Madonna, Harvey Weinstein, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow. Credit: Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
She Said – the story of the Harvey Weinstein investigation and the two New York Times reporters who conducted it – is, for the most part, a gripping read. That is not because it reveals that Weinstein regularly behaved horribly towards young women, which by now is widely accepted, but because it forensically exposes his methodology, and the complex net of people, attitudes and systems that protected him for so long.
If you’ve ever looked at the Weinstein case and thought but why didn’t someone say something earlier?, the detail of She Said goes a long way to answering that question. By far the most painful truth about Weinstein is that until a couple of New York Times reporters started digging for testimonies, few people in Hollywood even realised they were supposed to care. Certainly, although whispered warnings circulated among Weinstein’s female staff, not many outside that circle knew the full extent of his sexual behaviour. Then again, they hadn’t really looked: ‘pushy producer pressures young women for sex’ was hardly a new script for Hollywood.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story and wrote the book, which starts with the memory of 2017, when “women held more power than ever before” in the job market and political representation. But, the authors say, “all too often, women were sexually harassed with impunity” while the perpetrators “frequently sailed to ever-higher levels of success and praise”.
They single out Donald Trump: “Megan wrote some of the original articles in which women alleged that Donald J Trump preyed on them – and then she covered his triumph in the 2016 election.”
He remains US President despite such claims, of course, as did Bill Clinton, whose presidency was also dogged by allegations of sexual assault and harassment. But in the main, what helps a sexual harassment case gain credibility? Numbers of alleged victims, and bulk and quality of evidence. In Weinstein’s case, the volume of female complainants, along with records testifying to clandestine pay-outs and hushed-up internal memos about his behaviour, gradually enabled Kantor and Twohey to nail down the story – but not without a furious struggle.
Weinstein’s penchant for young actresses was an open secret in the film industry – so much so that, in 2013, the comedian Seth MacFarlane joked at the Oscar nomination announcements: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” Navigating Harvey and his considerable sexual ego was evidently understood to be part of a well-trodden Hollywood career path for young female stars.
It was less clearly spelled out – and not fully understood by many young assistants and actresses at first encounter – that this might also involve navigating the formidable tonnage of Harvey in his bathrobe, demanding ‘massages’, bombarding them with sexual propositions, and in some cases reportedly physically assaulting them and making it difficult to leave the room.
The actress Rose McGowan said that she had been sexually assaulted by Weinstein during a hotel meeting, and was thereafter paid a hefty sum in a non-disclosure agreement to keep silent. Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow – so long the ‘golden girl’ of Miramax – also reported incidents of harassment. Judd described Weinstein’s modus operandi: a hotel breakfast meeting with Weinstein in his bathrobe, offering her a ‘massage’, then a shoulder rub, then asking her to help pick out his clothes, then more sexual requests, then the offer that she could watch him take a shower.
Eventually Judd left the room with a joke: “I’ll make you a deal, Harvey. When I win an Academy Award in a Miramax movie, I’ll give you a blow job.” Both Weinstein and Judd knew that, if such a moment happened, that ‘bargain’ would be null and void: an Academy Award would catapult her beyond Harvey’s control.
In a piece entitled ‘Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster, Too,’ the actress Salma Hayek – who held back during the initial allegations – wrote in December 2017 about his sexual harassment, bullying and threats during the making of the Miramax-backed Frida. She also spoke about the previous “inertia of acceptance” around him.
“Inertia of acceptance” was what the reporters encountered when they first began asking questions. It was “Harvey being Harvey”, as if he were some tempestuous natural phenomenon. It was the “casting couch”, industry insiders said, as though that were some kind of proud Hollywood tradition, back to when the studio boss Louis B Mayer could lay a speculative hand on Judy Garland’s left breast as she sang, and Marilyn Monroe – who described Hollywood as “an overcrowded brothel” – told the young Joan Collins, recently arrived in Hollywood: “Watch out for the wolves, honey – if they don’t get what they want they’ll drop your contract.”
Young, beautiful women were necessary to Hollywood, but if Hollywood broke one it could always get another.
