Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

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People have this right to take better jobs at other companies. This is how we get better working conditions: competition between employers. Tech has figured this out. I’ve never felt the need to go on strike.

Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.

But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.

We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.

"Competition is universally good" is what has decimated American manufacturing since Reagan. It's hollowed out the US middle class, which affects what the country can build, purchasing power, and innovation. Free trade policies have destroyed cities, eliminated millions of well-paying jobs, cut social services, and ripped the social fabric from communities. There were no alternatives to just "take a job at a better company"; most manufacturing jobs that left had no alternatives.

It was cynically selfish and short-sighted. The US from 1980–2020 is a perfect example of how much more complex systems, economies, worker dynamics, and second/third/nth order effects are.

Just to add to that "Competition" is no longer even a thing when the unchecked capitalistic game is played to the extent we are at, with extreme consolidation and duo/triopoly cartels running most services and playing all the dirty tricks in the bag (regulatory capture, rent extraction, lobbying for deregulation and weakening of labour and environmental norms, ...)

Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).

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