Interesting, your comment follows the frame of the OP, rather than the economic frame that I proposed. In the economic frame, it almost doesn’t matter whether you ban sexual relations at work or not. If the labor market is a seller’s market, workers will just leave bad employers and flock to better ones, and the problem will solve itself. And if the labor market is a buyer’s market, employers will find a way to extract X value from workers, either by extorting sex or by other ways—you’re never going to plug all the loopholes. The buyer’s market vs seller’s market distinction is all that matters, and all that’s worth changing. The great success of the union movement was because it actually shifted one side of the market, forcing the other side to shift as well.
I agree that in long term, seller’s market is the answer (and in the era of AGI, keeping it so will probably require some kind of UBI). But the market is not perfect, so the ban is useful to address those cases. Sometimes people are inflexible—I have seen people tolerate more than they should, considering their market position they apparently were not aware/sure of. Transaction costs, imperfect information, etc.
Interesting, your comment follows the frame of the OP, rather than the economic frame that I proposed. In the economic frame, it almost doesn’t matter whether you ban sexual relations at work or not. If the labor market is a seller’s market, workers will just leave bad employers and flock to better ones, and the problem will solve itself. And if the labor market is a buyer’s market, employers will find a way to extract X value from workers, either by extorting sex or by other ways—you’re never going to plug all the loopholes. The buyer’s market vs seller’s market distinction is all that matters, and all that’s worth changing. The great success of the union movement was because it actually shifted one side of the market, forcing the other side to shift as well.
I agree that in long term, seller’s market is the answer (and in the era of AGI, keeping it so will probably require some kind of UBI). But the market is not perfect, so the ban is useful to address those cases. Sometimes people are inflexible—I have seen people tolerate more than they should, considering their market position they apparently were not aware/sure of. Transaction costs, imperfect information, etc.