The basic Weinstein formula existed long before he did: a blend of sexual pressuring, wheedling, threatening and kindling female insecurities in an already insecure business. Joan Collins, speaking recently on a television show, remembered going as a young actress to meet a producer about a role and finding him lying in the bath. She declined the offer to join him, after which he asked her age. “Twenty-five,” she replied. “Twenty-five?” he repeated, “That’s not young in Hollywood anymore.”
Was Harvey just seen as part of a very old Hollywood deal, sex for casting – a corruption so entrenched that it now seemed part of the landscape? That’s what Germaine Greer suggested when she touched on the topic with her typical directness: “If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.” Women must react immediately to harassment, she said.
But in this instance, Greer was missing the point – that it was women who didn’t consent to Weinstein who were speaking out, having survived or rebuffed his forceful advances, left the room, and then reportedly found themselves frozen out of jobs or tied up by zealous lawyers in secret settlements because of it. They didn’t want Harvey, but they did want careers in the film industry. Harvey was so well-connected that it often seemed as if the two things were inextricable.
*
In popular theory, the correct way to respond to a crass sexual overture is with a stinging rebuff and an instantaneous exit, honour intact. In films, women who behave like that are the proud heroines of the story. In real life – particularly among working-class women, in more precarious jobs with little financial safety net – such a reaction may well lead to instant joblessness, without a reference, and quite possibly with dependents hungrily awaiting the arrival of the next pay cheque.
Even among the better-off, a walk-out can mean the death of a long-held career ambition. That’s why, in response to workplace harassment, many female employees will evaluate the level at which it is pitched, hoping that it’s a one-off incident, and consider how best to bat it away without destroying the professional relationship. Hence those innumerable pics of Harvey and his glassy-eyed, smiling actress ‘friends’, Gwyneth Paltrow et al on the red carpet.
A little story: when I was 17, I went to live in Paris with a friend in the belief that it would be easy for us to find work. It wasn’t. The big hotels that we had written to before leaving, offering our services as chambermaids, had no openings. The Left Bank boutiques that advertised for English-speaking shop assistants wanted someone who spoke better French.
Finally I found a job as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. It was run by a husband and wife from Shanghai. I really liked the wife, who had three young children and worked non-stop. The husband was small, slight and brusque: he had one front tooth missing, but then he rarely cracked a smile.
One day I turned up for the evening shift, and only the husband was there. He was unusually genial, pouring us both a glass of Chinese wine. I noticed that he was smiling, alarmingly, and uncharacteristically making a minimal amount of small talk. Sensing something odd in the air, I drained my glass and went to get on with the washing up in the narrow galley area, but shortly afterwards he materialised beside me, fumbling tentatively at my chest. I can’t remember exactly what I said to dissuade him – possibly a pointed reminder about his wife – but he stopped pretty quickly.
There was a faint lack of conviction to the whole enterprise, mercifully, as though he had perhaps been put up to it by sleazier friends and felt obliged to give it a go. Thereafter, he went back to brusque, to my relief, and we all carried on as normal with no more trouble.
I could have left the job if necessary, but it never came to that. But when I recall even the brief disorientation of that little moment, it is possible to understand how – at the other end of the scale – an encounter with Weinstein alone in his hotel room must have been deeply shocking for a young assistant such as Rowena Chiu, then in her early twenties.
Unlike my employer, Weinstein was physically imposing, at six feet tall, heavy, and with a strong undercurrent of aggression in his psychological make-up (he once punched his brother Bob during a disagreement in the office, leaving him with a bleeding face in the presence of colleagues). He knew everyone in the industry, all the power-players, all the stars, and he came festooned in lawyers. As well as being terrifying, he could also be funny and generous. He carried his own dramatic, appalling atmosphere around with him, and he wore young women down.
Chiu was working alone with Weinstein late into the night on a Venice trip, she later said, going through a stack of scripts. As a precaution she was wearing two layers of tights. Weinstein kept interrupting with “an escalating series of sexual requests, for massages, a bath” and repeatedly touching her. She was, she said, “worried about being raped”. It became a kind of terrible bargaining situation, with Chiu trying to get the work done while mollifying Weinstein, within limits: at one point, she said, she ended up on the bed with him promising that with one single thrust, it would all be over.
