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This shifts the discussion elsewhere, but I'm happy to address the points you raised.

> [regulations] appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies

Says who? If we move beyond opinion here, do we have something more to inform this conclusion? And how exactly do we connect the two here? - without more information it's a non sequitur situation.

I suggest that there are two separate things to look at here and we should not conflate them: tax politics (how states fund support) and labour law history (why employment protections exist).

On the first point, the claim that regulations appeared because voters want low taxes is wholly unsupported. It wouldn't make much sense either: regulations of all kinds existed long before democracy was a thing, as a general rule.

If we look at regulations pertaining to work in particular, labour law exists because the employment relationship has a built-in power imbalance and requires worker protection. It's really as straightforward as that. The ILO's Employment Relationship Recommendation [0] states explicitly that labour law seeks, among other things, to address "an unequal bargaining position" between parties, and it also notes problems caused when contractual arrangements deprive workers of protections or disguise the real employment relationship. It also says that national policy should clarify and adapt laws to guarantee effective protection and combat disguised employment relationships.

In fact, the ILO Constitution itself from 1919 says labour conditions involved "injustice, hardship and privation" on a scale that threatened social peace, and that improvement was urgently required through measures such as regulating hours, unemployment prevention, wage adequacy, protection against sickness/injury, protection of children, and freedom of association. That is a direct historical explanation of why labour regulation was institutionalised internationally.

Then you have the Treaty of Versailles [2] (the labour provisions) which explicitly state that labour should not be treated merely as a commodity, and list urgent principles including freedom of association and wages sufficient for a reasonable standard of life.

But the history of labour regulations is actually old, if you're into that. [3][4][5]

So let's put to rest the completely unfounded assumption that this is a tax-politics explanation and not a social-protection and industrial-order explanation.

> It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.

Again, you misstate what labour regulation is for. Labour law does not generally make firms responsible for a worker's entire "wellbeing" in the abstract. It sets minimum rules inside a specific relationship the firm controls: wages, hours, safety, dismissal, status, notice, and similar conditions. The ILO framework is explicit that labour law exists because employment relationships involve unequal bargaining power and because protections are linked to the existence of that relationship, including where firms try to structure or disguise arrangements to avoid obligations. [0] Otherwise employment would pretty much be a form of slavery; favoured by employers, for sure, but an altogether shitty deal for the employees.

It is also historically (and morally, if you ask me) wrong to reduce this to tax-and-welfare politics. The foundational international labour-law texts explain the emergence of labour regulation in terms of "injustice, hardship and privation," social instability, and the need for social justice, so not as a response to voter demand for low taxes. The ILO Constitution and related early labour principles are very clear on this. [6]

> Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others.

This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc. Corruption can exist in any regulatory domain, but that does not establish that employer duties are conceptually invalid. At best, we could frame it as an argument about enforcement quality and governance integrity, but it wouldn't refute the underlying rationale for labour standards (power imbalance and prevention of harm in employment relationships).

I'll stop here, because I need my dinner.

[0] https://wecglobal.org/uploads/2019/07/2006_ILO_Recommendatio...

[1] https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/ILO%20Consti...

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partxiii.asp

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law

[4] https://law.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/facultysites/hass/law/hamly...

[5] https://formsoflabour.exeter.ac.uk/conference/levels-of-labo...

[6] https://www.ilo.org/resource/other/ilo-constitution

Edit: mixed to order above, but hopefully the points are still clear.

discuss

lotsofpulp|3 days ago

I should have specified the regulation I was referring to is related to things like being able to let go of employees or pay for them while unemployed or cash when they are retired, etc.

I did not intend to wrap in stuff like minimum ages, maximum hours without supplemental pay, discrimination, sexual harassment, safety, or other quality of life related labor laws.

Only the laws related to the business interaction a labor selling choosing to sell their labor, and a labor buyer choosing to buy labor. It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market. Which is not antithetical to the goal of also having a society that provides a minimum quality of life.

>This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc.

My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.

Instead of giving people cash to buy homes (which would increase taxes because that cash has to be accounted for), the voters opt to give people loans underwritten by future taxpayers.

And the underlying dynamic of this is that as a society's median age gets higher and higher, it needs to squeeze its young more and more to deliver on the benefits to its largest and most reliable voting bloc, the old and soon to be old.

robtherobber|2 days ago

Thanks for clarifying.

> It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market.

I'd argue that the goal was never to just have an efficient market, for there's absolutely no reason to have a market to begin with, unless society at large benefits from it (not just the employers and the employees, since they don't exist and operate in isolation). The employees, who are real people rather than - or before they are - legal entities, absolutely need protecting. Their bodies can break, their time is limited, and they have tangible and intangible needs that have existed before - and will exist after - businesses were a thing. But once we've adopted this economic model, market efficiency is certainly an aspect to it, agreed. However, it still can't be the most important factor or even one more important than individual rights and their wellbeing.

As such, I'd agree that selling one's own services/skill (labour) should generally be easy, but a fairly long list of failsafes is still unavoidable and necessary simply because businesses are predatory entities by their very nature (a necessary evil, it could be argued), especially after the onset of neoliberalism in the 80s, and there's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. [0][1][2][3]

Labour is not just a market commodity because the seller is a person embedded in family/community. So I am all for giving employees (but not employers) more control over this relationship (selling labour) for multiple reasons, the two most important being that this is inherently good for democracy and also because what's good for workers/citizens may legitimately override narrow "economic efficiency" metrics. [4][5]

> My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.

I am fairly sure that this push doesn't come from citizens/workers, but from the private business sector, which has all but accaparated the political power in the US and other countries, UK being the closest in terms of mentality and approach (think Thatcher & Reagan). US can now be considered without any exaggeration an oligarchy. It is more or less a consensus among economists and historians that privatisation generally works against the best interest of the citizen and very much to the interest of the wealthy and the business class. [6][7][8][9]

The privatisation of public services and the other mechanisms that you mention have had undeniably negative effects on citizens and workers, and it was very much not a choice they made, but it was forced upon them. US and the UK have been the only two countries that have embraced neoliberalism so fast, blindly, and without guardrails, and it definitely shows. [10][11][12][13][14]

[0] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-economis...

[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/09/16/failing-globa...

[2] https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/home/

[3] https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/3109/files/65b9360509de1...

[4] https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2016/POL401/um/Pateman_Dahl...

[5] https://economicsociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/the...

[6] https://aeon.co/essays/privatisation-is-bad-economics-and-wo...

[7] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/chiara-cordelli-harms-...

[8] https://truthout.org/articles/the-political-economy-of-preda...

[9] https://weownit.org.uk/privatisation

[10] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-dark-side-of-e...

[11] https://www.eurozine.com/the-us-and-the-uk-after-neoliberali...