Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

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> If they can't afford it as a basic cost of doing business, they can always close.

This 100%. It reminds me of the similar issue of zero-hour contracts and living wages. One person I know complained that putting restrictions on zero hour contacts, and upping the amount that he would have to pay workers, would mean he couldn't hire any (for his extremely early-stage startup with no investment(!)).

In a similar vein, the answer is the same -- if you can't afford to pay employees, don't hire them.

And this applies more generally than either of our examples -- if a company cannot afford to do something ethically, then it shouldn't do it at all. A business that cannot survive when forced to comply with the bare minimum of ethical practices deserves to fail. You cannot simultaneously believe in a capitalist market without embracing with open arms, the failure of companies that couldn't stick it.

But you can comply with ethical business practices without hiring employees to deal with hundreds of thousands of callers. Automated moderation is a thing, and actually responding to support tickets instead of ignoring them is also a thing.

I think you underestimate how many services you rely on that wouldn't be able to survive with a legal requirement that they were required to take calls from any human that wanted to contact them. Presumably those services are useful to you and you wouldn't want them to be closed down, yes? And similarly, you wouldn't want to be paying the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center to deal with not only customers but potentially affected non-customers (as in the Giphy example in the parallel comment thread).

>the $50-100/month for each service that would likely be required if every single one had to support a fully-staffed call center

You're estimating what, that every customer would on average spend at at least an hour a month on the phone with each and every service they do business with?

>potentially affected non-customers

There is a reason that most companies make it hard to talk to a human before you've already exhausted all other support channels.

Make something like that a right and people will use it. Maybe 99% of the time you won't need a human for a particular service in a month, but there will be users who are on the phone every day, maybe multiple times per day.

And your monthly fee would need to exist to pay for the users who abuse the right.

>if you can't afford to pay employees, don't hire them.

If you can't afford to work a job, don't take it.

Wage slavery is a fact and inevitability of capitalism

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