Employees who decline genetic testing could face penalties under proposed bill

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/03/11/employees-who-decline-genetic-testing-could-face-penalities-under-proposed-bill/

by kungfudoi • 9 years ago

242 156 9 years ago

washingtonpost.com

emodendroket2• 9 years ago

Absolutely insane policy.

apathy2• 9 years ago

This is severely fucked. Wellness programs do little or no good but do allow employers to offer incentives for participation. This on the other hand is GATTACA level fuckery. GINA took many years to be put in place; now the proposal put forward will potentially cause people to lose health coverage or their job based on things they cannot control. Potentially their kids, too, since these idiotic "wellness" programs are administered by poorly regulated third parties.

This is very, very bad stuff.

whiskyant• 9 years ago

In a world with mandatory genetic testing, genetic engineering in order to "give your child the best possible start" will definitely ring true.

M_Grey12• 9 years ago

I wonder what traits we'll program for? Intelligence, maybe, but that's tough to manage and I'd guess that without a complete understanding you'd get a lot of madness. Physical traits will be easier to select for, especially gross ones like size and overall strength. Selecting out congenital illness would be another step.

If you could though, if you had a clear understanding of how Trait A and cluster of genes/epigenetic factors Z were related... then what traits would be valued? Some would want attractive, intelligent offspring. After a while though, I wonder if people would really want that?

If you're the kind of person who wants to control the development of your kid's moral/religious/political/etc. views (and lots of people do) then you're not going to get what you want out of that. You might want to select for traits that are just... like you.

M_Grey12• 9 years ago

To be fair, kids born today are pretty fucked for so many reasons. In a way, this kind of dystopian future is averted when you consider the rate of accelerating ocean warming, permafrost melting, etc. It seems likely that all problems short of that which is going to end us, sort of gets subsumed.

All of these social problems are in the context of a failing ecosystem that is being increasingly overtaxed. So... the kids never had a chance.

ryanwaggoner5• 9 years ago

Is there any credible research that climate change is going to "end us"?

adolph• 9 years ago

At some level I think to myself "first they came for the druggies and I was too young to say anything, just pissed in a cup like everyone else, then they came for smokers and I didn't say anything, then they. . . ."

Where is this all going and in what combination of futures does it turn out well?

vkreso• 9 years ago

Gattaca?

I must say that I am extremely interested in the forthcoming genetic policy debate.

quickben• 9 years ago

From the outside, this whole thing appears completely SNAFU.

It's right up there with gender/religion/race discrimination, but, everybody is discussing is calmly.

greglindahl• 9 years ago

Recent discussion with 87 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843364

woogiewonka• 9 years ago

I would have never imagined it would come to this. Now I'm reading about it and can't believe what I'm seeing. This is worrisome on a whole new level.

state_less• 9 years ago

We need to get some people to the nascar track, put the foam hats on folks, it's time to start yelling fire! This is Republican policy taxing your family unless you give your family's bloodline to the corporation.

Insurance company: Looks like you might have an elevated risk of heart attack. Your premium will be half your paycheck. Sorry about the bad luck, buddy. God bless and send our love to your defective children.

drawkbox• 9 years ago

We've got to separate healthcare from employers before this goes to far. Companies have no business in your health and we still tie health insurance to employment as a legacy error not a benefit. Many problems arise from healthcare provided from the job such as ageism, culling the sick, making it harder to change jobs or start companies, and losing healthcare as you change jobs, not to mention helping the fixed price / backroom market that is healthcare. We'll never fix anything until we unbind healthcare from employers and make it more consumer focused independently (single payer or completely independent/private).

We don't get any other personal insurance from work. We need to outlaw allowing companies to facilitate the healthcare plans and go fully independent like all other insurance (auto, home, life etc). Benefits can be paid in extra money not false benefits that lead to invasions of privacy.

