Author: stevenattewell

Could you explain the Versailles strategy

Sure. 

The Versailles strategy – which isn’t unique to Early Modern France; I think the sankin-kōtai system of the Tokugawa shogunate is similar enough in purpose and effect that it qualifies – was a strategy for monarchies to gain power over the nobility through the exercise of (mostly) soft power, rather than crushing them by military force. 

The basic idea is this: bring the whole of the nobility together into a very large court (the court at Versailles included 6,000-7,000 people when you add together the royal family, royal officials, courtiers, and servants; compare this to the early medieval court of Charlesmagne, which amounted to a few hundred people). Instead of the king going out on progress to visit his subjects, his subjects would come to live at Versailles instead. 

This change had a number of consequences: 

  • Reduction of the economic independence of the nobility: Living at Versailles in the style benefiting a nobleman or noblewoman was incredibly expensive. Not only did it require you to establish a second household – with Louis XIV as your landlord charging you rent – but the official rules of Versailles required a particularly high-spending lifestyle: “The king insisted that every courtier be well dressed on all occasions: a death, a birthday, or a marriage in his family required that everyone wear new clothes.” (Versailles: A History, Robert Abrams) Moreover, while you were away at Versailles, you weren’t spending time on your estate maximizing your income, and the scissors of increasing spending and stagnant or declining incomes trapped a lot of the nobility in debt.
  • And once you were in debt, you were in Louis’ clutches. Because working was out of the question, the only way to earn additional money to help pay off your debts was through a royal post or the like, and those were Louis’ to give and take away. Moreover, residents of Versailles were spared from various forms of taxation and were legally protected from having their property seized for non-payment of debt – this is how Louis initially enticed the nobility to move – but that meant that at any time, Louis could evict you from Versailles and throw you to the wolves.
  • Reduction in the political independence of the nobility: at the same time, living away from your base of power meant that you became less important back at home. After all, you weren’t there making all the of the important day-to-day decisions, but the King’s intendant was. 
  • More importantly, living in Versailles meant that the king controlled your political environment. While you might think that being surrounded by the rest of the nobility of France in close physical proximity to the King’s person might give rise to assassination or coup d’état, the reality was that you were living in the King’s palace surrounded by his guards and very far away from your feudal levies, and you had to obey his rules, which by the way kept you constantly busy in various rituals and ceremonies from the time the king got up in the morning to the time he went to bed at night, and let the king observe who was there and who wasn’t. And if that wasn’t enough to keep people loyal, he also had his spies open everyone’s mail, and listen at everyone’s doors, and he could order you arrested at pretty much any time he wanted?

So why would anyone sign up for this system? 

Well, in addition to those nice taxation and debt privileges, Louis simply made it a requirement that if you wanted anything from the king – command in his armies, help with public works in your area, help with a legal case, etc. – you had to come and ask him in person. Which meant coming to Versailles and taking part in the rituals, and since getting an audience took forever, you’d better get an apartment, and so it goes…

Just as importantly, after a certain point, it was the place that the nobility wanted to live. Did you want to make a good marriage? Versailles was where the most eligible matches lived. Did you want to live a magnificent lifestyle? Louis spent a LOT of money on making Versailles the most ostentatious and magnificent palace in Europe, not just in terms of architecture and gardens, but the best entertainments, the best scholars and artists, the best tailors and craftsmen, and so on and so forth. Did you want a political career? You couldn’t really do it out in the provinces anymore, so you might as well go to Versailles and play the game. 

What would be your verdict on Jonas Jr? Was he a good person? Or at least a better person than his father?

He was less selfish and amoral than his father (although he’s still a paternalistic dick in a lot of ways), but I think it’s significant that Jonas Jr’s accomplishments are of two varieties – consumer tech (which is a pretty clear slap at Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley self-regard) and trying to honor his father’s legacy. 

The latter of these – whether it’s the museum on Spider Skull Island or Gargantua-2 – all come crashing down, because the legacy they’re trying to uphold is tainted at its core. 

I have a question about medieval royalty that I have been unable to find out through google and I hope you can help me. Is it true that royalty (and the aristocracy) would often have others dress them? And if so why?

Yes, it is true. Partially, it was an outgrowth of having servants in the first place – they also didn’t cook for themselves, and so on. Partially, it was because the kind of clothing that royals and aristos wore was exceedingly complicated and was much easier to put on and take off with help. 

The opening credits of Hellen Mirren’s Elizabeth I depict this rather well, showing the complicated process of disassembling a court gown. 

Are there any laws that stop management from forbidding their workers to join/form an union? Because it seems that all it takes is them refusing to hire someone who’s part of an union or putting on the contract that they can’t join and unions are dead.