But Chiu rolled over, wriggled away, and carried on with the script-reading shift, finally leaving around 2am when the work was done. There is something poignant in reading about how Chiu slogged on with the work, as though by being excessively diligent she could help return this out-of-control situation to normality. But soon there was no more work, for Chiu at least, because she and her supportive colleague Zelda Perkins – both having made a complaint – were out of the company, silenced with another of Weinstein’s draconian non-disclosure settlements.
Weinstein invested heavily in concealing his activities, not least by assiduously courting prominent women on the Democratic left. He donated to Hillary Clinton and accompanied her to fundraisers. He “gave a large donation to help endow a professorship in Gloria Steinem’s name”. He had even joined in the first women’s marches of January 2017. When Meryl Streep won a Golden Globe in 2012 for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, she thanked Weinstein, jokily referring to him as “God”.
*
One of the most disturbing revelations in the book is a ghastly email sent by Lisa Bloom, a leading US ‘feminist’ lawyer who was retained by Weinstein in December 2016 at a rate of $895 an hour. In it she advised simultaneously attempting to fob off the actress Rose McGowan with “directing” opportunities, while running a “counterops” campaign to smear her as “increasingly unglued”. “I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of this world,” she wrote to Harvey, “because I have represented so many of them.”
Bloom devised a reputation management strategy that involved a strictly limited mea culpa from Weinstein: “You should be the hero of this story, not the villain. This is very doable.” Some of her suggestions are now beyond satire: that he “establish the Weinstein standards, which seek to have one-third of films directed by women, or written by women…”.
One particular case illustrates how complaints got hushed up. Back in 2015, a junior executive called Lauren O’Connor left the company after filing an internal memo in which she noted the “toxic environment for women” and how “female Weinstein employees are essentially used to facilitate his conquests of vulnerable women who hope he will get them work”.
After the memo landed, O’Connor was contacted and told not to come back into the office. An exit agreement was finalised, including a settlement with tight confidentiality clauses. So why would anyone sign?
Partly, it was because complainants had little idea what others had experienced. If they were the first to speak out, they correctly felt that Weinstein would go to every effort possible to destroy their personal and professional reputation (as he did during the New York Times investigation, at one stage even hiring an Israeli private intelligence firm, Black Cube, to dig dirt on the women who accused him.) Furthermore, to leave such a prestigious company without any agreed explanation could injure future career prospects. Harvey’s omerta held fast, and for a long time.
*
Kantor and Twohey’s investigation not only revealed how Weinstein operated in the heart of left-leaning Hollywood, expertly using its causes and characters as camouflage, but also helped to trigger the #MeToo movement. The book goes into a number of stories beyond Weinstein, such as Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of attempted rape in high school against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and Rachel Crooks, who accused Donald Trump of forcibly kissing her when she was a 22-year-old receptionist.
At times the binding-together of ‘women who spoke out’ in the book feels awkward, since every case brings its own distinctive weight of evidence and set of dilemmas: rather like Tolstoy’s definition of unhappy families, each sexual harassment allegation is unhappy in its own way. And beyond the prominent accusations against public figures cited in She Said, there has also been a complex, rolling, international argument on where the outer boundaries of ‘harassment’ lie.
A large part of what the new movement should surely be doing is building pragmatic support and protections for low-paid women such as Kim Lawson – mentioned briefly in the book – who said she was repeatedly sexually harassed at her McDonald’s job by a co-worker and manager (Lawson had already faced homelessness for rejecting the attentions of a landlord).
In fairness, the Time’s Up Legal Defense fund has indeed partly helped enable Lawson and nine other McDonald’s employees to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But much more is needed: around 40% of women working in the US fast-food industry, for example, have experienced sexual harassment on the job, and 42% of those said they felt they needed to accept it rather than endanger their jobs. For harassers, there’s generally no aphrodisiac like a woman’s economic vulnerability: in the aftermath of their much-publicised Weinstein reporting, Kantor also “reported on low-income workers, whose experiences suggested little had changed structurally”.
