Every state has the right to regulate its labor supply. In fact, that is how society got better. Unions setup oligopolies to ensure workers were fairly compensated. Unlike other commodities, labor cannot be traded on a free market because if you can't sell your time you'll starve and become homeless. And if supply and demand is a thing, it seems that restricting supply favors the sellers.

The US has no shortage of labor. However, it is terribly allocated. Like "baggers" for groceries, old people (that should have retired long ago) working as "greeters", and thousands of Uber drivers working 12+ hours/day cause cities are so badly designed that you need taxis to get around. People whose only job is to put out cones on the street to force cars to slow down when the light is green... So much wasted labor. Why not try and "upgrade" these people through education (which tech companies should pay for in taxes) so that they can work more qualified jobs? Then the US wouldn't need to import qualified labor.

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cmxch 2 days ago | parent [-]

You make the erroneous assumption that these people are defective and are default not qualified.

Retraining has been tried and has failed every time when taken at scale.

Just have the tech firms and the like cut huge, straight, salary replacement checks to the citizens who they harm.

	▲	com 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I ran a corporate networking team in the 2000s with two of the five network engineer team members, being two years out of retraining (they were welding specialists in the former local shipbuilding industry). Non-white collar supervisory and work ethic issues, but excellent work in general. Had an issue with the team on-call car getting bullet holes once (suspect some drug dealing on the side, long story!) but excellent colleagues in general. I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.