Why would you want your company knowing anything about your health? We supposedly live in a free society but then work at mini feudal/sharecropper empires with dictators and barely any say in what is acceptable.

alanh• 9 years ago

I completely agree with your sentiment. “We don't get any other personal insurance from work” isn't quite true, though. Many companies include at least minimal life & disability insurance.

programmarchy• 9 years ago

The history behind our current nonsensical scheme started with FDR capping wages during the great depression, which spurred companies to offer "perks" like healthcare to recruit talent. An example of one market intervention leading to another, and another, ad nauseam.

Totally agree that insurance should be decoupled from corporations. The way the "market" is regulated hampers people from working independently or starting small businesses because it's so damn expensive for individuals to pay for healthcare themselves.

StClaire• 9 years ago

Kaiser of Kaiser Permanente started out making ships during WW2

AbrahamParangi• 9 years ago

The specifics of the American healthcare system aside, what leads you to believe that the problem is regulation? By essentially any metric, state provided (single-payer) healthcare is the best-known solution to the healthcare problem. Why is there any reason to believe that there's too much state intervention as opposed to, say, too little?

rpedroso• 9 years ago

There are a few problems with this explanation:

1. FDR did not propose a wage cap until 1942, 3 years after the Great Depression had ended. It was a temporary wartime fundraising effort (and was quite popular with the public). In fact, health insurance really first came into existence during the Great Depression (mostly to ensure physicians and hospitals got paid).

2. FDR's wage cap did not pass.

What actually happened was the passing of the the Stabilization Act of 1942, which gave FDR a power (that he invoked) to freeze wages and salaries during the war. The freeze was deeply unpopular with the labor movement, who threatened mass strikes. As a compromise, congress exempted health insurance (and other benefits like PTO and pensions) from the freeze.

This was certainly a contributing factor (proportion of US population with healthcare roughly doubled from 1940 to 1945), but ignores the other factors that prompted the rise of employer sponsored healthcare. Indeed, by 1945, less than a quarter of Americans had health insurance.

Rather, the two largest contributors to employer-sponsored health insurance was the demand of health coverage by labor unions and the 1954 legislative change that made health insurance tax exempt.

james10712• 9 years ago

There are many things that started 70 years ago which have long since gone.

So, there must be forces which sustain the US model, where the employer pays for medical insurance.

Also, I fail to see how employers offering medical insurance should make insurance for an individual any more expensive.

So, while I appreciate the sentiment that something is clearly wrong, the two things that you mentioned are not the cause.

yummyfajitas4• 9 years ago

In fact, Obamacare (which significantly mitigates the healthcare related costs of changing jobs) had no noticeable effect on startup formation or job separations. I've seen similarly no effect from Romneycare.

https://images.washingtonpost.com/?url=http://img.washington...

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100816.png

Do you have any evidence (as opposed to hypothetical anecdote) suggesting this is actually a significant factor?

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

In fact, Obamacare (which significantly mitigates the healthcare related costs of changing jobs)

The ACA doesn't all that significantly affect the healthcare-related impact of switching jobs (it slightly mitigates the healthcare related cost of being a difficult-to-insure individual and moving from a job that provides a group plan to one that doesn't), and the parts of it that did have some impact on that were have not been in place long enough to have substantially affected people's expectations and behavior.

jedberg• 9 years ago

Places I've worked have provide life, health, AD&D, pet, dental, vision, and lawyer insurance. So yeah, it's a lot more than health.

But I still agree with you -- we need to figure out a way to separate insurance from a job. Although I don't like the idea of just precluding them from offering it. If a company wants to offer insurance we shouldn't stop them. We just need to make it so they have little advantage to do so.

gambiting• 9 years ago

I work in the UK with excellent national health service, but I still get private health insurance from my employer - mostly so that I can see a specialist quicker than through NHS. But it's really not too much of a perk for my employer to provide, we have the highest tier of insurance and it costs about ~$400/year.

