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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why it’s such a hot topic that the terms people agree to...are the actual terms.

Because it’s almost universally agreed that some terms are not acceptable and thus not enforceable. Selling yourself into slavery is a common example. More gentle would be a contract where you agree to a pay rate that is less than the minimum wage.

The disagreement is merely over which side of that line arbitration clauses fall on. I happen to think that the right to have your grievances heard in court should be considered fundamental and inalienable.

Indeed. Minimum wage laws will probably soon no longer apply, because nearly all laws are superseded by arbitration, including state ones. It will not be long until we reach that point where you can easily and accidentally agree to work for 1c/hr with a carefully contrived contract. And, as long as they can secure an arbiter to rule against you for signing that employment agreement, you will be subject to it.

It makes me wonder if we're about to see a large increase in corruption. In societies where the enforcement mechanisms are widely perceived to be in the pocket of powerful self-interested organizations, workers often don't just lie down dead and take it (well, some do, but not all). A significant fraction instead turn to covert activities that subvert the effectiveness of their employer and enrich themselves, but can't be easily detected. So the Uber driver might hold to the letter of his contract, much as it screws him, but surreptitiously pass Uber data on to Lyft as a side job. The service worker may put in the hours according to their contract and hop to it whenever the boss asks, but when the boss isn't in, they're going to ask for a little bribe under the table to actually give you service. The boss might even be in on it, splitting the pool with his workers so they can slack off and demand bribes even when he's looking but never reporting their side business to corporate management.

I've always wondered about the logic of the certain faction who wants to roll back basic protections of the rule of law to some fraction of society. Or actually, I get it - they always believe that they're in the fraction that will come out ahead, and can co-opt the enforcement mechanism to do their bidding. But I think a lot of these same interests underestimate the degree to which they depend upon the norms of functioning democratic society. Also common to high-corruption societies is the need to hire private security & intelligence forces to prevent a disgruntled rival from offing you and your whole family; are the new corporate oligarchs willing to go there, and live in that fear just so they can make more money?

Go work at any retail or food service job for a well known company. You'll find constant theft and shrinkage from employees just not tracking loss of product. Many people on forums like this act like it's because that class of people are less trustworthy or incapable of delaying actions for future benefits.

That may well be true for some of the population, but I saw a large portion of employees whose viewpoint was, "Why wouldn't I do this? The company doesn't even pay me enough to live". I saw many times where it only took one bad week where someone went hungry for a few meals before they started stealing food or medicine. It won't take much for that viewpoint to spread as more and more people get pushed into the "have nots" group instead of the "haves"

But not required to continue working there. It should be pretty easy to find a job that pays more than 1c/hr.

Might as well skip all the arbitration hassle and just repeal all minimum wage laws, then.

Well, if it's good enough for Sweden, I don't see why not.

Sweden has de facto minimums specified per industry, so not really comparable.

Best I could find is that unions in a given industry bargain for their wage. There is no minimum wage law that I could find. From what I read, it seemed to be the consensus of the unions that minimum wage law might actually hurt their bargaining power by driving wages down.

Am I missing something? There's a huge difference between negotiated wages between two parties (one being a union), and a law mandating a wage.

Not if the contract also includes an endless non-compete clause preventing you from ever finding another job.

Well shit, if we're just making things up, then why stop there?

These aren't made up. States are feeling compelled to add laws to limit non competes now, when they historically haven't, due to things like sandwich shops having non compete clauses for their minimum wage employees. Massachusetts recently enacted regulations on non competes in response to those kinds of abuses

Did those sandwich shops have non-competes that forbade the employee from working for any other company no matter the industry, or just sandwich shops? It's still stupid, but the hyperbole above is about non-competes forbidding getting any other job anywhere ever again.

If I recall correctly it was food prep, which covers any retail shop, like Walmart, that also serves food. That happens to cover the vast majority of all minimum wage work. As companies are growing larger and larger, and entering more and more industries, those uncurtailed non competes _are_ going to effectively be a complete stop on working at other firms.

It's not stupid. We are watching this happen. If you think companies should be free from any of this regulation or even discussion about their practices then you are free to go to Somalia and live in a regulation free utopia

I can't reply to you below, so I'll do it here.

Firstly, apology accepted. Easy mistake to make.

Secondly, I just can't see us letting things go that far. We'll have to agree to disagree with that.

