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Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

Actually small businesses (while they vary widely and many of them can be good) can be home to the worst kind of abuse. Small business owners can be absolutely monstrous tyrants to their employees. Have you ever met a waitress at a restaurant who hasn't been sexually harassed by her boss? I've met.. one? and I've met quite a few waitresses. She can't complain to HR, there is no HR, there are no policies, there is just the boss who will fire her (and maybe "forget" to send her her last paycheck, oops). Wage theft is rampant in small businesses that can go underwater and don't have a payroll department. Workers absolutely need help at small business, probably more help even than at large corporations.

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With small companies, it's much easier to hop to another small company than it is if you work at the only car plant in town.

And I'm sure there are restaurant owners out there who aren't complete assholes.

Yes, you can hop from tyranny to tyranny until you find a dictator who will have mercy on you and not abuse you as much, losing your health insurance and livelihood with every hop, hoping you don't become homeless or destitute or get sick every time you are abused. And maybe, if you're lucky, there is a company in your area that does what you know how to do and is decent, and you haven't had your reputation as a "complainer" who dares challenges your boss spread around town.

Alternately, we could institute worker protections and support unions (which are necessary to develop the political will to institute worker protections) so they all have to treat you decently and everyone who works hard for a living can have a humane reasonable life.

Sorry small businesses have apparently been so cruel to you, I've had great luck with them.

I've been lucky as well and all of my small business experience personally has been great (tech small businesses are pretty good on average, I think) but my point is that luck, by definition, doesn't happen to everybody and we shouldn't have to rely on it. "I got lucky therefore there is no problem" is not a reasonable position to take.

When you say we shouldn't have to rely on luck, do you mean in terms of not being harassed, or more generally? Because if you mean more generally, I don't know how you do that without severely curtailing people's freedoms.

Well yes of course, we should curtail the freedoms of bosses to be abusive, steal wages, and generally behave horribly to his or her employees in the same we curtail the freedoms of a physically large man to physically assault others.

And even if that isn't okay for you, there are plenty of ways to do this without even curtailing anyone's "freedoms" to be abusive: we can provide government jobs to all workers if they want them and require managers at government run institutions behave decently, for example, as we did in the New Deal.

Those are what I meant by harass. We already do, there are a number of laws on the books that address those things. That said, the legal system could certainly be made more accessible.

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