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Comment by hollasch | Hacker News Reader

Increasingly, American political parties are most interested in seizing and wielding power, and I feel like most citizens are occupied with surrendering and assigning that power to their preferred political party. How in the world did we get here? Is there any way we can turn back?

Most of the discussion here is about whether mandating business practice would be a good or a bad business move, but hardly anyone is questioning whether this is a good or legitimate role for those in government to decree and mandate. More and more, I see governments mandating changes that already appear to be underway, but in a way that accrues the praise and rewards to themselves. Most Americans seem to be complicit in this transformation, continually voting greater and greater control and authority away from the people and toward government powers.

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Because there's really no reason to question whether government should reasonably limit standard business practices – we've seen, in spades, how business practices are driven entirely and only by concerns of profit while the labor market has very little flexibility that would allow workers to "vote with their feet" and move to "better" employers without outside influence.

Put another way: Of course it's a good thing to force businesses to make work more humane and sustainable for the humans who have to do it.

>> while the labor market has very little flexibility that would allow workers to "vote with their feet" and move to "better" employers without outside influence

Have you heard of the Great Resignation?

Most companies treat employees as necessary liabilities to make profit and not assets. Flexibility only went one way, and people felt that life is too short to be treated like shit, so they left. Usually the bosses/managers/execs had tons of flexibility, but the employees didn't.

I'm not saying your wrong, it's just that it took a pandemic for people to realize that working in a shitty job for 20 years may not be the best use of their lives.

>> Have you heard of the Great Resignation?

Isn’t the Great Resignation driven at least in part by the government’s influence? COVID lockdowns and regulations heavily incentivized employers to offer more flexibility around remote work, and COVID economic relief policies helped provide folks with the financial stability needed to look for better employment. I’m not sure this would have occurred organically without any government intervention.

That would only explain remtoe workers, However non-remote jobs are having the same problems. Hell the MCD's in my area now has signs wanting people at up to $16/hr (min starting is $13 now)

Government policies are never the correct way to solve societal problems, even taking the premise the the "evil profit motive" is the actual reason we have seen abuse in the past (which I disagree with), the resolution to that is NEVER government as any honestly look at government policies requires one to conclused that at best the government policy just takes credit for something that was happening anyway, but more often the government policy slows or stopps the trend to improving lives

Just look at the "War on Poverty", at the start of that poverty was dropping FAST, then the government steps in to "solve" the problem of poverty that the evil free market could not (even though it was), and poverty rates flatlined.

Trillions and trillions of dollars spent later, and the government still has not solved that problem, where the free market likely would have if allowed to continue...

If someone thinks the Government doesn't solve problems, they can just look at the 1929-1934 and how problems got "solved" under free market capitalism (before the massive government interventions starting in 1934).

(we now consider that period to be a giant mistake specifically because the government did not do enough and left free markets to their own accord)

No "we" do not, some people do, some people do not

There is LOTS of scholarly economics works that shows government intervention in the markets not only lets to the crash, completely extended the length the crash.

Specifically the fed actions in 1929 lead to prolonged pain not seen in other nations that recovered faster because their central bank did not try to "solvable the problem"

To state that is a forgone conclusion that everyone agrees that "free market capitalism" was the cause of the great depression is highly ignorant

I suggest checking to see what policies changed in 1934, and who was in power before and after (and why).

How do negative externalities fit into your picture?

And you believed these are resolved with government policies?

Which ones? Point to some examples of government resolving these to the detriment of corporations?

The examples I could provide would be government shielding corporations from these negative externalities, limiting their liability, and socializing the costs to the tax payers of that government....

I can point to no examples of govermment resolving the problem of externalities

The Clean Air act in the US is a good example.

Yes. Are you trying to imply that the Great Resignation was not the result of the outside influence I mentioned – in this case government intervention (lockdowns, unemployment insurance expansion), and a global pandemic that removed hundreds of thousands of people from the workforce and changed priorities for companies and employees?

The definition of the length of the work week and who it applies to is already a concept defined by government.

Unfortunately. People should be able to negotiate between themselves without interference from the government.

As should children! Why should the pesky government step in the way of my child working in a factory.

Child labor should be reserved for the Girl Scouts as God intended!

It doesn’t if your family business is farming.

Acting allows actual children to work very limited hours. By comparison it’s illegal for 11 year olds to do farm work where infants can be actors.

>without interference from the government.