Yet in the academic, political and media sphere, the former silence around harassment has been replaced with ‘call-out culture’ in which men can be shamed for everything from making a mild joke in a crowded lift about pressing the button for the ladies’ lingerie department (Professor Richard Ned Lebow) to hugging a young democratic staffer for what she retrospectively judged “just a beat too long” (Joe Biden). To their credit, the authors acknowledge the difficulties around the broadening #MeToo movement: “There was a lack of process or clear enough rules.”
There are, however, certain risks to this rapid category expansion of what is ‘inappropriate’, which often now veers more towards the ideological than the practical.
One risk is that public outrage at very serious harassment or assault will be diluted by its conflation with more trivial matters of social etiquette, allowing men with retrograde attitudes to women to present themselves as moderates battling a rising tide of feminist insanity. Another is that non-predatory men – wary, rightly or not, of an outsize fall-out from any small perceived transgression – may gradually retreat from useful one-to-one interactions with female colleagues at work, as a recent large study suggested.
As in Right-Left politics, the centre ground between men and women should be expanding, but often appears to be eroding: on the one hand, there is a US President who speaks more crassly about women than any other within living memory; on the other is an academic such as Suzanna Danuta Walters, director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote a ludicrous article titled ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’ last year, informing males: “Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this.”
Three specific things enabled Weinstein: the sexism already long entrenched in Hollywood culture; the fact that his considerable wealth and success meant that people were willing to overlook his overt tantrums and concealed harassment; and the use of ‘non-disclosure agreements’ (NDAs), which permitted a systematic pattern of harassment to continue in silence.
Legislators in the US and the UK are closing in on the abuse of NDAs. There has been, at last, a welcome corrective to the ‘inertia of acceptance’. When it comes to reshaping a post-Weinstein future, however, we should carry on checking whether the preoccupations of the new movement are really taking all women – and particularly those on low incomes – to a better place.
Jenny McCartney is a journalist, commentator and author of the novel The Ghost Factory.
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SubscribeUnion bureaucrats are not union members.
Why is Trump double-crossing the organised working class, having explicitly appealed to it during the 2024 campaign? The answer is obvious. The organised working class has now voted for him, and accordingly is of no further use to him.
We should understand that unions as they exist today are nothing like the unions of the Gilded Age. Those early unions were often illegal and fought both the robber barons and the government. The law itself was against them. They had few allies in government, which was, then as now, dominated by money. It was a long struggle, and it ultimately resulted in mostly a victory for the unions during the FDR administration. The National Labor Relations Act that created the NLRB was essentially a peace treaty that ended decades of conflict between employees and labor, but like all peace treaties, future circumstances can make it irrelevant or untenable. This is a case of the former. Since FDR, there have been a lot of other laws passed and almost all of what the unions fought for and more besides has since been codified into the law itself. We don’t need a union to negotiate safety standards because OSHA exists. We don’t need them to limit work hours or force them to pay overtime because they are legally required to adhere to the standard 40 hour week. We don’t need unions to negotiate wages because there is a minimum wage law, though it should probably be raised.
This is the real reason manufacturing in the US is more expensive. It has nothing to do with unions and strikes and everything to do with the various laws and regulations that have made unions largely unnecessary. Factories in the US have to meet standards for wages, safety, and environmental impact that are much lower or nonexistent in the several places jobs have been offshored. Through free trade doctrine, they then get to import the stuff duty free and pay only the cost of transportation, which is much less. Globalism has decimated union membership as much as it has American manufacturing and for the same reasons. The unions are neither a cause of the loss of manufacturing nor are they a solution. The solution, if there is one, is to end the free trade era and enact tariffs that reflect the differences in labor and environmental standards between nations and basically acknowledging that countries exist and borders are drawn for a reason. Trump is admittedly not the populist champion of the people I had hoped for, but to the extent he embraces tariffs as a way to balance the scales of trade and start to rebuild a manufacturing base, he’s better than the alternative.
