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Comment by doyouevensunbro | Hacker News Reader

Or they are afraid of retaliation and losing their jobs? Amazon hits them with anti-union propaganda from day one. We’ve seen Walmart close locations that plan to unionize.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores...

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This could be easily fixed by introducing a law forcing companies to give out half of company’s shares to the union. The only reason this doesn’t happen is political - peoples votes don’t matter, what matters is company lobbying.

Confiscating ownership of 50% of a company seems like a pretty big line to cross. I don't think it's purely about political imaging. That would have all kinds of ripple effects, both in terms of the direct results of doing it and of the indirect results of setting the precedent.

Questioning pope’s infallibility used to be a pretty big line too, and now we know it was all just bluff; there was never a proper reason not to cross it.

To put it differently: the law must keep up with times. The law we have wasn’t designed for the business models we have today, from Facebook to Uber.

Amazon used to provide one unit of stock to each full-time employee --- folks gave that up for a higher base salary and other compensation.

Kind of silly to be complaining that the employees don't own enough of the company when they gave that ownership up as a bargaining position.

employees are able to collectively bargain at any time for better compensation though, that's the point of a union

This line of thinking is so out of the ordinary for me. I'm sure you could fix one side of the equation by forcefully taking from the other... but on what ethical grounds?

Ethically the company is not a human, and thus doesn’t have any inherent rights. The only rights it can have are those that were granted to benefit society - or because of corruption/lobbying.

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