All those jobs going overseas? Blame it on the ladies. At least according to MRA blogger The Fifth Horseman – the guy behind The Misandry Bubble, a bizarre apocalyptic manifesto that took the manosphere by storm last year. In a heavily upvoted comment on The Spearhead, TFH explains:
Not many people realize that outsourcing happens mostly due to feminism.
Feminists impose all sorts of costs on businesses in the US, who are forced to employ women despite the low productivity of these female employees.
Since an office is not allowed to have too many men, the next best answer is to move the entire department to India or China, where Western feminists can no longer harass it.
Since Western women cost more than what Western men produce, outsourcing is inevitable, as a means to avoid feminism.
The blogger behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog was impressed enough with this argument that he featured it in a post of his own, adding
Plenty of people have tried to run the numbers on the offshoring of jobs, but they can never figure out where the savings are supposed to be. Business would only offshore jobs if it made financial sense, and running the numbers indicates that it doesn’t make financial sense because any savings gets eaten up by the costs of offshoring. That is the case until you include the costs of feminism in the analysis. When someone runs the numbers on offshoring, they don’t include things like the costs of the false sexual harassment industry, affirmative action, and pure makework jobs for women in their analysis. As soon as feminism is included, offshoring makes perfect financial sense for business. …
If you want jobs to come back to the US (and elsewhere), then you have to eliminate feminism.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it.
I mean, how the fuck am I supposed to know why my hip hurts all the time? The fact that I had a major injury to the same hip while working (seriously, do you have any idea what a pain in the ass a major hip sprain is? You can’t elevate the joint, you can’t immobilize it, and it’s almost impossible to find a sitting position that doesn’t put it somehow) might not have anything to do with the bursitis, right?
oh dear gods, why the fuck can’t i type?
FTFY
Now to present my boss a pay raise offer he can’t refuse…
@Fatman
Noone is helped by sexual harassment. That’s not even close to my argument. My argument is that giving people the power to sue employers over activities that would be considered protected free speech outside of the workplace is a bad thing.
@zhinxy
Those are some very interesting links. I’m going to have to read through them to further understand both your point of view and my own. Strangely enough, I think I agree with about 75% of what you are saying, excluding pot shots like this:
What? These two statements contradict each others? Since when?
Did I say that? You didn’t ask me what was the primary deformer of employment markets, and to be honest, I wouldn’t know. Minimum wage, EEO laws, tax and accounting compliance, enforcement of employment contracts after the term of employment, intellectual property, education subsidies, entitlement programs for low-income families, geography and certain aspects of immigration all come to mind, however I really wouldn’t know how to rank them.
@Holly Pervocracy
The fact that there is still a policy about it has a chilling effect on consensual romantic relationships. Willing individuals would purposely avoid this behavior to comply with the policy.
Think of all those illegal terms in employment contracts, like non-compete clauses (at least here in California). They may have no real-world force behind them, but they are still used to cow employees into sticking with a certain job.
So, what if we build our policy under the whole idea of making “I feel threated” a good justification for taking action. What’s to stop someone from making allegations like when there is no cause, perhaps to sabotage a competitor or retaliate for a bad preformance?
Beyond that, is there any behavior that is guaranteed to be non-threatening to everyone? I’ve heard of a case where a front-desk secretary filed a hostile-work-environment complaint because the company’s engineers gave her a friendly greeting on their way into work.
Your other point about incomplete information is much more compelling. However, it could apply to all sorts of behavior that’s bad for employees. Should we have a law preventing a boss from yelling at his subordinates?
@Bagelsan
Feminism hasn’t encouraged men to work only in high-risk fields. But, it often has cut off other opportunities for your young men. This slight difference you mention is around 10%. It also applies to the high-school graduation rate too. We have simply switched one sexist assumption (girls can’t do math and science) with another (academic achievement is for girls). And, this is even before we get to mentioning affirmative action and hiring quotas.
“The marketplace I refer to is the labor market. If a place is absolutely discussing to work for, leave. Or, make a union. This is clearly a perfect case of unionization.
You have recourses that do not require infringing on the freedom or property of others. You may not like the consequences, but they do exist.”
Unless said workplace/specific type of labor market is unfriendly to unionization. I remember bringing up “har har driving my own car 120 in-town miles a day in a blizzard with 60 mph winds sure sucks har har maybe we should form a union har har” at the pizza place i delivered for, and the owner/operator turned and got in my face so fast, I barely knew what happened. He told me that if he heard about unionizing again, I was fired. And I couldn’t leave- I was one kid in a small college town with a limited number of jobs. I was incredibly replaceable. Without having a completed college degree, I still am wholly replaceable at my current job as a bar waitress. I can’t leave, I need the money. And buddy, sexual harassment IS infringing on the rights of others.
I’m mostly preaching to the choir, as you will probably ignore this or not see it. But not everyone lives your life (which seems like a damned comfy one), not everyone has the opportunities you did/do, and the market is NOWHERE near as fair as you seem to think.