Further, the unions we have today are often corrupt and political. For most of the period from the National Labor Relations Act, it was legal for states to have closed shop laws that required all employees to join a union if there was one, which made the union and the company essentially codependent organizations that would collaborate to a significant extent because keeping the factory open and employees employed kept both organizations intact, regardless of the wishes or interests of the workers themselves. A lot of the corruption came from this system, which was finally outlawed in 2017, long after unions became largely irrelevant anyway. Seven years isn’t long enough to undo decades of corruption and the symbiotic relationships that grew between unions and closed shop employers.
Even so, I’m not terribly surprised to hear Trump isn’t really defending workers and I am equally not surprised to hear Josh Hawley’s name backing another piece of legislation that is actually populist. Had Trump nominated Hawley as his VP, I might have actually voted in the election, hoping that somehow Hawley could succeed Trump, preferably not by assassination, and be the Teddy Roosevelt to Trump’s McKinley. Sadly, these days VP isn’t regarded as a political graveyard and they don’t put people in the position to get them out of the way because. of what happened back then.
I always figured there was a possibility that once they realized globalism was truly finished, many or most of the wealthy elites would then conclude that Trump’s version of economic nationalism was preferable to the wealth taxes and monopoly busting that Bernie Sanders, or Josh Hawley, might have done. Lo and behold, that’s what seems to be happening. I once again lament that the Democratic powers that be squashed Bernie’s campaign twice and instead doubled down on Trump bashing, woke virtue signaling, and racial grievance peddling. I once again call for the Democrats to ditch the woke nonsense of academia, ween your party off the crack of racial grievance peddling, get off the globalist ship before its entirely sunk, and find your own version of Trump. Maybe Fetterman, as he had the chutzpah to attend the signing of the Laken Riley act, which is a perfect example of a law that shouldn’t be needed, but is because of the pervasiveness of globalist ideology in our bureaucratic institutions. Then we could have two parties that have different visions of America and two differing opinions of how best to advance the interests of the American people, not a de facto global government trying to bring liberty and justice for all like some wannabe Superman.
Are you as boring in real life as you are online?
Actually I am way more boring. Are you as insufferably juvenile in reality as you are online?
Very interesting read (disregard disparaging comments from people who object to substance). But do you really think unions have no role now in raising living standards? When I was a teacher in the Netherlands I remember getting a 5% pay rise in 2022 through a collective agreement between govt and the AOB, while I have a friend at Siemens in Germany who says she’s eligible for certain privileges as a unionised worker which the non-unionised do not enjoy (in a system that creates financial incentives for the individual to join, which seems like a great way to rebuild the movement).
Also how likely do you think it is that Trump’s tariffs will do anything to protect or improve the lot of American workers? Are there any examples of tariffs being helpful for ordinary people around the world? I can only think of the example of the medieval English wool merchants being protected by Edward III from trade with the Flemish weavers, though doubtful how helpful that was to English people actually working with wool!
UAW workers are in the top 25% of the income distribution. If they were universal, we’d all be there.
But all the talk of the Big 3 is about layoffs. Whereas Toyota is constantly hiring. And they make good money. Anyone who’s been through Georgetown, KY where the Toyota plant is (the largest Toyota plant in the world) could testify to the prosperity it’s brought to a whole region.
If only the UAW could say the same for Detroit or the USW for Allentown and Gary.
The recent picketing at some Amazon facilities was not by their employees. It was by Teamster professionals paid to do it. Inside those facilities, the employees start at $18/hour with health and other benefits. Not bad for unskilled labor.
If UAW workers are in the top 25% for income, than does that not prove unions are good for workers?
When combined with the fact that they’re also laying people off, it suggests that employee wages matter to profitability of the company, and if unions distort wages far enough, the profitability of the company will begin to suffer. The government has already bailed out two of the three American auto companies, and where does that money come from? Same as the rest of it, the printing press, and inflation. From the perspective of a national government, both profitable companies and high wages are worthy goals. The government should strive to strike a balance between the two, but over the past couple of decades, it has pretty much sucked at both and instead made the CCP and the likes of Warren Buffett and George Soros fabulously wealthy. I don’t love Trump but at least he’s not doing the same thing and hoping for different results.
