argument to me - it looks like a utilitarian attempt to rebalance power against the corporation by mildly unjust means, using a law that was put in place without enough forethought about how to quantify situations like this. So, y’know, not the good guys either, but we all know the corporation uses legal exploits to do worse, so I don’t know where that really leaves us.
Appreciate the perspective. While ultimately my point was less whether this specific case was valid or not or an individual mess, but whether it was at all representative or what's going on with...
Appreciate the perspective. While ultimately my point was less whether this specific case was valid or not or an individual mess, but whether it was at all representative or what's going on with the law more broadly, it's still helpful.
It feels like a cherrypicked example of a particularly... He's framing it more as ridiculous but it's at least fucked up in some way based on how it seems to be going?
This feels very "written for people who obviously agree with me" and thus not a useful one to share here - not a good argument, not a good example of the work, no compelling personal reason for the share, etc."
From the article: [...] [...] [...] I'll add that market prices are often wrong (inconsistent). The market gives an answer, but nothing says it's a correct answer. It's what we have.
From the article:
Suppose that apples sell for more than oranges and Parliament in [its] wisdom decides that, at last, apples and oranges must be compared. Not by shoppers — shoppers are biased, they merely reveal what they are willing to pay — but by a tribunal, which will determine whether apples and oranges are of truly equal value and thus must sell at the same price.
What would the tribunal need to know?
[...]
To determine the “just” price of apples and oranges, the tribunal would need the entire general-equilibrium system.
Under the Equality Act’s “equal value” provisions, tribunals compare jobs by scoring their intrinsic properties — effort, skill, responsibility, working conditions — the labor theory of value applied to labor. How is it going? The Tesco litigation began in 2018; the tribunal’s fact-finding hearing ran 36 days, its judgments run to more than 900 pages resting on some 19,000 pages of training manuals, and the independent experts have yet to begin the report that will actually say whether a shelf-stacker’s job equals a warehouse worker’s. Eight years, and the calculation has not started. Apples and oranges, adjudicated but not, as Orwell or Marx or Stafford Beer might have imagined, by a industrial bureaucracy or by an all-knowing artificial intelligence but by lawyers and commissions and tribunals. The worst of all worlds.
And having discovered that the tribunal cannot price two jobs in a decade, the government now proposes to add race and disability comparisons and an enforcement unit to publish official guidance on which reasons for a wage difference are permissible. A bureau of allowable scarcities.
[...]
The market compares apples and oranges every day. It is the only institution that can. But there is a deeper error here than computation. Suppose the tribunal succeeded. Suppose that after another decade it delivered the true and final score, shelf-stacker versus warehouseman. What would it have found? Not justice. A wage is not a grade on your character or a measure of your worth as a human being. A wage is a price — a report on how scarce your skills are relative to the desires of people you will never meet. Nurses are not morally less worthy than plumbers should they earn less than plumbers or vice-versa, and no one thinks otherwise except the tribunals.
I'll add that market prices are often wrong (inconsistent). The market gives an answer, but nothing says it's a correct answer. It's what we have.
While I am suspect of his claims here and will have to decide how deep I dive, I think pay discrimination due to race is far easier to highlight than pay discrimination based on type of job. Plus while he highlights one case gone on particularly long (and why has it actually done so) have there been others that have been resolved quickly? Is it possible that, say, Tesco is dragging its feet here? He frames it as if this is the only case and the tribunal has never done anything. At least one of the other cases linked was from 14 years before the law directing the case he complains about. (Some are just straight paywalled).
I also think that the fundamental comparison he makes doesn't make sense. Apples and oranges are static objects whose availability varies year to year. A sudden demand for more of a certain job means more people can work in that role rather than another comparable one. A sudden demand for oranges won't turn any apples into oranges. (And the assumption that an orange should cost more in a vitamin C rush is treated as a given.)
He presumes his assumptions are true and never presents them. That's fine for folks that agree with him, but not compelling at all to me.
I fundamentally disagree with his worldview also but he didn't really sway me here.
(And this is the blog where the other half of it is that creep who think the AI actress is his favorite actress and your best bet for finding a virgin on screen. Mega ick.)
I’m passingly familiar with this one, and there are a few things going on; first and foremost, it’s being brought as a gender inequality case due to the overall gender skew between warehouse workers and store workers. That’s what then raises the legal question “are these jobs of equivalent value?”, because if they are it’s possible to put the difference down to discrimination against the store workers - and in turn to suggest the gender split as a reason for that discrimination - whereas if they aren’t it’s simply a case of different pay for different work.
As I understand it, Tesco have been revealed in many ways throughout the case to be your fairly standard megacorp with all of the broad structures to put profit above workers wherever possible. I don’t think they’re the worst of the worst, but they’re by no means the good guys here.
That said, I don’t really think the premise of the case appears to be particularly fair either. I’ve seen pretty broad agreement from staff not involved in the case that warehouse work is, in fact, some combination of harder and more unpleasant than store work.
If there’s a discrimination claim to be brought, it seems to my non-lawyer eye that questioning the gender split of the two job types would be appropriate (but that could perhaps be defended by Tesco if the applicant split matched the employee split, which presumably is why that wasn’t the legal approach taken). Questioning the pay itself between the two jobs just seems to be reaching a bit; it looks like the store workers trying to enrich themselves. Which I don’t entirely blame them for, corporations are screwing basically everyone and this is their attempt to fight back, but in a bigger picture sense it doesn’t look like a just argument to me - it looks like a utilitarian attempt to rebalance power against the corporation by mildly unjust means, using a law that was put in place without enough forethought about how to quantify situations like this. So, y’know, not the good guys either, but we all know the corporation uses legal exploits to do worse, so I don’t know where that really leaves us.
Appreciate the perspective. While ultimately my point was less whether this specific case was valid or not or an individual mess, but whether it was at all representative or what's going on with the law more broadly, it's still helpful.
It feels like a cherrypicked example of a particularly... He's framing it more as ridiculous but it's at least fucked up in some way based on how it seems to be going?
This feels very "written for people who obviously agree with me" and thus not a useful one to share here - not a good argument, not a good example of the work, no compelling personal reason for the share, etc."
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
I'll add that market prices are often wrong (inconsistent). The market gives an answer, but nothing says it's a correct answer. It's what we have.