I don't see the corps giving up all the advantages they have such as mandatory arbitration and the like. It wouldn't be an equal negotiating table for the vast majority of people.

With all respect, that is an astoundingly naive viewpoint in light of the fact that there is nowhere near power equality between employer and worker.

I suppose many folks here are in those blessed industries and positions where employers and employees are in much more balanced relationships than mostwhere.

Which is how it should be; I don't think anyone would doubt that GP is correct in this regard. But - very sadly - not how it works in most of the reality.

I agree. I constantly see arguments in HN comments that come from the perspective of a highly paid tech worker and they either ignore anyone making minimum wage or pretend they don't exist in this dynamic or they are written off as unimportant because they should have "worked harder to change their position in life"

Its pretty sad that this ideology exists, we need people to do jobs and we shouldn't shit on them for it. We should support people in what every job they're doing because we're all part of the same societal machine

The government is one of the mechanisms we created to negotiate things.

Stated this way it makes it sound as if the government, unbidden by anything external, just decided to make this a requirement one day. Of course, this was not the case.

In reality workers, unions and even industry leaders themselves were already pushing for this decades before the government codified it in the Fair Labor Standards Act.

People literally died fighting for the 40-hour workweek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

The reason various entities wanted it codified in law was because regardless of what labour with actual negotiating power and businesses with the ethics and margins to not demand absurdly high workweeks wanted, millions of workers didn't have much choice.

When child labour was legal, lots of children worked.

>but hardly anyone is questioning whether this is a good or legitimate role for those in government to decree and mandate.

That's because you are in the wrong forum. I would think that there are forums out there where unpopular or less common opinions are the norm. Your original point is still true, far less people care less about their freedom, welcome to life.

If the govt does not have the power to dictate working hours, people would did from overwork like in the other countries. May be not software for now, but definitely it is possible with low skilled jobs. This is actually a good thing for the govt to have power over.

PS: This applies to every company, so the playground is fair to compete against.

It is interesting to see the tensions play out between managers/"entrepreneurs" and workers in threads like this.

The idea that the establishment of a working week is government tyranny is obvious to one side and bizarre to the other.

Keeping managers and entrepreneurs on the same plane is the most bizarre thing and frankly insulting to entrepreneurs

Eh whether government should have the right to do this takes a backseat to the fact that the government is the only way we can do this.

The government is the only coordinating mechanism we have to enforce something like this, otherwise everyone is playing the prisoner’s dilemma.

Respectfully, this seems like a completely backward take.

If you don't care about whether or not government should be able to do things, and are only concerned with whether or not it does things you like, you end up with a government that can do whatever it wants. Eventually, that power will be wielded by someone you find detestable, or even worse, someone who finds you detestable.

Seems like we're mixing up couple things here--(a) the level to which a government represents the people and (b) the powers that a government should have.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the government is--in its ideal essence--just a way for a population to collectively enforce compliance with / contribution to a social good.

I don't think it's controversial to say that if 100% of people wanted a 32 hour work week, the government should probably pass a law mandating that. Separately we can argue about the tendency for the aims of government to diverge from the aims of the citizenry or there being a slippery slope, but the "legitimate role" of government is representing the people.

It's probably more nuanced than that. If 100% of people wanted a 32-hour work week, a law wouldn't be necessary - we would just have a 32-hour work week. The fact that the number is less than 100% is the reason we need a law, because the incentives aren't aligned between those who want it and those who don't.

The prisoner's dilemma is a toy example where everyone wants the same thing, but they can't achieve it without some external mechanism. Many regulations in the real world fall into this category, ensuring your competitors can't do things you don't want to do and thereby force you to do it to compete (and they in turn don't want to do it, but if their competitors do it...).

This is not a good example, and is part of the problem with these types of discussions.

Not everyone wants the same thing in the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners all want one thing and the prosecutors want something different. If everyone wanted the same thing here, there would be no dilemma.

That's the case with 32 hour work weeks. Employees want them - but employers don't. So there is a misalignment of incentives. And employers specifically have much more power in the situation because there is a significant imbalance in risk between the two. The external mechanism is needed here in order to accommodate and mitigate that power balance.

The mechanism could be legislation, it could be collective action in the form of a union, etc. But it's specifically because not everyone agrees, and the disagreement comes with a power imbalance that the law is necessary.

The definition of the prisoners dilemma is that it is symmetrical, the only two parties involved are the prisoners and they want the exact same thing, and have the exact same motivations and payoffs and still can't agree on the best course of action.

