Comment by gruez
1 year ago
>If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild.
How's that working with police and/or teacher's unions?
Moreover, it's unclear how "professional ethics" would interact with legal and/or business decisions. If you think it's unethical and the legal department says it's A-okay, then what? For professions like engineering you could plausibly make the case that engineers should have the final say on decisions involving safety or structural soundness, but that's less convincing for business decisions. For instance would civil engineers be expected to reject building a luxury condo on "professional ethics" grounds because the the building would gentrify the neighborhood and displace marginalized groups?
I think a union is a tool like a gun. A gun can be used to steal money. A gun can be used to keep your home safe. A gun can be used to protect your country from foreign invaders. The gun is amoral.
How do you stop a bad guy with a gun? Ironically, the people generally most anti-union know the answer to that question the best.
The police union demonstrates that unions work. They have completely removed police oversight and made officers exist generally above the law and provided incredible overtime pay. That is not an anti-union argument, that's a why the hell aren't you in a union argument.
Teachers unions are more complicated because teachers care more about the children than themselves and that creates a problem because in order to act in their own self interest by exercising union power they have to harm children and maybe even a generation of them. Of course one could also cogently argue that the general undesirability of being a teacher is and has been harming children for decades.