Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!bloom-beacon!ora!ambar
From: ambar@ora.ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Affirmative Action
Message-ID: <1019@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: 11 Oct 89 21:38:53 GMT
References: <1989Sep28.023614.10776@rpi.edu> <15685@duke.cs.duke.edu> <1989Sep30.185858.22432@rpi.edu> <945@uvaarpa.virginia.edu> <2163@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Reply-To: ncar.UCAR.EDU!mtxinu!ed (Ed Gould)
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Lines: 29
Approved: ambar@ora.com

>Corporations don't use physical violence to further their ends, governments
>do.

To believe that corporations do not use physical violence is to be
blind to history.  How many murders, batteries, and assaults were
carried out directly by corporations during the last half of the 19th
and first half of the 20th centuries, right here in the United States?
More than I can count.

There may indeed be differences between government employers and
private ones, but use of violence is not one that reflects favorably on
private employers.  In fact, I expect that many fewer non-military
employees of government (at any level) in the U.S. have faced physical
violence than have privatly-employeed members of labor unions.

It might also be the case that a worker may not quit a state job in
under a totalitarian government, but quitting one's job is hardly a
viable option for many workers, even in this "most free" of nations.
Consider a coal miner in a town with no industry but coal mining.  How
realistic is it to say "I'll quit" when the employer know that there is
no other job available?

How did this wind up in soc.feminism, anyway?

-- 
Ed Gould                    mt Xinu, 2560 Ninth St., Berkeley, CA  94710  USA
ed@mtxinu.COM		    +1 415 644 0146

"I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady.  I'll fight them as an engineer."