Thats why it is a good toy example of this issue.

It is a confusing name for it, since in reality there are often mechanism to punish "snitches".

I prefer to think if it as two people wanting to make a trade without a framework to enforce any contract law. You both want to swap your items that are valued more by the other party, but since there's no mechanism to force you to be honest, you're both motivated to steal the other person's goods and not deliver yours. And so you both do that, and the trade doesn't happen, leaving you both poorer.

Because 100% of people don't want something is hardly "reason" to create a law and just because a majority wants something doesn't make it right. There are plenty of examples of that in history.

Is the role of government to maximize social good or individual liberty? I'd rather the latter because the examples of the former are abundant and dreadful. Anyone who thinks this isn't a race to the bottom where lawmakers trade "happiness" for votes at the cost of liberty is lying to themselves. Let's not kid ourselves, a 40 hour work week is not the same as child labor in the coal mines; such laws exist only to win votes. When will it be 20 hours a week? 16? At what point do we descend into the madness that embraced Rome where the role of government became appeasement of the populace to keep them from revolting?

By prisoners dilemma, do you mean that people are free to negotiate amongst themselves as they see fit? Oh the horror…

Yes I do mean exactly that. It's entirely possible for both these things to be true:

- Everyone believes that if they and everyone else had a 32 hour work week, they'd be happier

- Everyone stays at 40 hours per week when given the choice of independently moving to a 32 hour work week due to social / economic pressures

In this case a government law helps everyone coordinate to get out of a local maximum.

We already saw what happens when people are free to negotiate for themselves with people who possess most of the money and resources. People including children were working 60 hours a week in horrendously unsafe conditions for barely enough to live.

The government isn't an interloper inserting itself. The government is US. We are negotiating with employers in a fashion where we actually possess enough influence to make a difference.

They are free to negotiate their freedoms away.

What I have never understood so far, is that all the advocates of markets simply declare them free, as if reducing government involvement is going to solve inherent imbalances in power. The end result is branded "free market" when it is anything but.

The primary alternative to achieving this is through formation of unions. But, I’d wager there is an overlap between people who are against enforcement via legislation and people who are anti-union.

We've also seen significant anti-union legislation in recent decades; at the very least this would need to be undone in order to give workers a fair shot.

By "people who are anti-union", do you mean "people who believe unions shouldn't be allowed to exist", or "people who believe unions shouldn't be allowed to force workers to join as a condition of having the job"?

Hey, if they don't like it, they can get a job somewhere else, no need for authoritarian governments preventing people freely entering contracts with groups with much more power than they do individually.... wait, this reminds me of something?

Unions having the power to force employees to join is what's authoritarian. If I want to work for a company, and the company wants to hire me, we should be free to enter into a contract. A third party shouldn't have the power to say "you can't unless you pay us dues".

And before you say "well not if the company and union entered into a contract that said the company would only hire union workers", that's not how it works today. The laws we have today give unions the power to unilaterally say that without the company agreeing, and this is what's bad and needs to go away.

Didn't California stop companies from preventing their ex-employees from working for competitors?

Sounds like they're doing exactly what you want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#California

What does that have to do with unions?

> If I want to work for a company, and the company wants to hire me, we should be free to enter into a contract. A third party shouldn't have the power to say "you can't unless you pay us dues".

Seems like you only want to prevent unions from doing this, but not employers. You also want to prevent them entering into contracts with employers. It's not really a consistent argument is it?

I'm okay if a union gets someone else to voluntarily agree to a contract that requires employee membership. I'm not okay with a union unilaterally forcing this without agreement.

Isn't it the authoratarian government that's enforcing these laws? Why are you blaming the poor unions, they're only doing what they legally have to do to maximise the returns for their shareholders.

I'm not blaming the unions for doing that. I am blaming the government for giving the unions the power to do that.

This entire thread seems to be you willfully misinterpreting their comments, or taking the most negative possible interpretation, and then responding to that. In addition to violating the site guidelines, it's boring, stifles discussion, and is the stuff of emotional, uneducated partisan hackery.

Sometimes people's positions are so absurd that you feel there's no other way to break through.

"I want people to be allowed to freely contract with each other without government intervention except when I don't" is a fundamentally ridiculous position for someone to take and pretend they're just following some noble universal law.

If I've not conveyed that message with my replies, then I've failed in my attempt to communicate. But that's the fundamental problem with their stance, quibbling within their bizarre framing is pointless if they still believe they're arguing consistently.