XorNot2• 9 years ago

"figure out" - the rest of the first world has implemented this.

Pick a model, deploy, tweak for circumstance.

There's not a learning problem here.

codecamper• 9 years ago

In the US many have a very flawed way of thinking: if we give more power to companies, than we won't need government. I've met so many bright & creative programmer types who even believe this.

Government should exist to protect it's people and environment. It should have the long term in mind & work with other governments to do the same, creating a level playing field for the companies to be within.

enraged_camel• 9 years ago

>I've met so many bright & creative programmer types who even believe this.

I would posit that they aren't very bright if they actually believe it.

seanp2k2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I was just having a conversation with someone today about how it never works out in practice. There is no free market, and in anything approaching it, companies simply e.g. collude to keep prices high or make things unnecessarily complex. Look at cell phone plans and what "unlimited" means, for example. Not that the wireless ISP industry is unregulated (far from it), but why not just start your own and fix it? Free market, right? Start a healthcare company and undercut everyone because free market. Start an ISP and take down Comcast, etc.

The point of a business is to make a profit. This is many times at odds with what people actually need to e.g. Stay alive. I'm not sure why many people keep attempting to suggest businesses as a solution to the modern basic needs of humans. They're fundamentally misaligned.

I guess there is still debate around if a modern society should let people suffer and die because they did not generate or inherit enough money to pay for medical care. It saddens me that our baseline of giving a shit about other people in our society is pretty low in America, even though we have far beyond the means to do so. Enough people with enough power here would rather have a few extra % in their shell company bank accounts instead of increasing the standard of living for the people of the society in which they exist.

"A rising tide lifts all boats"

UnoriginalGuy• 9 years ago

The US's entire concept of "freedom" is wrapped up in this too.

If you take a service, for example household track/rubbish collection, that was being provided inexpensively via a mandatory household tax and move that service to a private company who bills households individually even if it costs more, Americans view this as "progress" that is "more free" (because you could theoretical "opt out").

A lot of other places simply view this as handing a private company a monopoly that used to be a public good (i.e. required but cheap); and because they as citizens now have less money and the same service level, they only lost in terms of quality of life ("freedom" isn't a metric here). Plus the externalities of making it optional, like having people illegally discard their trash by the side of the road.

This same thinking is prevalent throughout the US, from HOAs, to utilities (electric, gas, water, trash), to healthcare, to public transport, and so on. And none of it is REALLY about capitalism as these companies aren't competing with anyone else by the nature of the deal that was struck when the public service was sold. All people care about is "Keep government out of my X (even if it costs 2x as much)."

emodendroket2• 9 years ago

I get the sentiment but a lot of people do get life insurance through work.

dalbasal• 9 years ago

Employer coupled insurance has certain pathologies. But, I think that insurance as a funding model has is a bigger problem.

"It's a terrible Hobson's choice between affordable health insurance and protecting one's genetic privacy."

Genetics is just another way of getting useful information for pricing insurance efficiently, guessing future medical expenses more accurately. To the extent that pricing becomes efficient it ceases to be insurance. This is basically the case for sick people. Their medical costs are known and high. Price efficiency puts more people in that boat. Known high costs expensive. Known low costs cheap. In an insurance based system, information is priced in.

Insurance is good for costs that are unlikely but high. In medicine, we're looking for a system that caters to all medical scenarios regardless of likelihood. Insurance only makes sense for some.

quantum_state• 9 years ago

It's simply insane to propose such a bill ... they may as well as people to sell body parts to cover healthcare costs ... it's simply not acceptable!

witty_username5• 9 years ago

What is wrong with people selling their organs?

nisa2• 9 years ago

Almost 50% of US citizens don't have enough money on the bank to replace a broken 400$ item.

How many would out of desperation i.e. healthcare costs for relatives sell an organ?

