This deals with equal opportunity for federal contractors. It's not directly tied to labor in the private sector.
But also, yes. I feel like maybe it's better in the long run if the federal government isn't looking out for people, and they get accustomed to organizing themselves enough to demand better treatment from their employers without anyone needing to hand it to them.
Maybe.
IDK, maybe I am just trying to rationalize what is guaranteed to happen regardless.
Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, prohibits discrimination in employment by federal contractors based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity in hiring. It aims to promote non-discriminatory practices in the workplace for those doing business with the federal government.
Joan Westenberg’s framing of this problem as “technical debt” I think is spot-on. Because congress (especially the Senate) has become unable to pass bills, and states are no longer able to amend the constitution, we have amassed a ton of technical debt in our laws, patched only by executive orders that can be easily swept away by the next executive.
Musk is a racist white South African who grew up in the ownership class and inherited an emerald mine. Behind the Bastards explains just how bad it gets.
He's going to have to proclivities towards elitism and towards preserving his privilege. And when that is challenged by the rise of class consciousness, it means he's going to fall on the side of fascist autocracy, oligarchy and monarchism.
No salute is necessary to determine where Mr. Musk falls in this paradigm, and he would rather kill, die and end the world than give up his wealth and power. I hope we don't have to oblige him, but peaceful efforts to separate the super-wealthy from their ill-gotten gains have not historically succeeded, where guillotines (and hunting down any potential legal heirs, without remorse) have been more consistently effective.
The trick is getting from that moment to one that distributes that wealth and power diffusely or into actually-for-real public-serving institutions. Historically, we fail to do that part and have to kill a sequence of dictators scrambling to own the One Ring for themselves.