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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure that all of the employees of the small specialized privately owned companies in Switzerland and Germany really appreciate the lack of giant companies, which historically use their power to erode worker's rights.

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That's bullshit. In Austria (similar to Germany and Switzerland in many regards), plenty of small specialized privately owned companies are actively fighting to erode worker's rights (greed has no culture and knows no borders).

A couple o years ago, local industry lobby groups got the government to legalize the 12h workday and one top company I interviewed for had a time punching device next to the coffee machine so that employees could punch out during a coffee break as the company considered coffee breaks as non-working time for the employees and did not count to your 8h/day working time, just like your lunch break.

What you said makes no sense. Think about it. How can it possibly be that increasing labour market competition results in worse working conditions? No, the opposite is true. FAANG and FAANG wannbes outbid other employers by offering both better pay and better working conditions. And as for the rest of the market, here in Germany the smaller employers have the worse reputation. You really don't want to be employed in some small family business where the employer can do whatever they please without oversight. Bigger employers tend to be more keen to adhere to employment laws. Yes laws exists, but fighting for your rights is costly and in my experience, smaller employers are bigger bullies and will try to see what they can get away with much more than bigger employers, who act professionally for the most part.

Your argument makes sense, but flies in the face of daily lived experience. Read the headlines: large companies are constantly using their power to screw labour. Busting unions, collusion to hold down wages, lobbying for worse worker protections, and fueling a race to the bottom in environmental protection, occupational safety and tax revenue by outsourcing.

The problem is that the companies are too big, not that there are too few big companies in some region.

That's not actually happening commonly at all. That's a media/political soundbite, not the common reality.

If it were true, the US wouldn't have one of the highest median income figures. The US would be a giant sweatshop due to the huge corporations across its economic landscape. The US median person wouldn't be wealthier than the median in Germany or Sweden (given Germany is supposed to have vaunted worker rights, which apparently don't add up to much in the way of worker wealth).

The best employers in the US are major corporations, they almost universally pay the best and offer the best benefits. It isn't even remotely a close comparison. The same is largely true in Europe and Asia.

It was Amazon that went to $15 / hour nationally for their massive labor base. They're the ones that finally moved the needle on the national discussion about minimum wages, regardless of if you think their motivations were pure or not. Before that it was just endless politicking. As far as unskilled labor is concerned, everybody else ran from behind to catch up to them after they did that. They're still the ones setting the pace.

It wasn't mom & pop shops that moved the needle. They pay horribly and offer horrible benefits as well as exceptionally poor job security. If you want to really suffer, work for a small, struggling business. The large corporations reach global markets and dramatically scale their output per worker, which enables them to pay far better than local / domestic-only businesses, and that's very rarely not the case.

Large companies like Walmart and Amazon are using their power to keep wages for so-called "low-skill" workers down while also leveraging their size to crush competitors.

Large companies like those in FAANG are rewarding "high-skill" workers handsomely while leveraging their size to acquire competitors.

As a so-called "high-skill" worker, I don't have to worry so much about that aspect of things, as I'm sure is the case for most users here on this site.

I work for a FAANG. Among the many benefits we receive, a large chunk of our pay comes in the form of equity. When the price of the stock goes up, so does my effective pay. Also there is free food and stuff.

One of the A in FAANG drives their assembly contractor so hard, they had a problem with worker suicides.

The other A in FAANG busts unions and instead of providing safe working conditions, just parked ambulances outside to load up workers as they fell from heatstroke.

So yeah, um, enjoy your free food, dude.

Yeah by that logic here's an example of Germany being the pinnacle of worker rights [1].

[1] https://www.euronews.com/2020/05/12/covid-19-outbreaks-in-ge...

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