Don't think this is unusual:
CVS stores ordering all employees
using “the company’s health care to report their weight, glucose
levels, and body fat to their insurer, or pay a penalty of $600
dollars”.
As Erik Loomis explains in the context of major league sports owners:
Corporations have made such inroads into our consciousness that this
kind of formulation is common, even among people generally politically
progressive like Neyer. Corporations are not some disembodied beast.
They are made up of human beings with human values. We as a society
allow these wealthy humans who make up a corporation to exercise power
up to a given limit, depending on our own values. In times like today,
or in the first Gilded Age, when corporations exercise relatively
maximum power over society, to create philosophical justifications for
their existence that free them of responsibility to larger society.
Profit taking becomes naturalized, rather than a
socio-economic-political choice. Whether this is the Social Darwinism or
Gospel of Wealth of the late 19th century or the weird
corporation-as-human creation of the modern Supreme Court, these ideas
give corporations room to make very human choices without suffering
consequences or even criticism.
It doesn’t matter what big companies are in the business of doing.
They are controlled by people who are seeking to maximize wealth at the
top of society. It matters to what extent we allow those rich people to
do this. Today, we allow them to do about whatever we want, a
consequence of a sixty-year pushback against the New Deal that has
convinced lots of Americans that business knows all. This attitude
allows Bill Gates to shape education policy for no other reason than he
is rich. It allows for immoral fallbacks on “fiduciary responsibility”
to shareholders to justify any policy, no matter how antisocial. It
allows for a Supreme Court to declare that corporations can openly buy
elections.
Corporate dumping of toxic chemicals into rivers is in fact evil and
shameful. That’s because doing so is a decision made by human beings to
maximize profit at the cost of hurting nature and people. The same goes
for union-busting, for pension-slashing, and for race to the bottom
politics. So long as we apologize away the behavior of corporate leaders
by naturalizing their behavior, the things that upset us about
corporate control over society will continue to occur. Only by pushing
back against corporate ideology do we make society more equal. And that
includes for the employees of Major League Baseball.
Closer to home,
this reminder from Planned Parenthood:
It
just sounds crazy: your boss having the power to decide whether you
have access to affordable birth control. But just because it's crazy
doesn't mean it can't happen.
A group of CEOs has gone to court to demand that power — they want to be
able to deny their employees coverage for birth control. And they've
got politicians including Senators Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, and
Mike Crapo doing everything they can to help.
One of the reasons corporations now feel free to treat workers like serfs is the billions of tax dollars Congress takes from the working poor and middle class to lavish on corporations. Want to stop corporate welfare?
The Nation has some ideas.
No comments:
Post a Comment