If the only way a company can survive is by paying its employees too little to live off then they don’t have a viable business. It’s much better they fail and their market share be taken by a more productive rival.
Let’s not pretend low wages benefit anybody but the already wealthy
I agree actually. The burden is as much on management and ownership to find ways to make a profit while paying a fair wage. If they can’t do that, they fail at post-New Deal capitalism. The burden in capitalism must fall on both. The investor must put his investment at risk. These companies have failed to be profitable, and then took government bailouts, so the government took away that risk. Bailouts are arguably the most socialist thing our government has ever done.
Union membership has dropped to 9.9% of the labor force and the great majority of that is public union membership. Trump has zero hope of support from them. That’s why California, Illinois, and NY are irredeemably Democrat.
So Trump has little incentive to kowtow to unions and the unions have little power to make him beyond that which they’ve exerted already.
Exactly. Private employer union membership is around 6% and continues to fall. Organized labor is irrelevent.
Which is exactly why workers need to organize and fight, or continue to be crushed
Cut their own throats?
The reason people have a beef with unions is not because of rank and file workers. Its because of the intellectuals that claim to speak for them. This is nothing but a veiled threat. It’s a provocation. If you want to build popular sympathy how about talking to the people doing hard jobs instead of telling everyone of your plans to orchestrate economic disruption. There’s nothing more annoying than performative protests.
If you truly care about protecting the jobs of hard working people than speak about the bureacracy and red tape around manufacturing. The goal is for wages to keep up with prices.
Regulations are inherently inflationary. They introduce additional time and costs for any business. Businesses will pass on that cost to consumers and create inflation. Higher costs mean more people need help which leads to increased welfare payments requiring more spending. The money supply continues growing and it weakens purchasing power. Its a feedback loop of inflation.
So yes, fight for unions by seriously addressing price inflation caused by excess regulations. High wages are relative to prices. That’s why the minimum wage movements are silly. Everywhere min wages rise so does the cost of living. So nobody is getting ahead even if their wages are rising.
That to me appears to be nothing but a distraction. Trump campaigned on improving the lives and wages of working class voters, who in turn gave him their backing.
Since then he has sided with the tech barons in the visa row and now done the billionaire class another favour by trying to severely weaken the unions.
Whilst I may agree with him in regards to immigration, the scaling back of environmental red tape and the cancelling of the diversity nonsense, the man is an absolute snake who I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him
More TDS
You crack me up. Let me see if I understand you correctly based on this and past responses.
1) There’s not a single politician that you respect and you can’t name a living politician you respect more than Trump but your character attacks on Trump should he taken seriously.
2) You don’t particularly care about American politics, your interest is just based on the comedy of the “hypocrisy” and gullibility of the median Trump voter. You as an occasional watcher of headlines is more in tune with the desires of median Trump voter than I am as an actual Trump voter.
3) You speak of the desirability of wage increases without considering their relation to prices. Do you think its a win if wages go up 3% but prices go up 5%?
4) Robinhood. All Rich people are bad. All labor advocates are good.
I’ve said numerous times I think Trump is an imbecile, if he wasn’t born a billionaire he’d have struggled to hold down a job on the bins, but despite that if I was a yank I’d have probably chose him over the alternative.
I agree with his stated policies on immigration, the environmental stuff, the equality stuff etc, but I find the influence of unelected tech barons such as Musk & Co rather uncomfortable. You rightly ranted about the likes of Soros using his wealth to influence policy yet support others doing the same now it’s your preferred side in power, which to me seems rather hypocritical.
Trump campaigned on improving the lives of the workers, yet once in power has twice now sided with his wealthy backers over his working class support base, which wouldn’t fill me with confidence going forward if I had voted for him
He campaigned with Elon Musk, Steve Wynn and Steve Witkoff. He did not campaign with bureacrats from the NLRB.