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secr...

throwaway198743• 9 years ago

Wow! I wonder how long it will be before genetic tests become as pedestrian as finger prints.

randyrand• 9 years ago

If two consenting adults want to make a agreement that includes exchange of their own genetic information, I really don't see the issue.

There are plenty of employers that don't require genetic information. If you don't want to give your genetic information to your employer it's simple, don't work there. Companies that can't hire employees go out of business. This is a self correction 'problem'. We don't need legislation here. Legislation almost always fails edge cases and is not needed for self correcting issues.

erlehmann_• 9 years ago

If two consenting adults want to make a agreement that includes exchange of their own genetic information, I really don't see the issue.

The problem is one of bargaining power: Consent must be given freely – but in cases where one party in an exchange has a lot more bargaining power, the other party often will agree to something because of fear of retribution or a threat of force. Example: If an employee is told by the boss he or she will be fired if they do not have sex right now, any consent in that scenario is not given freely, but under duress.

witty_username5• 9 years ago

The boss is threatening to abuse their power if they do not have sex. An employee can sue the boss for violating the contract.

but in cases where one party in an exchange has a lot more bargaining power, the other party often will agree to something because of fear of retribution or a threat of force.

You seem to be implying this is bad thing but it makes sense that a company (could be thousands of people) should have more bargaining power than an employee (1 person). What is the threat of force here? That is illegal. What is the retribution here if an employee chooses a different employer because the employee wants to decline testing?

marchenko• 9 years ago

The other problem is that it is impossible to contract to give solely _your own_ genetic information: your DNA necessarily informs on your relatives in a predictable, probabilistic manner. Should they be informed that a third party can reasonably infer salient features of their genome? Should they have to consent?

op00to• 9 years ago

If this law is passed, every insurance company will jack their rates up to make participation in wellness plans all but a requirement for those in the bottom 98%. Your employer will not have a choice of non-GATTACA health plans.

known• 9 years ago

Is it applicable to Law makers?

brokenmasonjars2• 9 years ago

I suppose if this is passed it goes to the many reasons why I enjoy living my life trading with my own funds without the stability of holding a career with an employer. So far no drug tests is pretty much the winner but if genetic testing bill becomes law then I'm pretty sure that tops drug testing. I'm not a fan of background checks and I refuse to give references..but that's easy for me since I'm not applying to jobs. I wish more people collectively refused to participate in the whole reference thing as well. Nonetheless, I suspect this bill will become law and more things to occur to make working for employers even more invasive.

Buge• 9 years ago

Why are you against references?

My current job didn't require drug tests or references. Just resume + whiteboard coding.

brokenmasonjars2• 9 years ago

It's more of a personal preference than overt philosophical stance. I just don't think it's anyone's business where I'm applying or may end up working (I don't want the references to know where I'm applying or may end up working).

Edit: switched "stance" for "preference"

chimen• 9 years ago

Employers collecting on death insurances might get a higher ROI now with access to such information isn't it? This gets too far.

Exofunctor2• 9 years ago

While I think health insurance shouldn't be attached to employers, I don't really have an objection to insurance companies using genetic testing. This is certainly an unpopular opinion here, but as someone who believes that medical care is a service, not a right: I think it's unfair to force people to subsidize the healthcare of other people, regardless of the mechanism used.

When you have car insurance, the insurance companies are allowed to use statistical techniques to predict how much you are going to cost them. Competition between insurance companies involves treading the line between beating the price of other insurance companies while charging slightly more than the customer is expected to cost.

If we let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people. Of course, it would also get drastically less expensive for healthy people. From a moral perspective, I think this is preferable, but obviously not everyone will agree.

Now, from a utilitarian perspective, these two possibilities seem roughly equivalent at first glance. However, I'd argue that the latter (where insurance companies are allowed to set prices like car insurance) has a number of (significant) positive side effects.

