Henry

Joseph Braude suggests (free registration or bugmenot required) that the Bush administration should support trade unions in the Arab world, as an intermediate step towards democratization.

In light of the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudis, it’s hard to fathom why the United States would even consider ignoring a secular movement in the Gulf with reasonable goals and thousands of members. … The Gulf unions, by contrast, according to the American labor official, desire logistical support and training from the United States–a sentiment you don’t hear very often from the traditional Arab labor headquarters in Damascus. To be sure, the Bahraini unions are–and the Kuwaiti unions are about to become–members of the Damascus-based establishment. All the same, their eagerness for American partnership is an opportunity to plant the seeds of meaningful political change. … What can the United States do for these unions in practical terms? In countries where there are no unions, the U.S. government should demand to know why–well before a free trade agreement is signed. Laws restricting public assembly–which exist in many Gulf states–ought to be eased in any country wishing to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States. But the right to assemble is only the first step in a long road that should lead to the rights to strike and collectively bargain–which either don’t exist or are severely constrained in all Gulf states. And it’s not just the U.S. government that has a role to play. In countries where unions are already active and feisty, like Bahrain and Kuwait, American labor unions should lend support to their counterparts by offering advice and tactical training.

Sounds like a good idea – but one which I suspect this administration won’t pursue (I’d be very happy to be proved wrong on this).

And this 2002 article by Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers fits very nicely with the Nathan Newman post on minority union representation that I blogged about last week.

I saw The Interpreter last night, and had distinctly mixed feelings; it’s an interesting film, but not a very good one.(warning: spoilers ahead).
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And while we’re on the subject of Thomas Friedman’s latest burblings, isn’t it about time that someone brought up Edwin Abbot’s classic novel, Flatland and its hero and narrator, “A Square?”

One for Daniel Davies from a book I’m reviewing.

“Monitoring, Rules, and the Control Paradox: Can the Good Soldier Svejk Be Trusted,” in Roderick M. Kramer and Karen S. Cook eds., Trust and Distrust in Organizations, New York: Russell Sage 2004.

One of the most fascinating and revealing forms of organizational sabotage is “working to rule” – precisely following rules while providing no voluntary effort beyond that required by the rules. An especially destructive form of “working to rule” involves applying the rules most carefully where they are least appropriate to the situation. This technique was perfected by Private Josef Svejk, a leading Czech cultural hero, and the eponym of Jaroslav Hasek’s satirical novel, The Good Soldier Svejk. … Svejk was taking advantage of a basic fact … it is simply impossible to specify in advance all the behaviors that the organization will require from its employees if it is to survive and thrive. This is the organizational manifestation of the phenomenon known as “contractual incompleteness” in economics (Coase 1937). … many organizational tasks simply do not lend themselves to outcome-based incentives. The rest of this paper discusses the alternative: close specification of desired behaviors by means of rules and commands, and sanctions to enforce those behaviors. In particular, I will argue that built-in inefficiencies may plague management by monitoring. The inefficiencies may be understood by picturing the monitoring relationship as a one-shot game with a Pareto-suboptimal equilibrium. … The paper will examine the nature of the “tit-for-tat” exchange that is capable of Pareto improvements in organizations in which labor contracts are based on monitoring of individual actions rather than measurement of individual outcomes. Furthermore, cooperation requires trust in that hierarchical superiors must yield some of their capacity for discovering and punishing shirking by subordinates.

Amardeep Singh at the Valve presents us with a long quote from Samuel Johnson on aesthetics. It’s a nice quote, but I prefer the one below the fold (taken from The Rambler no. 106), which seems quite apposite to the enterprise of blogging.
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The FT has a long investigative article, suggesting that schemes in which Western firms monitor their Chinese subcontractors to see whether they conform to labour standards aren’t working. The subcontractors are getting increasingly adept at cooking the books.

Factory managers in China are becoming increasingly sophisticated at falsifying worker time cards and payroll documents to disguise irregularities including underpayment, excessive hours and inadequate health and safety provision. Auditors estimate that more than half of factories they see in China are forging some of their records – meaning that many of the international companies that source from China are learning less about the actual working conditions in the factories they use, even as they step up efforts to monitor them.

But if Chinese suppliers are only pretending to comply with these standards, the auditors hired by Western companies are often only pretending to check up on them properly.

As the social compliance auditing industry has grown in response to increased demand it has left many auditors with less time to spend at each factory. “I tell auditors that I cannot tell them the truth in relation to some of their questions. They smile and move on to something else,” a manager at one large garment factory in Dongguan told CSR Asia, a Hong Kong-based research group. “They are complicit in the deception.”

Update: Thanks to Stephen Frost at CSR Asia for pointing to a no-sub-required version of the story, and to the CSR-Asia report quoted in the FT story

David Sirota tells us that Bernie Sanders is on the verge of announcing his candidacy for Jim Jeffords’ Senate seat (Jeffords is retiring). This could be fun. (via Atrios)

Don’t know about you lot, but this Glenn Reynolds shortie conjured up some unfortunate images in my mind.

Brad DeLong’s transformation into a political scientist appears to be advancing rapidly.

And this paper on voting in the mediaeval church provides some evidence that social choice theory is an outgrowth of Frances Yates’ Hermetic Tradition (it mentions in passing that Ramon Lull and Nicholas of Cusa anticipated some of the key arguments of voting theory a few centuries early).