I do agree that binding arbitration clauses are terrible, and I accidentally put myself in a position where I had to sign one at my last job. We had worked out terms, and a start date and I quit my old job before I saw the employment contract. I went through and made edits, and the CEO was open to negotiating on it. There was a problem with their IP ownership clause he happily fixed, and if I wanted to, he was willing to get his lawyer involved in the removal of the arbitration clause. I let it go though because I would have been jobless if he decided I wasn't worth it.

The problem though is, how do you strike a balance between leaving people free to make economic decisions they deem in their interest vs being taken advantage of by predatory contract agreements? Arbitration and non-competes are bad, but I'm happy to agree to them...for a price.

I agree that striking the line is difficult. The only way I see for the government to have a balance is to look at aggregate values. For instance we're seeing corporate profits and GDP skyrocket right now but worker wages aren't and haven't for decades. That would indicate to me that workers need more support from the government. On the other side if we saw companies stagnate while workers were pulling more and more out in compensation that would be a good time to loosen regulations on companies.

Would you care to assign any other positions to me?

I feel like you've lost sight of me simply taking objection to this histrionic idea of companies forcing people to work for them for 1c/hr. It's never going to happen, and you don't have to be a Somali pirate to see how absurd this argument is.

I've put forth no other argument about anything, regulation or otherwise.

I don't find the idea histrionic. We are seeing a constant and repeated degradation of worker's rights in ways that are both limiting what workers are allowed to do outside of their employment with a company, and in limiting worker's abilities to seek redress for any damages done to them by their employers. We already see industries where every single company operating in that industry requires arbitration agreements which employees have no protection against. The courts have said its kosher, the legislature has no intention of blocking it at a federal level, and for many classes of workers there are no options without arbitration agreements. That is just removing the protection of the courts from a massive number of workers.

Combine this with other controls on workers, like companies getting a say in whether or not you get unemployment, and workers are being forced more and more into a choice of do what the companies say or starve. I don't see how this doesn't end with virtual slavery like being forced to work for 1c/hr but you stand here and say its stupid and hyperbolic.

I admit that I did assign you a position you never stated. I have mostly seen arguments against discussing issues like this come from die hard libertarians who think there should be no sort of government interference in agreements between employees and employers and I made an assumption about you without evidence, for which I apologize

What about the time that workers were literally gunned down for not allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. Once you look at historical examples, these crazy things people are saying end up being less crazy than what historically has happened.

So, what happens when a worker signs such an agreement and it is upheld under arbitration?

Heck, it used to be pretty common to have workers with contracts that not only forbade them from working elsewhere, but forbade them from leaving their job at all. The hypothetical extreme of “sign a contract to sell yourself into slavery” is not actually very hypothetical nor extreme.

> But not required to continue working there. It should be pretty easy to find a job that pays more than 1c/hr.

That's pretty glib and misses the point: labor laws like the minimum wage exist for a reason. The tl;dr is that the free market didn't solve the problems the laws were meant to solve 100 years ago, and the free market isn't going to solve them now (if the GP is corrected and forced arbitration gives employers a way to bypass the laws).

The parent was talking about people being forced to work for 1c/hr. It's an absurd claim, and that hypothetical person could walk into basically any other job. Preferably one paying more than minimum wage.

It is a denial of the agency of the individual to prohibit them from agreeing to something else.

So in your view, preventing people from selling themselves into slavery is denying them agency?

Technically that is true. People do have an inherent right to make bad decisions. That, (ironically in this example) is what freedom means.

"Agency" approaches meaninglessness when you can't understand what you're agreeing to, can't afford a lawyer to interpret it for you, and can't get access to the courts later because of an arbitration clause.

If I am kidnapped by a serial killer and given the choice between death by machete and death by pistol, it counts as freedom?

If so, your definition of freedom is terrible.

And?

That concern is weighed against other considerations, including whether or not to allow society to coerce individuals into degrading situations.

Law -- like any other human construction -- is about trade-offs.

Have you ever said something before similar to,"what if the child consents?"

Because in almost every contract where an arbitration clause exists, it's because there's a gross disparity in the negotiating power between the parties, and the clause enables the more powerful party to deny the lesser the primary means of equitable redress of contractual violations stemming from this power disparity: the courts.

Y'all who fight for workers' rights on HN are the real troops o7

Excuse me?

Because there are some terms which are antithetical to law. If you sign a contract stating that you're willing to become someone's slave for $x, that violates natural rights and would be voided by a court.

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