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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

The only solution is labor unions. You need a CONTRACT that determines what happens when a company wants to discipline or fire an employee. So firing is still possible, but it's a process that's negotiated and agreed to beforehand by two sides and generally not the first step (minus certain circumstances).

The truth is, people are fired for arbitrary and unfair reasons constantly. I'd imagine 1 out of a million times someone is fired for unfair reasons it has something to do with cancel culture.

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Unions are a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

The problem is that corporations are too large.

If a company wants to fire you over nonsense but there are 30 others in the same city who pay the same salary for the same work, they're doing you a favor. You don't want to work for a company like that anyway, when there are better alternatives.

When they're the only employer who will hire you without having to move your kids to another school district or take a salary cut by changing fields, you need them more than they need you and getting fired over nonsense is a major problem.

Make corporations smaller and more numerous and you don't need unions. This also happens to have major benefits for competition on the consumer side, so everybody wins.

This is a really good point. I would consider myself pro-union, but after considering what you just posted, I think you're right.

Thank you for the insightful comment, I feel like this may actually change some of my own opinions.

In some countries (e.g: in the EU) getting fired over a tweet would result in a lawsuit which the company would almost certainly lose and they would be forced to hire back the former employee.

The issue in the US is that the labour market is incredibly unjust towards employees and they have almost no rights.

Has this actually happened recently?

Because the UK still has full EU law in its statute books, and it's home to a guy who was just fired for flying a airplane banner saying "White lives matter". Oh, they didn't just fire him, his girlfriend was also fired (from a different company) ... just for good measure.

But if he can sue and force them to rehire him I'd be very surprised. The problem is not merely what the law says, but that the institutions that enforce employment law are just as corrupted as everywhere else.

As a counter example, police unions seem to have played a large role in creating/perpetuating the problems so many have been protesting lately.

Police unions are very different from ordinary labour unions. So, that is not a counter point, really.

(You could argue that I'm engaging in a "True Scotchman", but see this article [1]:

> Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.

)

[1] https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...

> Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union.

Like teacher's unions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassignment_centers

Really like public sector unions in general. When the other side of the bargaining table isn't capital but the representatives of the people, and those representatives are often beholden to the unions to get elected, the union isn't representing the workers against capital, it's representing the bureaucracy against the citizens and capturing the people's representatives to do it.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12537

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