Chris Mooney has a great piece of investigative reporting at Mother Jones detailing Exxon’s funding of anti-global warming groups ranging from Steven Milloy’s one-man disinformation campaign at junkscience.com to the American Enterprise Institute. Bottom line: there’s now an overwhelming scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gases are causing the world’s temperature to rise. Many previous skeptics (e.g. BP and Shell) have now been convinced on the basic facts of global warming. Yet Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, an organization with which Exxon has close links, have sought to cast doubt on this consensus through funding spurious “reports” and other publications that don’t meet the minimal standards to get published in peer-reviewed journals.[1]
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The Washington Post has a piece on the battle between “family friendly” editors who sanitize films for conservative family consumption and film directors, which poses some interesting political questions. On the one hand, I reckon that leftwingers should be supporting conservatives on principle in this fight. As I wrote at the beginning of this year (in one of the worst-titled posts of all time), there’s a strong argument that conservatives should have the right to ‘remix’ bits of the culture that they don’t want to consume. Why shouldn’t they be able to take the sex out of Hollywood movies that their kids watch (just as leftwingers might want to protect their kids from rampant consumerism)? On the other, there are clear costs to this:

Family Flix, which claims to have the toughest standards, removes “sexual innuendo,” including suggestions or depictions of homosexuality. It recently edited “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie,” an animated film with a PG rating, to eliminate a scene in which a male starfish character sings and dances while dressed in fishnet stockings and high heels.

I’m strongly attracted to what might be called, for want of a better term, BoingBoing socialism. That is, I buy the argument that some of the key goals of the left can best be achieved through maximizing individuals’ control over the conditions of their consumption (and, by extension, maximizing their ability to remix and re-produce cultural goods). But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Empowering people to make cultural choices we might ‘like’ is also going to empower them to make choices that we might dislike too – to separate themselves from what many of us would consider to be a minimal shared social consensus on homosexuality. There are some extremely vexing questions about the appropriate relationship between the common culture and dissenting sub-cultures like the one that Christian conservatives have very successfully created, a difficult balance to be struck. As individuals’ ability to remix their cultural consumption increases, so too will these questions become more urgent. At the moment, I don’t have any very good answers to them.

Howard Kurtz’s blog round-up points to this small gem of insight on the estate tax, from blogger and University of Nebraska law professor, Rick Duncan.

Of course, the Democrats played the Marxist class-warfare card and said this legislation would only help the dirty, stinking rich. Actually, it is a very egalitarian law that ensures that no one will pay death taxes. What is wrong with equal treatment?

Duncan finds himself in some interesting intellectual company. If I’m not mistaken in my recollection, Karl Marx himself was fond of quoting Anatole France’s not-dissimilar observation that “[t]he law in its infinite majesty, prohibits rich and poor alike from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges.” (I fear however that Duncan, unlike Marx and France, believes himself to be making a serious argument).

Three links relating to unions and the academy:

A very nice article in Dissent, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while, setting out the reasons why non-tenure track faculty should unionize.

Teaching assistants at Columbia and Yale plan strike action; the university administration responds with the usual chestnut: “The university’s relationship with graduate students is educational and collaborative. It is not an employer-employee relationship.”

Nathan Newman writes about a new book by Charles Morris, a labour law scholar, arguing that unions have a right to “engage in collective bargaining through a minority union on a members-only basis.” By Newman’s account, Morris “documents that the clear legislative intent of the National Labor Relations Act was to require collective bargaining by companies with minority “members only” unions.” If this original intent can be made to stick (which would be a hard-fought battle, given the current ideological slant of the NLRB), it could transform the US labour relations system.

A very interesting article about the Heritage Foundation, Malaysia, and and sums of money flowing to the Foundation president’s wife in the Washington Post, which I hope to write more about tomorrow or on Monday (there are some interesting and complicated issues that I want to think about a bit more). In the meantime, I want to point out this fascinating little paragraph about the Index of Economic Freedom (previously discussed here and here).

Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr., former editor of the annual Index of Economic Freedom, published by Heritage and the Wall Street Journal, said that in 2002 Feulner [the president of Heritage] pressed him to give Malaysia a better ranking. When the staff objected, Feulner backed off on changing the ranking, Driscoll said, but changed the text to make it more positive.

Heritage said Driscoll’s account “is incorrect. . . . If Dr. Feulner had any concerns about the Malaysia score, his name would not be on the book.”

As you prefer, you can read this as a testament to the honesty of the Index’s staff, or as damning evidence of Heritage’s intention to cook the books. Either way, it’s a rather interesting datum on the politics behind the Index (and how the text of the Index report is shaped by the political and/or financial interests of its backers).

Rabbi David Saperstein condemns Frist’s telecast in exactly the right terms – as an attack on religious freedom.

The telecast is scheduled to take place on the second night of the Passover holiday, when Jews around the world gather together to celebrate our religious freedom. It was in part for exactly such freedom that we fled Egypt. It was in part for exactly such freedom that so many of us came to this great land. And it is in very large part because of exactly such freedom that we and our neighbors here have built a nation uniquely welcoming to people of faith – of all faiths. We believe Senator Frist knows these things as well. His association with the scheduled telecast is, in a word, shameful.

I can only applaud. Via Atrios