The largest side effect is that it incentivizes customer health improvement. A lot of health risks, including at least the top 6 causes of death worldwide (heart disease, stroke, lung infections, COPD, respiratory cancers, diabetes) can be substantially mitigated by personal choices such as diet and exercise. If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better. Let the market do the heavy lifting! This is exactly the sort of thing that the market excels at. Society benefits from healthier people, but in almost all countries rich enough to have insurance (including the US and nations with socialized healthcare), there is no mechanism to incentivize this! An actual insurance market would do the job.

electricEmu2• 9 years ago

I think it's unfair to force people to subsidize the healthcare of other people, regardless of the mechanism used.

This is literally car insurance in the United States. You buy insurance, put money up front for your own health, or risk paying a penality. It's also literally the ACA.

If let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people.

Unaffordable. My mother in law died from cancer recently. Coverage was impossible before; in America's free market that constantly pays out dividends. The ACA was the first time any insurance was affordable.

I'm sorry, but the views you've put forth appear to diminish the plight of others who aren't young and healthy. Those views and policies would kill my friend afflicted with an autoimmune disorder.

_Edit: spelling_

Exofunctor2• 9 years ago

I can't imagine how people have such an incorrect view of how insurance works.

No, car insurance is not you subsidizing other people. Car insurance is you paying in proportion to your own estimated risk. That means if your expected costs are 5x higher (nicer car, young driver, etc.) you pay 5x more.

Medical insurance in the US emphatically does not work this way. More expensive people don't pay proportionately more than cheap people, meaning that the expensive people are being subsizidized. You should be alarmed at the fact that you apparently fundamentally misunderstood the way insurance works in an open market, or what the ACA is. The only part of the ACA that is even reminiscent of car insurance is the individual mandate, which is actually way worse than car insurance because you don't need to buy car insurance just for being alive. You only need car insurance if you drive on public roads.

It's too bad that your friend has a disease, but I'd rather have them pay for it than pass the bill off to a bunch of innocent people who aren't sick. If you choose to have tunnel vision and focus on health alone, it's worth noting that the second-order effects of making other people's lives more expensive will also include worsened health from poorer nutrition, increased stress, less frequent medical consultation, etc.

mantas5• 9 years ago

If let health insurance companies do this, then yes, healthcare would get substantially more expensive for very risky/unhealthy people.

Which is more risky/unhealthy - obese couch potato or mountain biker?

The only cheap way of living would be sitting on a couch and doing nothing. But then you gotta work out. Infinite loop :)

icebraining5• 9 years ago

A lot of health risks, including at least the top 6 causes of death worldwide (heart disease, stroke, lung infections, COPD, respiratory cancers, diabetes) can be substantially mitigated by personal choices such as diet and exercise

That's true, but genetics is literally the opposite: it's the one thing you definitively can't choose to change. So your argument doesn't work in the case being discussed.

If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better.

One would expect that all the existing drawbacks of being morbidly obese would encourage a lot of people to start eating better. Why would this specific drawback work when others haven't?

ohstopitu• 9 years ago

Because spending $200/m hits you more than just the thought of future illness.

I don't support this bill, I do want this idea explored / discussed - as in, why should healthy people subsidize costs of insurance for the unhealthy? (as in, is not fair is it?)

nisa2• 9 years ago

If you had to pay an extra $200/mo to your insurance company because you were morbidly obese, one would expect that this would encourage a lot of people to start eating better.

That homo economicus myth is still going strong? Mental issues and addiction don't exist?

Let the market do the heavy lifting!

What if the market decides it's not worth the risk and costs to cover the unhealthy? What do we do with the disabled that need more medical supervision?

This is exactly the sort of thing that the market excels at.

...in some idealised simplified textbook version of reality with simple linear algebra.

DanBC2• 9 years ago

Look at people who need an organ transplant.

Before transplant they have low quality of life. Their treatment is very expensive. They struggle to get an organ. They go through extensive support to help them realise that after the new organ they'll need to take meds for the rest of their life.

