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Comment by samiv | Hacker News Reader

This is a tremendous opportunity for the capitalists and industrialists to dodge their obligations towards normal employees. Essentially outsource their costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections to the working class while additionally driving down the wages. They profit and the rest of the society (Ie the tax payers that still remain) have to shoulder the cost.

A labour union in Finland interviewed some Wolt gig workers and found that after discounting for time waited for delivery and expenses their effective take home pay was around 2.5€ per hour.

We can expect this to spread more and more from taxis and delivery service to wider spectrums.

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> costs, healthcare, pension, unemployment etc employee protections

It makes no sense for these to be the responsibility of a buyer. Let people buy and sell products and services, and let the government collect tax and provide subsidies.

I was thinking the same. Isn't it a bit of a power imbalance for your employer to look after all of those aspects of your life? It's not far from there to company towns. If you lose/quit the job, you lose health insurance and so on. Not a good bargaining position.

I think it makes sense to give some of the cost to businesses because they also create some of the cost. For example, in the US you have to pay unemployment tax based off of your business' turnover. If you hire and fire a lot of people, you cause more unemployment, so you have to pay more taxes to cover your societal cost. It makes sense.

The key point is that it's just a tax. The government should still be the one doing unemployment, although they're not, but that would be the ideal.

So maybe if you have, say, a dangerous business you pay more healthcare tax or something. That could work instead of letting companies provide health insurance.

Even serfs had their housing, old age, etc factored into the equation. We've reached the point where companies are so disconnected we are back to companies not caring if their employees can live, and a system with less protection than serfdom.

If you as a buyer of labor can't afford the cost it takes for that labor to exist, you are a zombie company and should be shut down. You can't expect to buy business inputs for less than those inputs cost as a business model. Yet because people still have to figure out how to live even when the numbers don't work, business thinks it's a reasonable model to expect from humans. It's not. And the system WILL break if business keeps this up.

>Even serfs had their housing, old age, etc factored into the equation. We've reached the point where companies are so disconnected we are back to companies not caring if their employees can live, and a system with less protection than serfdom.

Which is why it is stupid to have government policy that requires buyers to be responsible for these things. Serf-dom is a bad thing. Today, we have democracy, so the people should vote for the government, made up of the people, by the people, to provide those things.

You know we don't 'buy' people, right? You are talking about employers of people, not buyers of people. We employ people, a much different dynamic than buying goods.

If we want no protections in business relationships, no special treatment, start with the very special protection/treatment/made up rule that is the fictional corporate 'entity'.

Or do some people (company owners) deserve special government labels/treatment/protections while others (zero hour workers) don't? If you don't want these rules, let's start at the start. No more corporate entities as they are just special protections and special protections in business are bad and create mis-incentives. Government shouldn't be in the business of giving people 'special protections' when it comes to business, right?

I am talking about buyers of labor, labor which is sold by people. Employing people is buying labor, no different than me hiring someone to clean my gutters or buying an apple at a grocery store. I compare prices and quality and switch the person I use to clean my gutters and grocery store I buy my apple at when it suits me.

>Or do some people (company owners) deserve special government labels/treatment/protections while others (zero hour workers) don't?

Obviously not, but I have no idea what you are referring to in the context of this discussion. A "corporation" has always been free to stop buying something from another "corporation" anytime.

Bro, you can't be seriously putting this forward. Employing people is very different, hence a separate term, separate laws. Or do you think society just missed this whole wisdom you are sharing?

Corporations only exist because society creates a pretend entity called a corporation via laws/rules/regulations. If we want to get rid of business laws we might as well just get rid of corporations, especially if we are getting rid of policies that create an un-even relationship in business. No reason to have laws that give special protections, it just gets in the way of business.

So much of thought put forward on this site is 'ignore the hundreds of years of policy and discussion and causes that led to the creation of something I don't like, throw it all out' be it labor laws, intellectual property rights, financial policy. Meanwhile the same tech minds couldn't even deliver on the tech-optimist world promised in the early 2000s that was brand new, created form the ground up and instead delivered an enshitified tech world.

You're 100% right and people here cannot handle the truth.

Routinely, the solution to problems is "idk just burn it down lol" and these people say it without an ounce of irony.

If you remove regulations without preventing the reason we built those regulations in the first place, then you'll just get them again.

People do not do things because they're stupid or just for kicks or whatever. No, they have reasons. We have tried alternatives. Turns out they suck major donkey dick and nobody likes them. That's why we don't do them anymore.

We tried the whole no regulation things. That's literally the sole reason we have regulation. Do we not understand basic cause and effect?

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