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Comment by technotony | Hacker News Reader

This comes up a lot, nobody is literally chained to their desks. Democracy in the workplace comes from voting with your feet and taking another job at another company. It's not perfect, particularly for lower income people, but it's also not slavery and generally the arc of worker rights is improving through time.

You could make a case that some of the current anger in the united states is because COVID's destruction of the economy has removed that freedom to switch jobs (as the jobs have gone) demonstrating how important it is.

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> It's not perfect, particularly for lower income people...

I don't think many minimum-wage retail or service workers can just "vote with their feet" and easily get another job, especially if you don't consider major changes in location and hours to be a non-starter.

For folks with kids, or who depend on public transit to get to work, "up and moving" isn't really an option. If you're one missed paycheck away from eviction, bankruptcy, or arrest due to missed fines or court fees then you can't play "hardball" with your employer.

Saying the arc of history improves overall cruelly glosses over the reality today for millions of Americans.

> Saying the arc of history improves overall cruelly glosses over the reality today for millions of Americans.

No it doesn't. Medical understanding and technology has gotten way better over the centuries, and people still die of things that could have been handled. Acknowledging progress doesn't imply perfection, but progress.

voting with your feet is almost certainly going to land you what is basically an equally shitty job when you have no leverage.

It is far beyond imperfect.

Let’s say I work at Kroger. I don’t like the way I’m treated, so I quit.

Now the remaining grocery stores I can work for owned by Albertsons or Amazon. What kind of choice is that?

Pick any other industry and you’re likely to find similar problems.

It would be really interesting to see what mandatory democratic corporate governance might look like.

Or, perhaps, fixing union regulations so that unions don’t have a bunch of downsides for the employee or other regulatory issues that seem to have directly led to their decline.

You’re not limited to grocery stores.

The fundamental problem is that there’s less demand for unskilled US labor than there are unskilled US laborers looking for work. Fix that, and most of the issues people are worried about go away.

That likely has to be solved at the federal or international government level.

>Democracy in the workplace comes from voting with your feet and taking another job at another company.

Democracy is about voice, not exit.

I don't think, "we've mostly gotten rid of actual leg irons" is the paen to worker's rights you think it is. To the extent slavery was outlawed, that happened 150 years ago. In many ways, things have gotten worse for the average worker since that era. (If you don't believe me, read Lincoln himself. [1])

Fair conditions grow out of equal power. But a fundamental problem with managerialist capitalism is an imbalance of power that will never be solved with vote-with-your-feet slogans. You have one job. A CEO has tens, hundreds, thousands of employees. It's always easier for a boss to fuck you over than it is for you to push back. Individual action is not enough to fix that.

[1] Foner's "The Firey Trial" is a good look at Lincoln's ideas, including what he has to say about labor. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0044XV6G6/

Personally, I'd love it if everyone could easily vote with their feet. I think there's more overlap between certain libertarian and socialist visions of the economy than most people realize. In our current system, there's a lot of factors that prevent people from voting with their feet: healthcare, location, switching costs, and availability of jobs being chief among them, but also newer phenomena like non-compete contracts.

Non-compete contracts tend to be unenforceable.

They tend to be unenforceable in California, they certainly aren't unenforceable in other states.

Yeah, they are unenforceable in other states, and in all of them if they are determined to be unreasonable in court.

https://www.legalnature.com/guides/are-non-compete-agreement...

>Yeah, they are unenforceable in other states

Yes there are other states that have similar limits, and many other states that don't.

>and in all of them if they are determined to be unreasonable in court

That's a tautology. A court can refuse to enforce any contract for many reasons. The problem is that what may be considered unreasonable in California might not be in Georgia.

It's also not super helpful for someone who can't afford a lawyer to fight it. Or for someone who can't find another job because companies don't want to deal with the hassle.

Courts tend to take a dim view of well-monied people bullying the not-monied in courts. Larger companies are well aware of this, so are their employees, and the companies get sued constantly by those employees, and the companies usually settle because it's cheaper.

I personally know of many, many cases of this.

>Courts tend to take a dim view of well-monied people bullying the not-monied in courts

Even if this is true in theory, it's so completely untrue from a practical perspective that it's pointless to debate.

> it's so completely untrue from a practical perspective

Poor people successfully sue businesses ALL THE TIME.

Besides, just last week a friend of mine told me that the former boss of one of his employees threatened a lawsuit over a non-compete agreement. He simply told the former boss "see ya in court and you'll be paying my legal bill". That was the end of that.

Not only are most of these just bluster, it's not profitable to sue poor people, since poor people don't have money.

There's really no point in debating someone like you. No matter what I say you'll just quote some unverifiable anecdote and declare victory.

I'll leave you with some advice that helped me find my way out of libertarian ideology when I was younger.

Stop and think for a second. Why the "proper functions of government" just happen to line up exactly with the functions that directly benefit you.

Don't worry, it isn't true in theory either. Courts don't give a shit about that sort of high-minded honorableness.

Why, the existence of anti-SLAPP laws comes directly out of courts not caring how they're weaponized by well-monied people bullying not-monied people. That's literally the point of anti-SLAPP laws.

GP's claim makes no sense with even the dimmest awareness of the court system.

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