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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

You can't always excuse bad things with "market forces". We have prohibited child labor. Otherwise "market forces" would also motivate poor children to work in coal mines. We could mandate reasonable sick day and vacation policies. We shouldn't accept exploitation of people who are willing to take a job.

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Again, at the risk of sounding coldly analytical about it, while I'm grateful child labor laws were put in place, I don't think they actually did much to alleviate the underlying reasons and experiences of why children were put to work (by their parents or exploiters or themselves) in those days. Suddenly outlawing children from working didn't miraculously make their lives better or lift them out of poverty. Stopping people from taking those jobs merely stopped them from making their desperation visible (and of course obviously yes, from dying in horrible conditions they probably had no idea they were signing up for). It was other efforts and initiatives improving the standard of living that made the difference.

I do think such laws have a very good and important role to play where people don't fully know what they've agreed to. If someone wants to get a job by offering their labor for less than his next competitor and is going into it with full information, I don't think we should act like we're doing him a favor by stopping him from doing so. Stopping someone from taking a less than minimum wage job has not alleviated their situation.

Again, just dispassionate observation -- mandating whatever number of sick days per year may be a humane gesture, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that there is a surplus of willing labor in this country willing to take jobs at these pay rates that even don't have any such benefits.

Efforts by unions to say that their political power and striking/etc led to change in our standard of living are conveniently mixed up with the rising general demand for labor and wages because we were a growing country willing to pay for relatively scarce labor at the time. Those conditions are not the same now.

What you are saying sounds a little like victim blaming. We need regulations so companies can’t compete on cutting costs through not providing things like sick days or safe working conditions. There are always people desperate enough to take exploitative/unsafe jobs. These jobs should not exist and all companies should compete under the same rules.

I think we're talking on orthogonal lines. It's not companies who are competing, but workers who are competing with each other for jobs and being willing to take those jobs.

If the employment conditions are transparent and not unsafe physically (which is related to having full information about what you're signing up for), why is sick days something that shouldn't be open to negotiation or a person willing to agree to have more or fewer of them?

Suppose that a person is young and healthy and believes he/she doesn't need a lot of sick days. Why is it unreasonable for him/her to agree to a job that doesn't offer extra sick days? What's the logic / principle there?

Is it because sickness is unpredictable and an employee shouldn't have to suffer from something unexpected? Is it an information asymmetry argument?

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