I will embrace each of the supposedly problematic things you mentioned in your post any day. They seem rather fair to me. Do you have a different opinion? Why would you want startups to be exempt from this?
That's simply not the case anywhere else in the world, and it may be surprising to people from the US.
Thanks for your post. I mean no disrespect, but could you please link to any references. Specially about the working hours, minimum wage and vacation etc. If it is true then I am going to do myself a favour and trash my US visa right away. I am not much of a traveller but I can always assume that grand canyon doesn't exist or that I can see it in a different life....
Edit: looks like you are right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#United_States
Bear in mind that no one is forcing the employee to accept this. You can leave a job at any time, for any reason with absolutely no notice just as easily as the employer can get rid of you.
If I'm hired to work 40 hours/week for $100k year with 3 weeks vacation, I am entitled to all of that. If the employer then decides that I should work 80 hours a week and he will cut my pay to $60k/year and not let me take vacation, I can simply get up and leave and in most jurisdictions, that will be sufficient grounds for me to receive unemployment insurance while I look for my next job.
That doesn't quite absolve the employer e.g. if I am stuck in sahara desert and bump into a man starving for days. At this time if I offer him food in return for his soul, would you consider it a fair trade? Even though the poor guy has a choice to reject my offer?
It would certainly be a horrible person who would demand that much for saving a person's life. But if the only reason that this or other person was holding rescue patrols in the desert was that they were hoping to strike it rich exploiting lost souls, then as a society we either ought to allow this or use taxpayer money to fund our own rescue patrols.
And remember that as a laborer you're not in anything like this situation. There's a lot of charity out there and though this won't make your life pleasant it will make you far better off than starving in the Sahara. And there is more than one potential employer out there bidding for your labor. And you can see that the system works because very few jobs only pay the minimum wage. If we were somehow to get into a situation where there was only a single employer in the country than I'd say that at that point some sort of government intervention might be called for.
Starving to death instead of trading away your soul is more short-sighted; the metaphor has nothing to do with deferring pleasure or information asymmetry. It's about power asymmetry.
Being in a weak position while negotiating a deal doesn't imply either being less informed or having less self-control than the person on the other side.
Absolve him from what, exactly? A potential employer is in no way obligated to "give you a job." It is expected to be a fair trade of skill for pay. If you don't like the terms you're offered, you can go somewhere else.
Of course, it's true that there are differences in the social contract you usually get working in the US compared to other places -- for instance, there is less expected vacation time here than in a lot of EU countries. But that's a tradeoff that people choose to make.
I'm not saying nothing about at-will contracts filter down to benefit employees: US companies can often afford to pay higher salaries which on some occasions even correspond to higher hourly rates, and they can take more gambles on marginal job candidates. But it would be foolish to pretend it's a balanced tradeoff rather than a massive shift - fairly or otherwise - away from the interests of the median employee and towards the interests of the company.
No matter what kind of job you have, hourly or salaried, you can be severed at any time for no reason virtually anywhere in the US. At-will employment increases labor mobility and, very notably, makes entrepreneurship less risky by mitigating the problem of every termination being grounds for a lawsuit. At-will has social costs in other sectors where negotiating leverage isn't as balanced between buyers and sellers, but it is probably a significant net benefit for the tech sector.
The swap that is supposed to take place for salary-basis employees is that employees exchange their right to overtime pay for an assurance of full salary payment regardless of hours worked. If you dock an exempt worker's pay for leaving early or coming in late, they revert to overtime-eligible status; that's something that came up at a company I once worked for. Obviously, the other swap that salaried employees make is higher compensation; salaried employees out-earn non-exempt employees.