They have a very expensive operation that usually requires someone else to die and donate an organ.

After the surgery they need to take medication for the rest of their life.

This medication is the thing that prevents their new organ from being rejected; the thing that stops them going back to that expensive and painful life with a failed organ.

Currently the biggest caused of failure in transplanted organs is that people do not continue to take the meds.

This is the case in the UK where people don't pay for the surgery, and it's the case in the US where people pay considerable amounts for the surgery.

The money that people pay or the consequences for non-compliance don't seem to do much to change behaviour.

kondro• 9 years ago

Can we genetically engineer our kids too so they stand a chance in the future?

moonshinefe• 9 years ago

This article is very scant on details and seems to muddy the waters by comparing things like cholesterol and smoking to genetic screening which doesn't seem to help things.

If how they've framed it is true however, and this may become law, that's the final nail in the coffin for the GOP isn't it? What an absolutely nasty piece of legislation. I feel like the GOP got so much power since it's the usual "sick of the last 8 years" thing--but I think that may reverse fast if laws such as this start hitting people.

Then again, I've unfortunately overestimated the US voters in the past. Please don't let it happen.

tray5• 9 years ago

I'm sorry to all Americans who may read this and get ruffled, but what the actual fuck is wrong with your political landscape and attitudes towards workers rights? Why don't you have unions? Why do Americans seem to hate unions? Why don't you have an active political party representing workers? Why don't you have an active movement to prevent your employer from becoming overseer of your entire life? All I see day in and day out from America is employers and capitalists finding another way to fuck the workers and there is not one iota of widespread organised resistance to this (or any of your other disgusting work legislation like "at will employment" or your complete desire to shoot yourselves in the foot with univ.healthcare) at all.

Seriously what is the problem with your country that you've managed to manoeuvre yourselves as employees into a position where you are totally unable to counter the repeated and ceaseless violation of your ability to live with some sort of security and expectation of privacy against your employer. Your country is amazing, your people are lovely. But your politics and attitudes towards work, workers and their rights is abhorrent and disgusting.

The thought of legislation like this arising in my country (Australia), where your employer is given free range to look into your genetic privacy is just unfathomable to me, and if it did happen there would be widespread protests organised by unions and political parties representing workers rights. Truly the attitude of seemingly the majority of Americans towards themselves and workers rights is gross, and frankly quite sad. You will only ever stop these sorts of gross violations of workers rights with even bargaining power between employee and employer, and there is only one way to achieve that (workers unionising)

kogepathic• 9 years ago

But your politics and attitudes towards work, workers and their rights is abhorrent and disgusting.

Because the government providing anything for you is seen as a form of welfare or regulation that "kills jobs."

Never mind that any senior in the US benefits hugely from Social Security and Medicare, making any proposed reform of those programs nearly political suicide. Just look at efforts to raise the retirement age if you think I'm kidding.

So, not to sound like a whiney millennial, but the older generation already has programs which are quite socialist. However some Americans have still been duped into believing the "American dream" applies to them (it probably did if you were male and white in the 1950s) and thus anything that helps other people is "socialism" or "government overreach"

Nevermind that the Republicans will happily reach into bedrooms (abortion) and bathrooms (transgender rights) to affect people's life.

It's a complete farce to watch this unfolding in the US from Canada. Yeah, our healthcare isn't perfect, I don't think anyone said it was, but I don't have to worry about bankruptcy if I go to the hospital. Nor do I have to worry about politicians fucking me over w.r.t. healthcare.

techsupporter2• 9 years ago

I hesitate to throw out this quote because it may come across as a "hot take" but I think that John Steinbeck said it best:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Another quote I've heard is that "extremists become more extreme, not less, as problems come closer to solutions."

"Socialism" and "extremists" don't really apply but the sentiments do. Unions sprang up in the United States as a counterweight to outright and absolute worker abuse. Things we--those resident in the U.S.--now take as "absolute," like child labor laws and the 40-hour workweek, were earned as a result of those early struggles.