Question – how is feminism directly responsible for the fact that boys are underachieving academically in relation to girls? Please note that “I just think that feminism must be the reason” is not an acceptable answer.
do you think that’s how it works? you make an allegation and then you get money? employers know when the law is on their side, and they know you have to prove things in court. they don’t just throw money at you because you made one allegation.
youre arguing against a system that doesnt exist.
If the relationship is consensual, then your lover won’t file a complaint. If what you mean by “consensual” is more like “the guy’s really sweet and sincere about liking this woman at work,” all I can say is that he’ll have to learn to express that without winking, pelvic thrusting, or sucking noises.
You’re right! Employees can be cowed into sticking with a job even when they hate it! That’s why it’s important to crack down on sexual harassment rather than blithely say “why don’t you just leave?”
The fact that there’s an investigation. It’s not allegation => payout. Over half of allegations aren’t decided in the complainant’s favor.
I think you’re going to have to use your “reasonable human being” skills here, and trust the judge will do the same. “Hi” is good; “Hi, sugartits” is bad; “Hi, sweetie” is probably not actionable but you’re being a pain in the ass and I think on some level you damn well know it. And so forth. I can’t reteach you all of workplace etiquette here but the idea that some crazy woman will decide “HE SCRATCHED HIS NOSE THREATENINGLY!” is pretty much a boogeyman used to silence women who are being called “sugartits” at work.
Why does this stuff always have to go to analogies? Some level of “yelling” can be a legitimate way to motivate your team (although most bosses who yell are just jerks), but there is no level of ass-grabbing necessary to run a tight ship and enforce discipline. Really none.
But a lot of behavior that’s bad for employees is illegal. Your boss can’t slap you. He can’t (generally) make you work without pay. He can’t deny you breaks. He can’t keep an unsafe workplace. He can’t demean your race or sexuality or national origin. Treating your employees like shit in nonsexual ways is often actionable, and I’m glad for that.
So Developers is back, and once again sexual harassment is something that happens whenever someone winks at you or says something the least bit unpleasant one time. And it only happens to well-paid, well-educated office workers with lots of options! Good to know!!!
Sharculese knows more about this than I do, I think, but I believe that part of what you’d have to prove in bringing a sexual harassment claim against your employer is that they knew or should have known about the harassment and failed to take reasonable action to stop it. It’s not something where the employer has absolutely no idea what’s going on and then all of a sudden — law suit!
Developers^3, do you feel that there should be some limits to speech, the famous ‘fire in a crowded theater’ exception, for example? Or do you feel that societal benefits should never be considered when looking at free speech?
One more comment on the “but how will we know what hurts her feelings?” thing, besides that it’s ridiculous: subjectivity is the only answer here.
It’s impossible to draw up a conclusive list of all behaviors that constitute harassment, and say that anything not on the list is guaranteed not to get you in trouble. Harassers are too damn creative for that.
(Attempts to do this are also where rules that sound too strict come from. Bosses say “no joking” because they’re afraid that if they say “jokes are okay” then some jerkoff will go to the secretary and tell her all his favorite rape jokes until she has a panic attack, then say “BUT YOU SAID JOKES WERE OKAY.”)
So at some point you just have to go “look, you guys, figure out how to act like a human or err on the side of formality.” And don’t act like the latter is some sort of death sentence because at the end of the day you’re at work, sheesh.
And to add to the question, if I may …
Developers, if you do believe that free speech should be completely unlimited, do you also believe that there should not be any additional protections given based on circumstance? In other words, do you think that if a guy saying something sexual to a stranger at a bar (Hey baby, show me your tits or I won’t pay for that drink) is not actionable, so should a boss saying something sexual to his employee (Hey baby, show me your tits or I won’t give you a raise) not be actionable, a landlord saying something sexual to his tenant (Hey baby,show me your tits or I won’t fix your heat), etc.?
I’m getting the feeling that Developers doesn’t understand that there are some things that a person can walk away from easily, and other things that a person can’t walk away from and thus deserve greater protection.
in co-worker on co-worker harassment it’s actually higher than that, you have to prove actual knowledge, or that the lack of knowledge was due to negligence on the employers part.
if it’s supervisor/supervisee- it becomes the employer’s burden to show that they were unaware, and that unawareness was due to negligence on their part (this is where the importance of a good anti-harassment policy comes in) unless there is what’s called a ‘tangible employment action’ involved (firing, demotion, loss of pay, certain on-the-job humiliations) in which case liability is automatic once the hostile work environment is proved.
and if the harassment is done by someone really high up in the company, the action is automatically imputed to the company
the above was in response to bee
Grinner – “He also recanted his entire theory later in life. The father of libertarian thinking recanted, saying that personal freedom can sometimes only be obtained through collectivist policies; and that taxes (which in his first book he decries as theft of the worst degree) justly redistribute wealth to save an overly selfish minority from itself.
Just though everyone here should know, since he is the seminal thinker for libertarians, and he admits he was wrong.”
