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Comment by iAMAGuest | Hacker News Reader

> There's an entire holiday in the US, Labor Day

For those of us whom are not American, there is a similar day strangely called Labour Day, which is celebrated world wide for similar reasons, Small world hey :)

But in context what the unions did was important, it doesn't mean that they are needed, relevant, or beneficial in current day. We celebrate Xmas, but that doesn't mean that we have a guy wearing a Santa (non-christian) uniform everyday.

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> We celebrate Xmas, but that doesn't mean that we have a guy wearing a Santa (non-christian) uniform everyday.

But everyday we enjoy things like child labor laws, paid time off, safe working conditions, limits on shift-lengths, overtime pay, maternity/paternity leave, and myriad others.

Yes you/we do, for that we should be appreciative. But that doesn't speak as to the relevance of unions today.

We do in the US? Really? Salaried workers in tech routinely have 24-hour shifts without notice or compensation, especially when tied up in equity. I'd say if anything, worker rights have gotten further eroded with the loss of union power, add to that pay in most fields hasn't kept up with inflation, there's no paternity leave, more jobs being created are pushing education, retirement, healthcare, etc onto the worker, further eroding their wages just to keep their current job. Add to that the number of jobs being lost to automation, and workers really are not in a great spot, especially going forward, there's no way the current employment force can outstrip what a robot can do. It makes little sense to hire anything but contract employees at a certain point. Pretty soon you'll see micro-contracts to repair the bots, with a race to the bottom on price. I think that there's a massive market correction due to the employee-employer relationship.

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