That's a misrepresentation of my position. I do want everyone to be able to freely contact with each other without government intervention, all the time. My complaint is that right now, companies can't freely contract with unions, because the government gave unions special powers like not letting companies walk away from the negotiating table.

> The laws we have today give unions the power to unilaterally say that without the company agreeing, and this is what's bad and needs to go away.

Can you give examples? My impression was closed shop and union shop was negotiated, not dictated by law.

The issue isn't that there's no contract at all. The issue is that the contract isn't freely agreed to, since once 51% of workers decide they want a union, the company isn't allowed to walk away from the negotiating table.

The US is closed shop. If a subset of employees don't like their union, they are not allowed to form their own union.

Put another way, if employees disagree with something the union does, they have no recourse other than founding their own union and trying to get all their coworkers to vote to force every one to switch to the new union.

In particular, employees are not able to call strikes in the US. In some sense, unions solved the "problem" of employee walk outs by redirecting grievances away from employers and to large unions that are (in practice) unresponsive to employee requests.

When they do get things done, it's unclear what constituency they are serving, or who made the decision.

For example, the California statewide teachers union managed to block vaccine mandates for teachers. All the teachers I've talked to in Silicon Valley are vaccinated and support mandates.

Those teachers have no hope of joining a union that's not controlled by anti-vaxxers.

Stop.

Employees can strike. Taft-Hartley illegalizes wildcat or secondary striking.

I still disagree with it because I don't think the Network Effect pruning was equal between Capital and Labor, but Strikes can absolutely be organized by private employees/unions.

Public sector unions are a different beast as far as I'm aware. See the Air Traffic Controller strike and how that flopped. But you've had some teacher's Union successes recently too.

Unions don't have that power last I checked, and there is nothing that requires an employer to sign away their ability to seek unaffiliated workers.

Just as there is nothing forcing a worker to join a Union. The only thing is, if you don't join, you don't get the benefit of collective bargaining.

> Just as there is nothing forcing a worker to join a Union. The only thing is, if you don't join, you don't get the benefit of collective bargaining.

This is only true in states with right-to-work laws.

I agree - a related issue is that if indeed government should be using it's power, then it should be exercised at theost local level possible ie at the city or county level. That way you could see what happens when people have more of a choice about whether to live under those rules or not, before applying it in a way that is harder to avoid. Meaning it is easy to move cities or counties (in the US), harder to move state, almost impossible to change countries for most people's.

If it really is good for companies, then more will move there. If not, they will move out - better to do the experiment on a small scale first!

But the aim of a lot of federal or state level proposed legislation is so that people can't escape nirvana...

> hardly anyone is questioning whether this is a good or legitimate role for those in government to decree and mandate.

That's because it's been discussed and the current status quo is the result. Check out the history of the labor movement.

> The nature and power of organized labor is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions.

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

> More and more, I see governments mandating changes that already appear to be underway, but in a way that accrues the praise and rewards to themselves.

That's pretty much the definition of "politician", eh?

> Most Americans seem to be complicit in this transformation,

What transformation?

> continually voting greater and greater control and authority away from the people and toward government powers.

Without concrete examples it's difficult to say anything useful.

{insert strawman here}

The US government doesn't do nearly enough to ensure the welfare of workers. If not being treated like shit by your employer bothers you have plenty of options.

Government power isn't the only power. Workers cheer government regulation as one of their only leverages against employer power (or the power of capital).

> Most of the discussion here is about whether mandating business practice would be a good or a bad business move, but hardly anyone is questioning whether this is a good or legitimate role for those in government to decree and mandate.

Isn't the Government already limiting the workweek to 40h?

The authority isn't with people right now, it is with capital and being wielded against the people.

The only mechanism I'm aware of to change that is government and it needs more power to do so. Government is elected and democratic. Capital is neither.

I agree with your comment, but it has nothing to do with Americans.

Your comments sounds very much like an American with limited experience outside of the US. The scary part is that especially post pandemic, this is a very global phenomenon.

Source: American expat

Are you saying these laws are common elsewhere? I don't recall any other country passing a 4 day work week law. Either way, these type of laws being uncommon in America is not a bad thing.

> and I feel like most citizens are occupied with surrendering and assigning that power to their preferred political party

No, most of us are independent and lie to our friends for employment and sex

I need more free time from my work responsibilities so I can think about this very scary question with the gravitas it deserves. Can you give me a day off?

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