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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.

Oh, so then let's make it a society wide practice - if you get a job in local Amazon warehouse you are entitled to have your spouse or close family member employed as well. Let's make it a law. Yeah, I don't think so.

Far from merely entitled, if you work at any local warehouse to me they offer incentives for you to bring in additional workers from your friends and family. Stopping just shy of letting you recruit your own regiment civil war style.

You're entirely within your rights to demand that and if your market value is sufficient to command it then they will acquiesce. What's stopping you?

What is stopping me is overall morality and being judged by peers, sometimes even written ethical rules. But what amazes me is that simple renaming of a thing gets so far: it is not bad nepotism what we are doing, we are only doing "spousal hiring". Renaming things seems like a really powerful social technology of how to render written rules moot, and judging by reactions here it also works on people. Awesome.

Yeah that's right. The only two options are to legally mandate or disallow it. quite.

And that kind of nepotism is shockingly common in jobs that aren’t as strongly competed with as in academia.

University professors married to each other are unlike warehouse workers. The warehouse worker's wife can presumably find a job in town. A professor's wife who is also a professor will work at the same university or leave academia.

So there's one norm for warehouse workers and a different one for professors.

A good state of affairs can be that "everyone kinda knows, nobody makes a big fuss about it, it isn't officially condoned or supported or acknowledged, but people slightly judge the people involved in the deal and don't see it exactly aligned with the principles of a university." Plausible deniability is maintained, disbelief is suspended and a "quantum tunneling" has taken place. It's not necessarily good to separate everything into the black-and-white categories of legal (and therefore supported, and documented, and regulated and defined and socially accepted and considered moral) vs illegal (and beyond the pale and morally corrupt and unacceptable and you're an unperson for it).

Yes, this is called good old fashioned nepotism. When this manager in the team fucked his subordinate and then promoted her, everybody knew about it and many thought it was kind of piece of shit move. It also did not endear the newly promoted person in eyes of many of her colleagues. It was tolerated as lesser evil for many reasons by his superiors unfortunately. Little did I know that what he should have done was telling it transparently by saying that he was not promoting somebody for fucking his brains out, it was just normal HR benefit of "sex partner hiring" he was awarded during standard salary increase negotiations, no big deal. You see, he is really working hard and he works harder with hard-on that he needs to be motivated, his situation is special because he has no time to look for partners as he is working so much. Reading apologetics here in this thread I'd guess he would probably have much more defenders, silly him.

This isn't a manager hiring someone he's fucking. It's an employer hiring the spouse of someone they're pursuing as part of a compensation package. I don't think he difference is particularly subtle.

It is almost exactly the same scenario. There are three people: hiring manager, then there is the superstar fucker and then there is candidate that is being fucked. Superstar is pressuring hiring manager to hire his mistress "or else"- he leaves along with grants on his research or whatever. I can even construct it a such: superstar researcher with millions in grants comes to the hiring office that he fucks this student and she may be leaving for a job in other city. If they do not hire his mistress as an adjunct then he is going with her along with grants because he loves her. Now the same happens with my example of corporate manager: he fucks this young intern and she tells him that she has a good job lined up in another city. Manager sees this as a threat so he pressures his colleague in other department to hire his mistress, he even gets tacit approval from his own superiors because he is now responsible for crucial project and nobody wants to rock the boat for such a silly thing. How exactly is this different: except the fact that university has this as a written policy?

I don’t think the difference exists. Partly because the “spouse” appears to be just someone the candidate is fucking. Mostly because my objection is that one of the responsibilities of people in a hierarchy is to behave well to the people below them. That means giving applicants a fair shake and it means promoting people because of seniority, talent and experience, not because of who they’re having sex with.

Okay, I guess I'll spell it out for you. A manager promoting someone they are fucking (assuming it is not because they are the best candidate for the job) is presumably doing it as quid pro quo for the ass, to improve their own economic situation as they are sharing an income with the person they're fucking, and/or as a sign to future potential romantic partners that putting out pays out.

A manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire. They aren't benefiting themselves except insofar as performing highly at their job (securing top talent) benefits them, which is precisely the purpose of their relationship with the university.

It not only isn't the same thing it is exactly the opposite.

You are literally describing the same situation. Manager/Superstar researcher is using his superstar influence in order to secure job for somebody he fucks is the same as saying:

Manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire.

Yeah, that is the point. Manager is negotiating with the company (hiring manager) to secure new business relationship (for his mistress and for himself to the extent of getting potentially a good fuck as a result) and it is in best interest of the company (or else he leaves in the middle of the most important project to competitor or whatever) and he is utilizing various tools at his disposal (e.g. a lunch with hiring manager and his manager etc.) to secure that relationship.

I understand corporatespeak, no need to remind me that "spousal hiring" and "best interest of the company" means "hire somebody I fuck" and "do as I say or else something bad happens". Nobody with IQ more than 80 falls for this shit.

Do you think it is wrong for Superstar Researcher to use his superstar influence to just straightforwardly secure a larger paycheck? Or other terms of employment concessions?

If he tries to secure larger paycheck, then I see nothing wrong. If he tries to secure hot assistant that will give him a blowjob whenever he feels like it or he requires that university signs contract with his brother's firm for security services or that the university hires his nephew for new research vacancy - then yes, I think those concessions are wrong. I hope I will not have to go into the weeds of why I see it as wrong.

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You are being utilitarian, I am being deontological. It doesn’t matter who benefits, it’s not a moral way to handle your employees.

To put it another way, there are many, many things that a manager can do which is in the best interests of their employer (corruption, assassination, faking emission tests) but being good business doesn’t make those actions morally acceptable.

I'm actually not being utilitarian. I think that the hiring manager is employed to make a good faith effort to attract the best talent that he can within certain ethical guidelines and spousal hires fall within those guidelines. Even if the hiring manager had some move that fell outside of those ethical guidelines to create higher utility or even if the hiring manager decided that he could create higher global utility by ignoring his task for the university, I would think that he should do what he promised to do when he took the job and hire the best candidate that he can get with the tools at his disposal to do so, and it would be dishonorable to do otherwise.

It is possible for things to be a reasonable idea in some circumstances without it making sense to make it mandatory in all vaguely similar situations. It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.

It makes far more sense in an Amazon warehouse, where what’s needed is a functional human body, than in academia, which is highly prestigious and where your output depends heavily on your specific background, interests and talent. The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.

It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.

This, or the living wage, works for me. As you say, the difficulty is getting there.

The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.

This is why it doesn't make sense for Amazon. In the university case, the university is choosing on the one hand between a superstar for a prestigious position and a somewhat-worse candidate for a lesser position (or even a useless sinecure), and on the other hand between a much inferior candidate for the prestigious candidate and the best candidate (or nobody) for the lesser position. In the Amazon case, Amazon is choosing between essentially interchangeable candidates for the primary position; there's no incentive for them to hire a spouse.

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