Americans and Brits see the world differently. We don’t see everything as zero-sum. If my neighbor gets filthy rich off a product that makes trains travel at light speed, I don’t get poorer. But I do get poorer when some bureacrat organizes an economic shutdown of the economy
But that’s a false analogy. A neighbours financial situation is completely irrelevant. A better example would be an employer becoming more wealthy by refusing to give his workers a pay rise in line with inflation, as in that way he’s making himself richer by actively making his workers poorer. By siding with the likes of Musk when it comes to importing cheap labour or busting the unions that’s exactly what he’s doing
In order to improve workers conditions one needs to educate them so they leave un and semi skilled employment and enter skilled employment. Germany largely moved the German population out of un and semi skilled employment into skilled employment in the late 1990s. Immigrants did unskilled work.
The Swiss have high wages but make very expensive products, the basic watch is £5K. Compare the vast majority of American education and training to Switzerland.
One way of assessing product is Value per kilo. A 100 gramme Swiss watch at £5K works out at £50M/tonne.
Switzerland has ETH Zurich. If the USA had the same density of technical skill it would have 33 MITs.
Riots and high unionised wages drove the car makers out of Detroit from late 1960s. Now most car makes are outside of Democrat run cities/states.
Regulations should to promote the good and prevent the bad. What they become is way of employing people which increases costs.
Where selection and training is based upon the conditions encounted in employment, high tech companies paying well can exist. Once the schools no longer provide the education and training need for well paid high tech jobs and unions insist on overpayment of wages for the value of the products and services produced, jobs disappear.
We should fight for union members, not the unions themselves. It’s been a very long time since they were the same thing. The NLRB is a relic of a past age that has long since outlived its usefulness. It’s a peace treaty that ended a war whose basic axes of conflict have been overtaken by history and replaced with other conflicts that demand our present attention..
We shouldn’t forget that regulations are ultimately laws, and laws are about preventing things that are harmful and keeping civil order. Since the industrial era, labor laws have been a part of that, as the very violent history of the labor movement shows us what can happen when there aren’t laws in place. So some regulations, some laws, are necessary, and to the extent that makes things more expensive, perhaps they should be.
Right now, they’re not because they’re made overseas where there are a lot fewer laws and regulations, which should never have been regarded as an adequate solution by anybody, but it was, and here we are two decades later paying for it after all in other ways. In hindsight, maybe we should have just paid more for our big screen TVs, smart phones, and appliances after all. You pay the piper one way or another.
I’m sure there are quite a few useless rules that can be eliminated. That’s the nature of bureaucracy. It needs regular reforms to eliminate inefficiencies that creep in over time. Still, I stop short of advocating for a return to the bad old days before the New Deal and modern labor laws. If the problem is the lack of any standards or laws in countries we trade with and a resulting lack of manufacturing jobs, surely the solution shouldn’t be to recreate those conditions here.
Too many propose a race to the bottom as a path to prosperity
‘Everywhere min wages rise so does the cost of living’ – evidence please?
If you can’t find any, let me point you to plenty showing the opposite (see links below). Raising the minimum wage raises living standards – and yes – increases jobs (more money in the pockets of ordinary people does a whole lot more good for the economy than in those of the super rich who make our lives more expensive by trying to monopolise businesses and competing for assets in short supply, including housing and land and, to think of political assets, our media and politicians).
Yours is a popular misconception pedalled by a press largely owned by the super rich to discourage people from fighting for a fairer deal, even as owners and bosses take a larger and larger chunk of the pie, often in return for doing nothing, if you’re say Rishi Sunak who makes half a million a week in passive income.
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/the-minimum-wage-is-the-single-most-successful-economic-policy-in-a-generation-and-has-boosted-the-wages-of-millions-of-britains-lowest-earners-by-6000-a-year/
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/higher-minimum-wages-are-creating-more-jobs-with-michael-reich/
Trade unions are an important part of civil society, a crucial counterweight against corporate and political tyranny. Unions brought us so much from the weekend to protections against child labour. They even helped bring down the Soviet Union in the case of Poland. And yet so many on the right seem to have forgotten this to the point that I question whether they can even be called conservatives at all, insofar as a conservative is supposed to be concerned with giving peope agency and rewarding honest work sufficiently that family life can flourish.
ps BB – it’s great to see you still being one of the few traditional left voices standing up for workers on here, keep it up!