in australia workers seem to have more rights. they have industry awards that specify minimum wage and safety conditions etc, they have the legal right to strike and the legal right for union/collective bargaining if they choose it, aka freedom of association. when i look at employment conditions in the US, it boggles my mind how workers there basically have zero safety net. its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer.

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strictnein 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are plenty of legal "safety nets" for American employees, regardless of if you're in a union or not. Could they be better? Sure, anything can be improved, just like every other country on Earth.

What kind of boggles my mind is that people online think they have an understanding of almost every part of American society because of what they read online or saw in the news. I wouldn't for the slightest second think I would have a clue about the working conditions in Australia, nor would I think I have the ability to read stuff online and get an actual understanding of it.

The most glaring example of this were all the people who came here for the world cup, afraid of all the crime and all that nonsense, and realized that living in America is actually pretty fucking great.

> its an extreme example of giving all the power to the employer

And yet, we make the most money, which seems to kind of go against that idea. If all the power was with the employer, you'd expect low wages, not high ones.

Apologies if that was a harsh response, it's just tiresome reading all of these foreign online "experts" on American society.

	▲	mxkopy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Comparing US safety nets to those of “any other country on Earth” is just patently absurd and disingenuous. EU has mandated - mandated - 4 week paid leave. In the US you are obligated to exactly 0 days of paid leave. I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs that this applies to, but there is very little difference in take home pay for this income regime after accounting for necessary expenses such as housing, transportation, and food; in some cases EU take home is even higher. https://boundlesshq.com/blog/us-vs-europe-employment-costs-s... Like, sure, if you want to larp as a low income oligarch the US is the best place to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to be regularly crying after 10 hour shifts because you’re in the red each month after necessary expenses. Most people would like tech talent fall into the latter category out of schadenfreude or profit motive. Tech needs to unionize.

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polski-g 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Americans trade higher worker income for decreased protections.

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shoo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Is that actually true though?

Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker.

Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers.

Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1].

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3683/Collision-CourseEndle...

	▲	polski-g 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They would not. If its harder to fire people, then there would be less employee turnover, which is where all the income growth comes from.