Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Why is federal jurisdiction required for this?

State-level regulation enables greater accountability to local constituents, empowering communities to shape labor policies directly.

States can enact labor laws more quickly in response to local labor market conditions, and state-level regulations can be tailored to address specific economic and social contexts.

States can experiment with new labor policies, fostering innovation in labor relations. Favorable labor laws in some states may attract businesses and workers, fostering healthy competition.

Proximity between policymakers, workers, and employers facilitates better understanding and responsiveness

View on HN

> State-level regulation enables greater accountability to local constituents, empowering communities to shape labor policies directly.

In theory, yes. In practice:

1. State legislators are heavily influenced by local trade associations and their lobbyists — and their campaign contributions. See, e.g., car dealers, liquor distributors, and landlords, to name some that come to mind immediately.

2. Federal-level regulation is needed to prevent a "race to the bottom" among states competing to be the most "business-friendly" in the hope of attracting jobs. See, e.g., South Dakota's banking laws that caused so many banks to locate their credit-card operations in that state, as well as Delaware's famously management-friendly corporate laws.

> 1. State legislators are heavily influenced by local trade associations and their lobbyists — and their campaign contributions. See, e.g., car dealers, liquor distributors, and landlords, to name some that come to mind immediately.

There's functionally no difference here from federal legislators.

You might think "oh a federal congressperson runs a larger campaign so it would take more money to buy them off".

Then you'd look at the scale of the donations it took some of them to vote certain ways for interest groups. Net neutrality was a recent example. Single digit thousands was all it took for some.

That's not out of the reach of any business with an interest in influencing legislation.

> Then you'd look at the scale of the donations it took some of them to vote certain ways for interest groups. Net neutrality was a recent example. Single digit thousands was all it took for some.

Or, they got single digit thousands of donations from interest groups that aligned with their natural voting inclination (or the way party groups or other groups they are concerned with aligning with beyond direct issue-specific donations wanted), and ascribing the donation easily attributable to the position as a significant reason for the vote is wrong.

I don't know if you're being obtuse, but there's a pretty clear reason why Federal jurisdiction is required: the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.

So the Georgia labor laws applied to Amazon workers are all moot? Something else?

I genuinely don’t understand why you’re saying federal is required. The commerce clause exists but it doesn’t have to be used when there are better options

And bonus, its a lot cheaper and easier to bribe a state legislator, with only oversight from his or her state's (likely underfunded and understaffed) regulatory bodies, than it is to bribe a US congressperson.

Devils advocate: that’s competition (checks and balances). Not good per se, but maybe, better than the alternative. The alternative is that only massively oppressive globomegacorps can influence governance, because they can afford it

You're not wrong.

However, if I'm an oppressive globomegacorp, I'd definitely prefer only having to bribe these tin pot staties. You can probably buy off the entire West Virginia state legislature for less than the cost of a single US Senator. And you need 51 senators and 218 representatives to get things done.

If all we can do is make sure bribery is a cost of doing business, then we can at least make sure that the cost is high.

> Why is federal jurisdiction required for this?

There are two parties: capital and labor. Your arguments are on behalf of labor. There are arguments also on behalf of capital. In the USA, capital is under federal jurisdiction, not state. It is the US Congress that gives the Federal Reserve its monopoly over central banking. The states do not issue money.

Because corporations act across states and individual states can't restrict interstate commerce.

This is a big problem because corporations will just leave a state if they don't like its labor laws and operate out of whatever state has the laxest labor laws.

States used to have their own laws limiting interest on loans, usually between 10 and 20 percent. Then in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled[0] that banks can ignore these state laws if they are based out of a different state. This eventually led to pretty much all of the banks moving their headquarters to South Dakota or Delaware which repealed their laws limiting interest rates to attract banks to those states. Today, pretty much every credit card charges an interest rate well above the old legal limits.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....

I'd like to see Georgia try to effectively govern Amazon.

Does Georgia not have competent people? Is there no one from Georgia in the federal government, and that’s why the federal government is better?

The caliber of individuals in the Georgia State legislature is irrelevant to a company that can trivially move operations across the state line into Alabama. Assuming they even managed to get Amazon into a courtroom the Georgia State office of the Attorney General employs somewhere between 200-500 people according to linkedin. Assuming all criminal and civil enforcement actions statewide grind to an immediate halt to permit the state to focus 100% of it's legal resources on Amazon, according to law.com Amazon would have them outnumbered 4 to 1 before they even looked at hiring outside counsel. Were you being intentionally obtuse?

I see. So it's not the caliber of people, but the number of people that matters?

You over there pretending jurisdictional boundaries were invented last week and you missed the memo?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com