Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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The loss of memory
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Americans let their bosses look into their URINE!!! -- no name given
Now do you remember what unions are for?
Forty years ago, a friend of mine went to work one summer for AT&T in Manhattan. The management at his workplace decided that people were spending too much time goofing off in the johns, so they had the doors to the stalls removed. The union threatened them with a strike; the doors were replaced, and that was that.
In the absence of a strong labor movement, and decent labor legislation, employers will commit all sorts of atrocities -- extended psychological testing, evaluation of spouses, monitoring of phone calls and e-mail, refusal to hire people with prior medical conditions -- and on and on.
Once we get rid of the fascists in government, we'd be wise to consider once again setting limits to their depradations in the private sector as well.
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Jonathan
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Americans were once much more courageous; see my comment immediately preceding this one. Perhaps thay can be persuaded to recover their memoery, and their heritage as a free people. In any event, what good does it do you to bet against them?
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Only because we allow it
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the fact is that these are private companies, for whom one is not obliged to work, and with which one enters into a legally binding employment contract, part of which is to consent to such a test. -- kovie
Yes, that's the conservative's argument -- always have been. You want to take my money, you gotta live by my rules. You don't like them, go find another job.
The problem is this: in a post-industrial society, the majority of people have to work for someone else. If the employer is free -- simply because he's their employer -- to rule parts of their lives he literally has no business ruling, it becomes not simply a matter of contract law, but a matter of grave concern to the entire body politic. We don't call this kind of egregious nonsense wage slavery for nothing.
The government grants you free speech, your employer forbids it. Fine, say I, then its time to organize, pass a few laws limiting his freedom of action. You don't like it, go find another country....
That's the social democrat's position, and it always has been.
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Not you, exactly....
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perhaps it would've been better to say: If he doesn't like it, he can find another country. I hadn't intended to ascribe authorship of employers' infringements on the political liberties of their employees to you, only to suggest that your careful distinction between the government's infringements and the employer's was overly careful, and that, when employed by defenders of authoritarian relationships between employers and employees, it has a despicable history in this country, and for that matter, not only in this country.
Your position is/was clear enough. Mine is that these aren't at all two separate issues. Liberty is indivisible, and so, in my view, are the threats to it. It's no exaggeration to say that the liberties guaranteed us by the Constitution are routinely violated by employers, who believe that their status as owners and free economic agents grants them an exception to the rules governments must follow in their relationships with free citizens.
I believe that all such relationships are political as well as economic relationships, and that, as such, they must submit to being governed by political as well as economic processes. If employers refuse, especially on the basis of a contract law which their economic power has written in their favor, then ultimately they will invite ruin upon themselves, the same ruin which was once visited upon the feudal aristocracy.
For the health of our democracy, I believe that this confrontation should be explicit, and that the time to resolve it is always now, no matter how long it actually takes.
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Kovie
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's late, and this has the potential to be a long discussion, one which, as you suggest, is already off-topic in the narrow sense.
I'll just say that what an employer may or may not require of an employee should be a matter more carefully defined in law than it presently is. Almost every way in which an employer can treat an employee as chattel has been defined by the law as something else, and those definitions have, for the most part, been tested in court. Our current law notoriously favor employers, and our enforcement of such laws as favor the employee is notoriously lax. This is a political problem, one which everyone seems to believe can be ignored. It cannot be, not forever.
Given that virtually everyone recognizes that an incestuous relationship between corporations and government is characteristic of our age, it seems incredible to me that even political liberals will tolerate screams of class war, whenever this issue is raised.
It's a form of blindness which the country can ill afford. No name given, whatever his confusions about government spying and urine-testing on the job, is instinctively right about that.
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A moveable feast
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not betting against the American people, I'm just rationally appraising the likelihood of them standing up for their own rights and I find the likelihood extremely remote. -- Jonathan
True. The difference between us seem to be that where you write them, I would write us. This is not a trivial difference, it seems to me, in that an observer is describing a static situation; a participant views the same situation as subject to change. One must have respect for the dialectic.
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My sympathies, Jonathan,
[Read the article: The significance of the FBI's law-breaking]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and a tip of the hat. We've apparently got a lot in common. Still, pessimist or optimist, it should be eyes on the prize, yes?
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Just out of curiosity
[Read the article: Republicans and U.S. attorneys -- then and now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Evidence, evidence everywhere -- Paul Rosenberg
A reference to Casablanca?