Technically, the Wagner Act forbids both of those practices. The problem is that there’s not enough teeth when it comes to the enforcement of the Wagner Act, so that companies often simply budget in the fines for firing someone for being a union activist as the cost of doing business. 

So what exactly is right to work legislation in the US? I never quite got it tbh

opinions-about-tiaras:

docincredible:

racefortheironthrone:

Sure, I’ll try to explain. 

One of the things that unions and management typically negotiate over is mechanisms by which unions ensure that people in unionized workplaces actually become members of the union. These mechanisms have taken different forms: 

  • closed shops required workers to already be union members before they could be hired, and were common in fields like longshoring and construction. These were outlawed by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
  • union shops allowed management to hire non-union members, but required all workers to join the union within a certain period after they were hired. These were outlawed by the Supreme Court in the 80s. 
  • agency shops came after the banning of the first two forms, and limited themselves to saying that workers had to pay partial dues (known as “agency fees”) to repay the union for the cost of collective bargaining and grievance handling but not political activities or organizing campaigns. 

“Right-to-work” laws are state level laws authorized by section 14b of the Taft-Hartley Act, which ban unions and management from agreeing to union shop or agency shops in that state. 

The effect of these laws is that they inhibit union organizing for a couple reasons:

  • they create a massive free-rider problem: workers can get all of the benefits of being in a union – wage increases, benefits, protections and grievance structures, etc. – without having to pay unions. This in turn means that unions in right-to-work shops are underfunded, which means they can’t finance further organizing drives. 
  • they change the default in favor of non-membership: in union shops and agency shops, the default tended to be joining a union – in the former, you could be fired or fined if you didn’t join, so most people did; in the latter, you were paying dues anyway, so you might as well join. Just like shifting a program from opt-out to opt-in reduces participation, “right-to-work” means that there’s no push or pull factors in favor of joining, and instead there’s an economic penalty for joining. 

A union’s power should be generated from the unity of its members sharing a goal, and not legislative mandate. I live in New Jersey, where we have one of the most powerful teacher’s unions in the country, and absolutely every teacher I have ever spoken to about the NJTU would quit it in a heartbeat if they were legally allowed to. No union should be representing its members that badly.

I would not at all be surprised if, if the option was there between “joining the NJ Teacher’s Union”, “joining the Local School District Teacher’s Union”, or just “not being a teacher”, my local school district would have 0% membership in the NJ Teacher’s Union.

But that would never happen, because if they tried to do that (and I know exactly the teacher who’d be most likely to head the LSDTU in this case) the NJ Teacher’s Union would fight them tooth and nail, and they’d win, because they have far more money to throw at the people who could change the law so the local school district could have its own union. No union should be anti-union, either.

The very concept of unionizing was created to get better working conditions. If the working conditions are satisfactory for a worker, then they don’t need a union in the first place. If they are, or become, unsatisfactory, that’s when a union should get involved.

There is no such organization as the “New Jersey Teacher’s Union.” Perhaps you mean the NJEA, the New Jersey Education Association?

Now, I know a lot more about the teachers union here in New York than I do in New Jersey. But I still find this anecdote… dubious.

First of all, as Steven notes above, you CAN quit the NJEA any time you want to. That’s been true for decades. In fact, ever since last June, you can quit the NJEA and still force them to represent you at the bargaining table without paying them a dime. So all them teachers you’ve supposedly talked to who want to bail out? There’s nothing stopping them!

But even if none of that were true, I’d still find your assertions dubious.

Know why? Because unions don’t have a corporate power structure. They have a democratic power structure. This has in the past not been honored; union elections have absolutely been rigged, and in multiple cases candidates for union leadership who were threats to existing leadership got straight-up murdered.

But now we’re going back literally half a century. Modern union elections are free and fair; this is no ballot-box stuffing.

The NJEA has elections every year, and they elect their senior officers on two-year terms. If the policies of the NJEA were really so disgusting to their membership, there is nothing at all stopping people from voting the union leadership out and taking their place.

Finally, most districts in New Jersey do, in fact, have their own local teachers union. That local is part of the umbrella of the NJEA, and it usually isn’t called a local but it has a name like “Trenton Education Association” but it is still a local, in the same way “United Steelworkers Local 161″ (or whatever) would still be part of the AFL-CIO. So teachers already have locals. The NJEA actually encourages their creation.

In conclusion, you have many basic facts wrong.

And to chime in: the closed shop, union shop, and agency shop weren’t created by legislative mandate, but rather emerged from collective bargaining agreements agreed to between management and the union. The legislative mandate was the Taft-Hartley Act banning workplaces from making those agreements.