Grinner – Nozick is NOT the seminal thinker for libertarians, not by a long shot!
Though this is now a “new meme” floating around. I’ve even seen him called the “founder!” – He had influence, after the seventies (and there was a lot of libertarianism between adam smith and him!) but seminal thinker is ridiculous. I think the confusion has more to do with the fact that many non-libertarian intellectuals tend to be familiar with his book if they’re familiar with ANY libertarian book. He’s in the odd position of being much more of a “Famous libertarian” OUTSIDE of libertarianism than within :
Also Nozick was NEVER an anarchist libertarian in the first place. 🙂
I was involved with libertarianism for a while before I even knew about him!!
Also, rumors of his defection from libertarianism are greatly exagerrated. (It’s all starting to seem a little like darwin recanting on his death bed proving the evolutionists false, only being passed around by people who for whatever reason don’t know much about and don’t like libertarianism 😉 )
http://blog.mises.org/17383/slates-metcalf-on-libertarianism-and-nozick/
http://mises.org/daily/4862
And Darwin at least did write origin of species… Nozick would be more like one guy who wrote a book on evolution a century later recanting, and then being called the father of natural selection. Stephen Jay Gouldish, maybe?
Again, Sharculese will know more about this than I do, but I believe there’s the reasonable man standard — and since Ellison, a reasonable woman standard (for the 9th Circuit): “In order to shield employers from having to accommodate the idiosyncratic concerns of the rare hyper-sensitive employee, we hold that a female plaintiff states a prima facie case of hostile environment sexual harassment when she alleges conduct which a reasonable woman would consider sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of employment and create an abusive working environment.”
So: No concerns about eggshell plaintiffs here. Sexual harassment cases aren’t based on one person’s weird idea of what’s not threatening. Your concerns should be alleviated sir.
of course this doesn’t me3an that libertarianism is or isn’t right or wrong, but it does matter that we all have our facts sorted out. 🙂
BEE –
But, but but but! There’s got to be some reason it’s all hysterical women who can get anything they want!!
Interesting, Sharculese. I’m never gonna take employment law, but that’s good to know. 🙂
Developers^3, it seems like it is the old freedom to/freedom from dichotomy. I think that most of us would agree that your freedom from getting punched in the nose supersedes my freedom to swing my fists wherever I want to, and because of this we have, collectively enacted laws through our representative system to enforce this. We have also concluded that your freedom from harassment supersedes my freedom to harass. You seem to disagree the decision we collectively made through our representative democratic system to value safe work environments over ones in which the freedom to harass is preserved. Why is this?
@ Developer: “My argument is that giving people the power to sue employers over activities that would be considered protected free speech outside of the workplace is a bad thing.”
Why? Employees don’t have unlimited free speech rights in the workplace. They are, for example, contractually obligated to not reveal trade secrets, to not misrepresent the company, or perhaps to not promote their competitor’s products. And yes, employers can sue employees. Generally it’s easier to just fire them, I suppose. Look, there is a reason that I don’t go to work and tell customers to fuck off when they say “Merry Christmas”. Do I have the right? In my home, on my blog, on a sidewalk, during a protest- I sure as hell do. But I don’t have that right in the workplace and I’d be a fool to expect it.
And government employees are even more restricted, specifically because of the First Amendment. There is a reason why cops can’t hand out Bibles and it’s a very, very good one.
While I suspect I’d agree with you about hate speech laws, which I generally find repugnant, I also understand that there are certain circumstances in which unlimited free speech is inappropriate, harmful to individuals, or can become a sort of status quo that basically creates a pervasive system of injustice and maltreatment for an entire class of people. One for which the victims have no recourse (legally or economically), and which eventually becomes simply intolerable because of it’s magnitude. Separate but equal is one example. Sexual harassment is another.
I has no preview :/ I hope those italic tags work XD
“Question – how is feminism directly responsible for the fact that boys are underachieving academically in relation to girls? Please note that “I just think that feminism must be the reason” is not an acceptable answer.”
Cos girls distract the boys from their study by simply existing. Duh! Although, apparently boys do better academically in mixed schools, whereas girls do better in all girl schools. Moral of the story: everyone is more academically successful around girls =D
@ Developer: “My argument is that giving people the power to sue employers over activities that would be considered protected free speech outside of the workplace is a bad thing.”
But why would harassment be protected free speech outside the workplace? Again, “Sleep with me or I give your wife these photos” is BLACKMAIL, not free speech. So why should “sleep with me or lose your salary” not be a violation of rights? Continually harassing a person is stalking and harassment, correct, and this is not a simple first amendment issue? So why should it be different WITHIN the workplace?
Even ignoring the law, it’s still a good idea for a business to have a strict internal policy against sexual harassment. It improves your public image, raises productivity, helps retain employees, and keeps some “this is where you work, not your clubhouse” discipline in the workplace.
I’m not really seeing the case for a “sexual harassment tolerated here!” policy.