We've had it really good here for really long, comparatively, so I think that a lot of people see these kinds of abuses as "won't happen to me"-ism so they're not interested in sacrificing even a little to ensure that the abuses happen to virtually[0] no one.

Going back to unions, a lot of people I know--in the IT industry, obviously--flatly refuse to recognize that a union could be a good thing because jobs, salaries, and opportunities are all plentiful. We're not "abused" because employers know that we can just hop jobs and recover. (Never mind things like the gaming industry or the "crunch" period or, say, Uber.) Because of the illusion of choice, unions aren't valued. (I say "illusion" because witness what happened in the doldrums of the early 2000s. When every employer, or even a bunch of large employers, pull back at the same time, there is no choice.)

For others, things like unions or some form of collective action or even just "group health care run by the government" are seen as impinging on the basic rights to shoot--metaphor intentionally chosen--our own feet off however we like, consequences be damned because other countries are just wrong and the United States is a Special Snowflake.

Or something like that but maybe with a little less bite.

0 - I say virtually because people will always find a way to take advantage of others but there's a lot to be said for pushing to prevent that as much as possible. America doesn't seem to do that very much.

pdkl952• 9 years ago

a lot of people I know--in the IT industry, obviously--flatly refuse to recognize that a union could be a good thing

Usually this includes knee-jerk arguments against dues, mandated wages/salary, and other aspects of existing/older unions. It seems like many people implicit assume that a union must involve a list a of traditional practices.

A union can be what you want it to be. If you don't want it to cover something, then leave it out. Charter the union to only address the specific problems that need to be addressed. Maybe limit "crunch" periods to healthy lengths of time near an actual product release? Maybe include a specific deterrent against extreme problems like collusion to fix salaries while otherwise ignoring salary completely?

As for dues and management costs, isn't that the kind of problem that is easy with modern computers and telecommunication? How much management is even needed for an IT union? In the past dues were needed to hire people to do the paperwork, send out notices, etc. Today, that work is a weekend Ruby On Rails project. After a specific purpose union is setup, are dues even necessary?

mark_l_watson• 9 years ago

Corporate and elite interests get away with this because of the propaganda of 'American exceptionalism' - people are brainwashed into thinking that we have it so much better that other countries, so don't complain. The news media is a powerful tool of control. Not watching any news at all on TV would yield a more accurate world view, that is, the news is a negative information source.

inh3• 9 years ago

As an American, I believe the fundamental reason you don't see widespread organized resistance against lack of universal healthcare and employer benefiting work legislation is due to the absolute lack of social programs.

Americans cannot organize because of the lack of universal healthcare and work legislation such as "at will employment." Doing such would risk one's job and healthcare. There is no recourse once one is unemployed in the US, especially if one does not have a significant amount of money saved. The government and corporations have our back against the wall.

nthcolumn• 9 years ago

Given her own lowly origins Virginia Foxx (opposed aid for Katrina, a bill against hate crime, hates gays - nice) you'd think someone like her would be against such forced disclosures. It won't affect her because she is nearly dead but her grandchildren will almost certainly carry defects causing hemoglobin mutations for sickle cell anemia, neurogenetic disorders and have increased risk for chromosomal disorders such as Downs. Republicans voting for this kind of widespread intrusion is like turkeys voting for xmas.

westmeal• 9 years ago

A BILL: To clarify rules relating to nondiscriminatory workplace wellness programs.
prevention programs that provide incentives, rewards, rebates, surcharges, penalties, or other inducements

How on earth is any of this nondiscriminatory?

I_am_neo• 9 years ago

With logic like that, forced abortions could be "workplace wellness" programs.

andrepd• 9 years ago

Compare with https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/03/08/genetic-testi...

Employees who decline genetic testing could face penalties under proposed bill

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